As we’ve been talking about our early writing and how we learned to write, I’ve been thinking about all of the so-called rules I, and I’m guess most of you, were taught in elementary, junior high, and high school. These are the rules that we were taught never to break, such as never start a sentence with and, but, or it, don’t use I when writing essays or research papers, make sure that all paragraphs are five sentences or more, and, of course, never split an infinitive. Certain words, such as fun and nice were “garbage can words,” and when talking about an author you are to use the present tense. As I grew up, though, I began to learn exceptions to these rules. Sometimes a paragraph can be two or three sentences. There are quite a few times when splitting an infinite is ok. And it’s not a capital offense to begin a sentence with and. I still find myself stumbling over these “rules,” though, even when I’ve re-learned them time and time again. I’m weary about using I in formal writing, and I cringe at the thought of using garbage can words (a good reason to keep my thesaurus handy).
My question is why? Why were we taught all of these rules and regulations when we were just starting to write if we were only to disregard them later on? The amount of exceptions to these rules pretty much nullifies them in the first place. I suppose that concrete rules help young writers formulate skills, but I find that many people I talk to who struggle with writing are struggling with these very rules. Do these, guidelines, we might call them, still serve a viable function in today’s elementary school teachers’ lesson plans? Or should we crape them and teach kids the truth from the beginning. Or maybe it all comes back to the old saying that rules were meant to be broken. No matter what the answer, I still can’t help feeling like someone, somewhere down the line, lied to me.
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Ohmygosh, I felt the exact same way in my first English class at Loyola, freshman year after high school. It was English 122, and just like you, I struggled no to use "but" or "and" to begin my sentences and avoiding all cases where my infinitive was split. But on a couple of occasions with some last minute papers, I slacked on these so called "principle rules of writing" and got one of the highest grades I ever had. Whaaa?
ReplyDeleteLike you, I thought the same thing, "why teach us this in the first place if what you were preparing us for (college)would let us break these rules and it be acceptable?" Then I thought, maybe it is a fundamental way to try to get high-schoolers to come up with better openings and varied sentence structures. But like you said, some students struggle with that now.
I guess the world may never know...