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You need to know the rules to know how to break them with intention.
Cormac McCarthy doesn't use punctuation because he "doesn't believe in it". His books are terrible to read. They're clunky, unclear, difficult to parse, and read like a middle-schoolers first try at story time. James Joyce, his inspiration, same story; I can't even get through one chapter of anything he's ever written.
I realize I'm in the minority when I say this, but grammar has rules for a reason. When you don't follow the same rules as everyone else, when you don't adhere to the reader's expectations, that makes it more difficult for the reader, not less.
The Road is one of my favorite pieces of writing. It's art like anything else. The lack of punctuation really made it feel raw and close to home.
I think that's the point too, you know? His writing style acts as a literary device in and of itself. It's not always like that, but when it's like that I feel it helps drive home the scene.
And I say that while I agree 100% that it's hard to read.
If you were to take the list of all professional basketball players, and sort them by the number of free throws missed per game, you'd see the top of the list is dominated by Hall of famers.
That's not because missing free throws makes for a good basketball player. Or even that it isn't important in basketball to be able to make free throws. It still remains important at every level of the game! But some of the people who miss a lot of free throws were just so utterly dominant at other parts of the game that they had long successful basketball careers despite being bad at an important skill for basketball players.
Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce have a signature style, yes, but I'd argue that they're successful despite that, rather than because of that.
Joyce is meant to be read like poetry. It plays off the sound of the language. His stuff is genuinely awful to sit down and read, just like it would be awful to sit down and read through a collection of poetry (to me anyway). Some Authors play with language in a good way, like the way Hemingway rarely attributes dialogue and forces you to pay attention and understand why the character would say something like that. It also reads very minimalist and leaves a lot to your own imagination and voice.
I agree. I read The Road recently since it's my wife's favorite book and holy shit it was exhausting at times. I enjoyed the story to a degree, but the stream-of-thought writing style and unspecific grammar took me out of it. If it had been written in a more understandable prose I think I would have enjoyed it more; but would it have been as famous then I wonder
The Road is so god damn depressing that the writing style was the least of my concerns while reading
I think you're in the vast majority.
When it comes to the readers expectation, things become a lot more complex. I don't remember the exact words, but Brandon Sanderson talked about promises to the reader, where it's OK to do surprising things, but expectations must be carefully managed in that surprises must not feel like betrayal. Poor execution of this is why everyone hates the "...but it was all a dream" trope.
All I do, is sit down at the typewriter, and start hittin' the keys. Getting them in the right order, that's the trick. That's the trick.
If anime taught me anything It's that character development is just padding
This is the standard line, but a lot of the time I find it to be bullshit. Sure, Cormac McCarthy gets to look cool and modernist by not using quotation marks, but my view is you would spend less time trying to decipher narrator vs. character if he did use them, and you would have a better reading experience at the same time.
This is not an inflammatory response, I am just curious- How do you feel about "House of Leaves?"
Generally considered to be a phenomenal work of art, but it DEFINITELY doesn't follow the vast majority of standard grammar rules.
I hadn't even heard of it until your comment.
I respect going all in on breaking convention for the sake of art a lot more than leaving out punctuation as a style.
I thought House of Leaves dragged on, but I think the confusion was kind of the story too, you know? You have this scenario going on in the book, and the book itself has you looking left right up down here and there for the context.
Given Lemmy's demographic we can put it like this:
If you invent an entire programming language from first principles, you're probably pretty smart.
If you're in a a class at uni learning C++ and you submit code written in your new language, then you're going to fail
You need to learn the fundamentals first before you break them.
As a jazz musician once said, you’ve gotta know the rules to break them.
English prof up on a soapbox here.
Comments like "you have to learn the rules before you break them" are kind of missing the mark. For the most part, those of us who teach English/composition/literary criticism/etc aren't particularly concerned with "rules" (with the exception maybe of English as a second or foreign language, where conventions/rules are used to scaffold learning rather than as universal truths). English teachers are familiar with linguistics and the fluid, messy nature of language and all the fun things we can do with it. The "grammar Nazis" you encounter online are VERY unlikely to be English teachers (though they likely were our most insufferable students), who are often the first to point out that language is constantly changing and that what's considered "correct" depends heavily on ... everything, really.
But we're talking here, ostensibly, about a "class." And if we're talking about a class, we're talking about a syllabus. Specific outcomes on which a course is responsible for improving and checking proficiency. Your English class isn't necessarily about "learning English," especially if English is your first language. It's about getting you to become proficient at doing a specific selection of specific things with your language. Very often these things aren't even about rules or grammar, but that doesn't mean the expectations aren't strict- and what most people read as strictness is usually just specificity.
It's damn near impossible to know whether a curriculum, teacher, method, or activity is successful without an outcome to measure. Lack of specificity makes measurement difficult and potentially unfair. If you're told to "write a persuasive essay," what exactly does that mean? What separates an A from a C? How does the teacher justify that distinction, and how does the student know what they need to improve? Without very specific target structures or a "can do" inventory, assessment becomes messier and we leave students guessing about what an given teacher might want from them, which isn’t especially fair (or useful, from a pedagogical POV).
A teacher can understand perfectly well that language is flexible, that different contexts call for different kinds of language, and that conventions change over time, while still expecting students to demonstrate a particular skill according to given criteria. There isn’t one correct way to use English, but a class DOES needs to establish what it's trying to do, what students are expected to be able to do, and how anyone can tell whether they've been successful. That's not necessarily prescriptivism, it's just how a curriculum works.
And this is why I taught math.......
Math teachers also didn't like how I arrived at my answers. I made little games and rules to try and predict the solution in a roundabout way rather than just doing the calculations "straight."
And yeah it wasn't as effective as the students following direction, but I was definitely having the most fun.
I am all about having fun playing with numbers. I did have students like you. It could be a real effort sometimes to get them on the right path. But the reasons I wanted you on that path was because I was trying to teach you shortcuts to make doing The Math^tm^ easier.
If you are a kid sitting in my math class I will tell you that you already learned everything you needed to know about algebra, (geometry is something different and sometimes more wild and fun), when you learned how to add and subtract. Everything else you were being taught was just a short cut to make the maths faster and easier to do. So it's important to learn those shortcuts. Hey, mathematicians are nothing if not lazy. And we all want to be lazy mathematicians right?
I was also a little bit less concerned about getting the answer right than I was interested in teaching you to understand how you got that answer. Explain to me what steps did you take to get to the answer. If you can do that, that becomes an important skill in getting the right answer far more often than you will get a wrong answer.
And finally, and a point where I did cross into the world of "The English Teacher", insert your native language here please. Neat penmanship counts in math. It makes going back and seeing what you've done far, far easier. Boys, as a very general rule, struggle with this a lot. Not that girls can't also, they do. And as a member of the Bar Sinister, writing ain't meant for lefties - The Struggle is Real. But keeping your math writing in neat columns and rows goes a very long ways to making math so much easier. Once I could get those boys to slow down and be neat and orderly, they would often be amazed at just how good they actually were with math and how easy it became. They could often quickly elevate themselves from being a struggling D student to a B or even an A student just on hand writing alone.
So remember Kiddies, You can't blow things up until you learn the math!
A young man asked Mozart how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You are too young to write a symphony.” The man said, “You were writing symphonies when you were 10 years of age.” Mozart said, “Yes, but I didn't ask how to do it.”
TLDR;; if you're a student then you're a student, if you disagree, don't ask, just do it and you will be recognized if your aim is true.
It's almost like English teachers are supposed to teach traditional writing norms. You know, like, as their jobs or something ...
To break the rules you gotta first learn the rules.
That being said I remember in late high school feeling pretty frustrated because I had a good grip on the rules by now and wanted to try adding some zest to my writing.
But zest is difficult to grade, my teachers were not paid well enough to deal with ambiguity and to be honest most of them didn't strike me as particularly imaginative in the first place.
aw man... but you still write, I hope?
Not really. Sometimes I think about it but it's sort of hard to find the time. My interests also just started to shift away from writing after high school.
Yea, it's just that pedants deep down believe that good grammar is good writing; they don't understand the difference. Therefore, they're going to struggle to recognize good writing, and be incapable of producing it.
I think you kinda have to learn the rules and prove you know them before you go wild breaking them.
That's not always the case. Sometimes a writer is like Jimi Hendrix where there's no need for elaborate theory backing them because they can just straight up fucking play. But it's usually the case, and the overwhelming majority of teachers are teaching extremely usual people.
I remember in my one college-level creative writing class I had to read other people's work and it read like an eight year old wrote it.
Novels are art. English teachers are not teaching you how to write as an art form. This is because our schools are designed to make good little worker bees. They are teaching you language so that you can then go on to learn technical writing. Now, I do think they should split the two apart, and let kids experiment and have fun with writing. That does not mean that they are wrong. Technical writing requires precision and a strict adherance to rules. It is the same concept as it being entirely fine to have a bit of fun when painting a mural, but not when you've been hired to paint someones house.
You have to know the rules, why they exist, and what breaking them implies.
If you are in a class designed to teach the rules, it doesn't even matter if you already did all 3 steps. You'll fail the class because the class is testing if you CAN follow the rules.
Students when English teacher get pregnant and she's off for this year. Again.
Also:
English Teachers: "Lets now analyze and decode the deeper meaning the author meant in chapter 23 paragraph 6" Authors: "There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?"
Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
English Teachers: “You are already dead"
Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
English Teachers: “You are already dead"
Salman Rushdie: "I know that was figurative, but it still hurts!"
Get your homework published and fight your teacher.
