shakespearemom

It never fails that at least one student each semester turns in the first essay, and I find, essentially, three typed pages of fragments. Oh sure, perhaps one sentence in ten actually has a subject and verb working together to make it complete, but all the rest of the “sentences” are nothing more than brief half-thoughts added upon each other. I dutifully correct the paper, showing the student what fragments are, how to avoid them, and how to find them while editing, so that the errors can be fixed.

Those of you who enjoy grammar may very well have noticed, however, that I use fragments quite a bit in this blog. In fact, I use them intentionally, both to add emphasis where I want it most and to affect the overall conversational tone of the blog. It isn’t that I don’t know what a fragment is, or know that fragments, overall, can interfere with written communication. I know the rules, but I choose to break the rules in a conscious, meaningful way. And I am not the only one (see–right here is a fragment!). Fragments are used everywhere, and usually for good reason.

My example applies to most other rules in writing, in music, in child rearing, in cooking… Rules are made to be broken.

To effectively break rules, we first need to know what the rules are. Only then can we make the choice to diverge from expectations to create something unexpected. 

Rule breaking is often necessary. Imagine dialogue where all the speakers use complete sentences, or use “whom,” or don’t split infinitives. Without breaking the rules, the dialogue becomes stilted, mechanical, far too formal. And unless characters are supposed to be so, the dialogue will make them less accessible to readers.

Other “rules” go through stages. For centuries, theatrical practice dictated that plays adhere to the unities of time, place, and action (although Aristotle’s discussion of such unities did not dictate that such continuity was required). In other words, the setting was to stay the same, the  time passing was to be real time, and the action was to be continuous and in consecutive order (happening as it would have happened in real life). 

Yet some rules simply must be broken. Time can be sped up some, but Shakespeare and others figured out that it can only be sped up so much. Even though King Lear’s original source showed the action of the play occurring over about 20 years, Shakespeare speeds it up to a few months. Yet there is no way to have the action occur in 2 hours. 

As a result of the “rule breaking,” the standard time frames changed. Now plays often span months at a time, making it possible for a great deal to happen onstage in a relatively short time. This has pretty much become the “rule.”

Yet we now have a new era of so-called rule-breakers. Think of the show 24, a specific answer to the trends developed during Shakespeare’s time. It’s a series, yet its action occurs in “real time,” as long as you, the viewer, can suspend your disbelief enough to accept that all of this can happen to Jack Bauer in a 24-hour period. This show is intriguing for the very thing that breaks the rules. And if the show didn’t break the rules, it wouldn’t be nearly so exciting.

So, what rules do you break? What rules should be broken? What rules are simply silly? What do you think will change next in writing “rules”?

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