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- Path: sparky!uunet!caen!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!gateway
- From: cwilbur@polar.bowdoin.edu (Charlton Wilbur)
- Newsgroups: misc.writing
- Subject: Grammar
- Date: 20 Dec 1992 13:27:46 -0600
- Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
- Lines: 40
- Sender: daemon@cs.utexas.edu
- Message-ID: <9212201927.AA14116@polar.bowdoin.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu
-
- Grammar, usage, meter, rhyme, punctuation: these things are rarely "right" or
- "wrong." A good writer knows the "rules" intimately and also knows exactly how
- to break them and, more importantly, when to break them. There's a subtle
- difference between (BTW, this example is taken from Gardner)
-
- He saw her last night, he was sure of it.
-
- and
-
- He saw her last night. He was sure of it.
-
- If the difference could be easily put into words, it wouldn't require the
- period rather than the comma. The first is technically a run-on sentence; but
- most professors and editors would overlook the grammatical technicality for
- the subtle difference. There's a reason for the rule violation.
-
- The same goes for poetry. Frost's "Mending Wall" is written in strict iambic
- pentameter. The first line, however, breaks the pattern:
-
- ` ~ ~ ` ~ ` ~ ` ~ `
- Something | there is | that does | n't love | a wall
-
- Why? Emphasis, perhaps. Variation, perhaps. But it works -- there is a reason,
- however difficult to pin down, that the pattern is broken. This is completely
- different from breaking the pattern just for the sake of having broken the
- pattern.
-
- In short, I guess, the eighth-grade, sentence-diagramming, right-and-wrong
- concept of grammar has to be abandoned. It simply doesn't work for writers.
- (Bureaucrats and politicians are another story: they _need_ well-defined
- grammar to produce anything vaguely coherent.) Subtlety demands flexibility. I
- would go so far, however, as to say that this flexibility requires that one be
- capable of writing gramatically perfect prose by the eighth-grade standards
- when it is necessary.
-
- --
- Charlton Wilbur Internet: cwilbur@polar.bowdoin.edu
- Moulton Union 690A BITnet: cwilbur@bowdoin.bitnet
- Bowdoin College Telephone: (207) 725-3962
- Brunswick, ME 04011 (207) 725-3963
-