Don’t Be Afraid to Break the Rules
By Joe Ferry on Jun 26, 2008 in Editorial Services, Featured, Marketing Communications | comments(0)
(Second in a series of articles about improving your writing.)
By fourth grade in my Catholic grade school, the good nuns had drilled into my head all the parts of speech, the punctuation rules and grammar regulations that were never to be broken, lest they show up on my permanent record. We diagrammed long, rambling sentences, marking the nouns with one red line and the verbs with two, adjectives with a diagonal and adverbs with a squiggly mark. By the time we were done, our diagrams looked like schematics for the Space Shuttle.
At the risk of getting a rap on the knuckles, I’m here to tell you to forget all those rules.
Writing is about communicating. It’s about making the reader feel comfortable with your words, about setting a friendly tone, about being clear and concise. It’s not about blindly following archaic rules that can get in the way of effective communication.
Here are a couple of rules I’m giving you permission to break without fear of an icy glare from the nun in the front of the room:
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