Let Grammar Work for You

This blog post started as a rant. I finished a novel that was excellent. However, the author didn’t use punctuation to signal dialogue, and that drove me crazy. I had to reread sentences to try to understand which parts were dialogue and which weren’t. As a lover of grammar, it made me grumpy—but the author did not write this book for me, now, did she?

The function of grammar is clarity. Punctuation signals to the reader what to expect: a period ends a sentence, a comma separates phrases or ideas, and a colon begins another thought or a list. A question mark causes the voice in your head to rise. Quotation marks signal dialogue.

However, grammar works for language, and language is always changing. A linguistics professor once taught me that, if a language isn’t evolving, something is wrong. How does an editor keep up with which rules to enforce? What rules can a writer get away with breaking? Rules are meant to be broken, but you must know the rules before you can break them. You should understand your piece well enough to know whether or not the changes you make will help or hurt the writing.

Omitting quotation marks, as well as several other punctuation marks, is a big trend in stream-of-consciousness writing, a popular genre in which the reader follows the narrator’s train of thought as they move through the story. Forgoing quotation marks can bring the reader deeper into this mindset, trailing along with the thoughts of the narrator, so a thought and a statement may be indistinguishable because everything is rattling through the narrator’s head.

Sparse, gritty writing is another opportunity to omit quotation marks. Using fewer grammatical marks conforms to a minimalistic style.

Grammar is a tool in a piece of writing, a tool that should work for the benefit of the piece; omission of grammar should work for the benefit of the piece, too.

So, instead of getting all high and mighty about who should and shouldn’t make the choice to break the rules in their writing, I strongly encourage writers to ask themselves: does the choice I am making enhance the piece more than it detracts from it? Will my choice bring the reader deeper into the story, or will it distract them? Is the aesthetic of a piece more important than clarity within the piece?

Let grammar, or the lack thereof, work for you—that’s what it was made for.