The three most useless English language "rules" you can ignore

[Dr. Jai Maharaj]

The three most useless English language "rules" you can ignore

By Benjamin Dreyer
Copy chief of Random House
Quartz, qz.com
March 1, 2019

I have nothing against rules. They're indispensable when
playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go
a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule
of law? Big fan.

The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and
regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up
new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner
set foot on the British Isles -- to say nothing of the
mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few
centuries -- and continues to evolve anarchically. It has,
to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone
to enforce the laws it doesn't have.

Certain prose rules are essentially inarguable -- that a
sentence's subject and its verb should agree in number, for
instance. Or that in a "not only x but y" construction, the
x and the y must be parallel elements. Why? I suppose
because they're firmly entrenched, because no one cares to
argue with them, and because they aid us in using our words
to their preeminent purpose: to communicate clearly with
our readers. Let's call these reasons the Four C's, shall
we? Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension.

Also simply because, I swear to you, a well­-constructed
sentence sounds better. Literally sounds better. One of the
best ways to determine whether your prose is well-
constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can't be
readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be
rewritten.

A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one
that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter
how long it is, without having to double back in confusion
because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of
punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in
some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you
want to puzzle your reader, that's your own business.)

As much as I like a good rule, I'm an enthusiastic
subscriber to the notion of "rules are meant to be broken"
-- once you've learned them, I hasten to add.

But let's, right now, attend to a few of what I think of as
the Great Nonrules of the English Language. You've
encountered all of these; likely you were taught them in
school. I'd like you to free yourself of them. They're not
helping you; all they're doing is clogging your brain and
inciting you to look self-consciously over your own
shoulder as you write, which is as psychically painful as
it is physically impossible. And once you've done that,
once you've gotten rid of them, hopefully you can put your
attention on vastly more important things.

Why are they nonrules? So far as I'm concerned, because
they're largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting,
feckless, and useless. Also because they're generally of
dubious origin: devised out of thin air, then passed on
till they've gained respectable solidity and, ultimately,
have ossified. Language experts far more expert than I
have, over the years, done their best to debunk them, yet
these made-up strictures refuse to go away and have proven
more durable than Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Put
together. Part of the problem, I must add, is that some of
them were made up by ostensible and presumably well-meaning
language experts in the first place, so getting rid of them
can be a bit like trying to get a dog to stop chasing its
own tail.

I'll dispatch these reasonably succinctly, with the hope
that you'll trust that I've done my homework and will be
happy to see them go. I'm mindful of Gertrude Stein's
characterization of Ezra Pound as "a village explainer,
excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not,"
and no one wants to be that guy. Also, if you persist in
insisting that these nonrules are real and valid and to be
hewed to, all the expert citations in the world won't, I
know through experience, change your mind one tiny little
bit.

An admission: Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is
to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or -- and
this is the part that hurts -- unfairly, by People Who
Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to
Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative
about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their
origin but, observed, ain't hurting nobody. And though the
nonrules below are particularly arrant nonsense, I warn you
that, in breaking them, you'll have a certain percentage of
the reading and online-commenting populace up your
fundament to tell you you're subliterate. Go ahead and
break them anyway. It's fun, and I'll back you up.

Continues at:

https://qz.com/1561426/grammar-expert-benjamin-dreyer-lists-three-rules-you-can-ignore/

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj