Rules of writing change, get bent or are broken. It’s not all bad. Language is a fluid medium. For instance, read some Young Adult books and you’ll find some authors who beat the old copy editor to death and made the new one accept dialogue without quotation marks. Things change. We can’t (and I don’t want to) freeze the language in amber.
One writing guru told his disciples: NEVER WRITE IN THE SECOND PERSON.
“Rules are rules!” he said. “Second person doesn’t work!”
Except when it does. Write in the second person if you want. Here’s the rule you should pay attention to:
If it plays it plays. Break rules if it works.
And to the guru: What?! You never read Bright Lights, Big City?!*
Bonehead.
*You’ll notice I broke a rule of punctuation there, but it conveys so it works. Your grammar and punctuation does not necessarily have to be as your eighth grade teacher prescribed. What it has to be is consistent so the reader receives the communication.
Filed under: rules of writing, writing rules
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