I was thinking today about writing style and the Style Police in general.
Photo courtesy of bethrosengard on Pixabay
I must admit that as soon as someone says (and it is amazing how often they do), “You can’t do that”, I’m always tempted to go and find a brilliant author, universally acknowledged to be in want of a citation and reply, “Oh, how unfortunate, Jane Austen does that, and here’s me thinking she was a great writer.”
In reality, you can do anything you damn well please. The rule in my book, is to understand the rules, stick to them in general and then when you break them, do it with purpose and aplomb.
What you need to know is what happens when you break the rule. Every choice of style has its positives and negatives. Take long sentences for instance, currently universally reviled. They involve the reader engaging their brains to a higher degree, as they need to bear in mind important information from the beginning of the sentence, so that as they progress through it towards the inevitable ending, they can build the composite world which is being revealed. I am told that no-one these days is interested in engaging their brains and readers need to be spoon fed in snippets to suit their teeming brains. How insulting. What does a long sentence allow you to do? It gives the author the chance to unfold linking meanings and nested possibilities in a fluid way, with which the chop-chop of short sentence construction can never compete. Try reading a good academic journal article and you will see what I mean. (Or even Jane Austen…)
But, of course, it needs to be born in mind that long sentences require a highly developed understanding of the use of punctuation. So if, like me, you’re a bit hopeless with that side of things and barely know where to put a comma, hyphen or ellipsis, let alone an em-dash or god forbid, a semi-colon, then perhaps it’s best to leave well alone. Stick to the single idea stuff.
However, let’s not get sniffy about short sentences either. How wonderfully tight they can be. Winding up the action until you can barely breathe. Punchy and wonderfully staccato. That last sentence, wasn’t even a sentence at all. My grammar checker (the electronic version of the style police) was very superior, calling it a fragment and insisting I put in a verb. But saying, “They are punchy and wonderfully staccato” is simply not punchy and wonderfully staccato. If I’d made a whole long sentence, “Winding up the action until you can barely breathe; punchy and wonderfully staccato.” it would have been perfectly happy, but I would not.
Now, there’s another punctuation conundrum for you. I had to put a capital letter and a full stop in the middle of that last sentence in order to make the point. So here is the question. Should the word “then” which followed the quote, have a capital letter or not? Any Style Police out there who can help me here?
Salatheel 