🚀 go-pugleaf

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