If you want to be an author, you must know the rules of grammar and spelling. If you don't you will quickly discover your writings being dismissed on what appear to be superficial grounds. "Of course I couldn't read his story – in the first paragraph alone there were three typos, a dangling modifier, and a damn comma splice."
Is this unfair? Perhaps. But people make snap judgments every day using far less worthy ideals than proper grammar and spelling.
But all that said, once a writer has learned to work within the rules of grammer and spelling, the writer will also know when to break the rules. Read the great authors and you will find them abusing and breaking all types of grammatical requirements. You can moan all you want about these authors breaking the rules but the moaning doesn't matter – the great writers will still be great and the rules will still be the rules, except when they are broken.
I have no point in all this except that if you are going to break the rules you'd better be good enough to get away with it. And to become good enough to break something, you first must understand it.
I run into this all the time with the middle school students I teach. They read novels and always point out how those authors are breaking the rules. I always tell them, "Learn 'em before you break 'em. The people breaking the rules have earned the right to do so through learning them first, when you are a published author, you can break them too."
That usually stops any further whining. ;)
Posted by: John Ottinger | May 21, 2011 at 03:46 PM
Yep. You've got to first learn to walk and run before you can steal third base.
Posted by: Jason Sanford | May 21, 2011 at 04:19 PM