OnlineBookClub.org

There has been an active thread here about typos, whether they irritate you or you just skip them. The discussion also veered into grammar and good composition, not specifically typos, but style. So I thought I'd start a new thread dealing with newer "rules" in modern English and whether you use them, avoid them and stay traditional, and what is your opinion about such.

As you know, modern fiction tends to carry the revisionist banner forward. Traditional rules of grammar are normally observed in nonfiction, such as essays, reviews, textual documents, and formal theses and reports. Rules stay in force if you're writing an article for the New Yorker, for example.

But the rules are now being relaxed in modern fiction, especially American sourced. One particular "rule" that's being overlooked is the requirement that all sentences have verbs. Often, sentences that are list-oriented don't have a verb.

Now I write essays, book reviews, short stories, etc., but recently I've focused on my series of modern American private detective novels. The first 2 are sold and published, and I'm hard at work on the third. As an example, here's the opening of my new book:

"The efficiency apartment was neat and spotless, maintained by someone who obviously took her student life seriously, a young woman with pride in her modest surroundings. Inexpensive bookshelves, filled to capacity with paperbacks and collegiate texts, lined the walls. Stacks of notebooks, a pristine desk and office-style cubicle, laptop and printer, family photos. A small flatscreen TV and combo DVD player on one shelf. Nearby bed made up, sheets tucked. Adjoined kitchenette gleaming, dining counter and two bar stools the same. Bathroom next, also clean, bright.
"Except that the apartment was now an abattoir, every surface strewn with her body parts. A vile and perverted display, hacked-off fingers, random pieces of flesh..."

Sorry for the graphic description but I needed to make my point. Believe me, the description gets worse in subsequent sentences. Anyway...If you check, you'll see that a couple of the "list" sentences in the first paragraph are verb-less, for example "A small flatscreen..."

Omission of the verb is now permissible in some sentences and I've used this recent stylistic change to its desired effect, the non-verb sentence evoking a mechanical and rather emotionless feeling, which of course is the purpose of this rule-breaking technique. The contrast with this introductory dry and dispassionate first paragraph is evident if you were to read the entire 2nd para, which I've only included the first portion, due to the extreme violence described in para #2. So the non-verb sentences in para 1 set up the contrast and help to further emphasize the horror in para 2. And I also deliberately made my narrative brief, using mostly short and common words. This further contrasts the 2nd para, where I wax a bit more expansive, words like "abattoir".

Regardless, I have broken a traditional English rule and I wonder whether you do the same with your writing, or stick to tradition. If you can provide short examples, please do so. Thanks.

Hmmm... my first answer would have been traditional, however, based on your examples of non-traditional I may fit that closer. I do use sentences without verbs and sometimes good grammar doesn't relay the feeling or emotion I want at that moment in the story. So I guess I would say a combination of the two.

Since language (and thus writing) are always in a state of flux, to establish a set of "rules" which must always govern all speech and writing is self-defeating. I suppose this is what is meant by "traditional." But colloquial speech will always be ahead - or, if you rather, outside - of any established rules. I suppose the decades of strictness in this regard, at least in this country (USA), stem in part from the puritanical, conservative Anglo-Saxon roots of the culture. The image of the schoolmarm in the one-room schoolhouse ruling with an iron fist, insisting that her young learners memorize rule after grammar rule, is probably based in truth. Although the teaching of grammar is practically nonexistent in schools today, this element of the culture remains.

So I see no real need to "stay traditional." Language is defined, not by grammar books, but by usage. Once freed from the restraints of rules that define language (which, ironically, come into existence only after language has defined the rules), and which are already antiquated and obsolete because they are decades old, a level of creativity and originality can be attained that would not otherwise be possible.

That having been said, one should never be too far ahead of, or too far behind, this gradual evolutionary linguistic curve. This will render one's writing either incomprehensible or distracting. (If this is the author's goal, then so be it. But one must decide if one wants to be an author of a story or an author of eccentric writing. Both are fine, but the goal will determine the vehicle used to attain it.)

Finally, there is a difference between writing "outside the box" for purposes of originality, creativity, drama, etc., and not following the established rules because of ignorance, laziness, or carelessness. For example, knowing whether to write "its" or "it's"; "your" or "you're"; "there," "their," or "they're." I find a disturbing level of ignorance in simple spelling and punctuation skills. This irks me, but I am also delighted when I see a writer intentionally "break the rules" and come up with something original, witty, and creative. It gradually redraws the boundaries, and it's fun to try to keep track of those boundaries, like a moving target, as language changes and evolves.

Excellent feedback, Pasha, thanks to all as well. Yes I normally see homonyms most abused ("they're" vs "their" vs "there") and that's simply due to lack of reading and too much TV. It's impossible to know the correct spelling by listening to the words, only by reading.

You speak of the puritanical schoolmarm but that's nearly 2 centuries old and much of it fantasy or "Currier & Ives" style legend. In truth I've found that a more rigorous style of English comes from those educated under the auspices of the British public school system, which was promulgated during the colonial expansion period. A rote learning process that was abandoned (along with the schoolmarm) decades ago in the US. Working with many engineers from India and Japan especially, I found their English much more stiff and antiquated than either US or current British usage. No negative reflection on these people, just that they adhere to a more traditional type of educational process than in the modern Western Canon.

Re. the often untrue image we've generated about "how it used to be" as implied by Norman Rockwell images, here's a quote from my first novel "Blood Spiral" that illustrates that fictional world that never really existed...

We were knee-deep in the heartland of the yuppie. This is now the focal point of American culture, a new paradigm of contentment, banner around which we are meant to rally like sparrows flocking to a crust of bread.

Regard, if you will, that primal diorama of the American Dream depicted so pristinely and devoutly by Norman Rockwell, and you behold a cheerful land, peopled wide and far with happy whiteface folk, farm and factory families all. Mom in the kitchen bustling, joyful in her destined place, mammoth turkey basted to a golden turn. Seven kids attend, apple-cheeked and scruffy. Pigtails, bare feet, childlike grins with missing teeth abound. Slingshot sags eternally from ragged overalls, mongrel dog dwells forever at the door. Meantime Dad hefts hoe or wrench or welding torch toward the future, grateful cog, prideful of his mighty labors, certain in the way he knows as right and true.

Remembrance of a Pangloss age that never was.

No Rockwell depicts the land in truth. No print displays poverty or disease. No incest, drunkenness, bigotry. No photo-painted image of the Klan perverting Christian word, no montage of the battered wife, children born unwanted and unloved, factory worker without hope for change. No Post cover featured black man bruised by thuggish cop, enslavement of the migrant picker, rotted lungs of miners in the dark. Yet, these too are but portions of our past and aspects of our souls.

So is it now as then: our nation‘s tender coin possesses both an obverse and a reverse strike. The proper framework of our yearned-for lives is summed for us within the newfound Rockwell of the Magic Box. We fret for toothpaste and for bran, for clothes and shoes and fragrances defining front of fashion and our very worth. Mom now sustains manifold roles of chef and courtesan, financial expert and social arbiter. Dad must now prevail at work, with family, and with peers at golf. Added burdens fall to kids, who now are pressed to fit within the narrow mold, to know and say and do and wear the stylish thing.

And TV is the source, the wellspring from which all goodness and all wisdom flows, supplanting sage advice, tradition of religion, quest for satori. Thus all the homes aligned just so, the cars just so, the aerobics and clothes and food and feelings just so, the lives just so.

Yet, beneath this sameness and vapid thoughtlessness, beneath the veneer of formed and ordered lives, there runs a deeper current. A darkness. Pry beneath the fancy cars, tennis courts and ballet class. Lift the rock. Still there thrives prejudice, incest, drugs, and hate. Brutality and wanton ignorance, poverty of mind and dearth of spirit, with us now as ever was.

And ever shall be.

(quote from "Blood Spiral" -- an example by the way that private detective novels don't all have to be gats and gals and fistfights)