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Words
Rules for writing well

One of my friends sometimes hears well-intentioned suggestions as hard-and-fast rules. For example, she once heard a TV chef suggest that a spoonful of sugar might ‘add something’ to a particular stir fry. She now believes that all stir-fried dishes must include a spoonful of sugar. No exceptions.

When it comes to the craft of writing, it seems many people share my friend’s occasional aural affliction. At a recent Plain English for Business workshop, more than half of the middle-management participants believed there were a number of writing rules that must never be broken. Never.

Among the ‘nevers’ was never begin a sentence with And or But. And never end a sentence with a preposition. (The Preposition Rule was championed by a chap who wasn’t exactly sure what a preposition was. He was, however, sure that it was something you should never end a sentence with.)

There was also a good deal of support for the rule that says you should never place a comma after the word and. And, somewhat surprisingly, several people knew that dashes must always be used in pairs – never singularly.  

One manager said that, by using the grammar checker built into her word processing software, she had learned the rule that a clause or sentence must always contain both a verb and a noun. Always? As Winston Churchill might have said: some checker; some rule!

According to the collective wisdom of the workshop participants, you and I must always avoid personal pronouns in our writing. Contractions aren’t permitted either. And to knowingly split an infinitive?  Apparently, it’s just not done.

Recently, I tried to trace the origin of every writing rule I’d ever heard. As far as I was able to find out, most rules started out as helpful suggestions. Some of these suggestions were based on little more than a particular writer’s personal taste. Others were borrowed from languages other than English – Latin, for example.

Unfortunately, over the years, the suggestions have often been heard as hard-and-fast, never-to-be-challenged rules. (All stir-fried dishes must include a spoonful of sugar.)

My own suggestion is that there is really only one rule for writing well: always try to write something that is clear, concise and rewarding for the reader to read. Do that, and you can safely ignore most of the other rules.