Most of the time, it pays to stick to the rules when you’re writing. You want your reader to get caught up in your story, not get distracted by odd usage or non-standard punctuation. Still, there are some ‘rules’ that can be broken, even should be broken, without annoying your readers.
1. Never end a sentence with a preposition. This so-called rule caused me a lot of pain at university. Whenever I ran my essays through Word’s spelling and grammar check I’d get all these wriggly lines at the end of sentences. There are more reasons to end a sentence with a preposition than to not. First of all, loads of questions naturally end with prepositions.
“Who are you going with?”
“Where did you get that from?”
Now, I suppose I could write:
“With whom are you going?”
“From where did you get that?”
But unless my character is a very posh 85-year-old, I’ll probably stick with the first version.
Also, English is full of phrasal verbs (combination of a verb and another word) that end with prepositions. A few examples are, sit down, stand up, come in, fill out. There are hundreds! It’s perfectly natural to end some sentences with them.
2. Don’t use semicolons in fiction. This one’s more of a punctuation thing, but it’s my list so I’m going to let it in. (Oooh, see how I ended my sentence with a preposition??). Anyway, there’s a persistent rumour that readers of popular fiction don’t ‘like’ semicolons. I’m baffled by this, as I don’t think most people have given even a passing thought to the use of semicolons in popular fiction. As long as they’re used sparingly and appropriately, I don’t know why you wouldn’t use them.
3. Never split an infinitive. Sometimes you just need to blatantly split an infinitive (did you see what I did there? No? Well, by putting ‘blatantly’ in between ‘to’ and the verb ‘split’, I split the infinitive). It’s not something you should do often, as it tends to lead to the over-use of adverbs, but it can be effective when done well. “To boldly go…” sounds so much better than “To go boldly…” ever would.
4. Never start a sentence a sentence with a conjunction. But, I want to! Again, this one falls into the ‘use sparingly’ camp. Readers will find it annoying if you do it in every paragraph, so save it for when it will have the most impact. It can be particularly effective in dialogue. Just think, often when you’re presenting an argument you say something, stop, then start again with something like ‘And, by the way,’.
And that, my friends, is the end of my list. It’s time for me to turn my computer off. I’m going to quietly pour a glass of wine and sneak out into my garden. I hope you’ll enjoy breaking the rules; I know I do!