×

This is one of my favorite sections from one of my favorite books on writing, Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know about Writing.

I love how the author breaks many of the pseudo-rules in this section.

If grammar is supposed to help us make sense, why do some of the rules seem so nonsensical? Well, maybe those aren’t real rules, after all.

You’ve not doubt heard them all your life:

  • Don’t split an infinitive.
  • Don’t start a sentence with and or but.
  • Don’t end one with a preposition (of, to, with, and so on).
  • Don’t use contractions (including don’t).

None of them are true – including the one that says none is always singular.

These misconceptions, which serve only to make writing clunky and convoluted, are not real rules and never have been. Since the 1300’s, writers of English have gotten along fine without them. So where did they come from?

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, classics scholars set out to civilize the English of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. They took a language that’s essentially Germanic and tried to clothe it in Latin grammar. No wonder the shoes pinched.

For generations, our most eminent grammarians have tried to lay these myths and Latinisms to rest, but they keep rising again like Jason from his watery grave. And like Jason, they’re not real, so feel free to ignore them. Our best writers do. George Bernard Shaw once complained to the Times of London about an editor who hadn’t gotten the word:

“There is a pedant on your staff who spends far too much of his time searching for split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman uses a split infinitive if he thinks the sense demands it. I call for this man’s instant dismissal; it matters not whether he decides to quickly go or to go quickly or quickly to go. Go he must, and at once.”

LOAD MORE
Loading