11-03-2011, 06:38 AM
Any style may be valid --but...there is no guarantee that it may not drive the reader up the wall! Emily Dickinson seems to have hit on the idea of a kind of universal punctuation, and it is quite comprehensible. For me, I must use grammar, and, although I sometimes am too lazy to alter things, I regard the whole business of punctuation as part of the tool-box, or palette if you wish, or armoury. Colons, semi-colons, commas and full-stops all have specialised roles, in my universe, with greater or lesser pauses associated with them. I also believe that the end of a line may require a comma, but will anyway have a mini-break just by dint of being the end of the line.
Other people write differently -- ee cummings eg -- and so I read what has been set before me, and try to pick up where the writer is coming from.
There is also the issue of what people can do. We all come to adulthood with whatever we have gleaned from childhood. If that does not include much grammar, that should not be a bar to writing -- but it does open the door to a bit of continuing education. My instinct is, that this grammar business is not rocket-science, and mostly people's work would be much more readable, if they just mastered two or three things -- but I do see that I think that, because I am me......(which itself, theoretically, is ungrammatical).
Interesting stuff, Billy.
Other people write differently -- ee cummings eg -- and so I read what has been set before me, and try to pick up where the writer is coming from.
There is also the issue of what people can do. We all come to adulthood with whatever we have gleaned from childhood. If that does not include much grammar, that should not be a bar to writing -- but it does open the door to a bit of continuing education. My instinct is, that this grammar business is not rocket-science, and mostly people's work would be much more readable, if they just mastered two or three things -- but I do see that I think that, because I am me......(which itself, theoretically, is ungrammatical).
Interesting stuff, Billy.