Blog Post #5--How professional writers write

Schuster, Edgar H. “Beyond Grammar: The Richness of English Language, or the Zero-Tolerance Approach to Rigid Rules.” English Journal 100.4 (2011): 71-76. EbscoHost. Web.

Schuster partially addresses the concern I raised in my last blog post: How, exactly, do professional authors write? While he does not examine the actual composing processes of professional writers, he does focus in detail on the ways in which professional writers (and one talented student writer) selectively break rules of grammar and style in service of meaning.

As a framework for the article, Schuster examines a paragraph from Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and three paragraphs of an eleventh-grade student’s personal essay. As he notes, both pieces of writing are very well done, yet both break generally accepted grammar and style rules: specifically, admonitions to avoid passive voice, weed out “be” verbs, don’t begin sentences with conjunctions, and eschew sentence fragments. Schuster spends time on each rule, first laying out the generally accepted rationale for the rule, then presenting sentences from his selections as they appear (with the rule broken) and as they might appear if the rule were followed. He handles the comparisons fairly—the rule-following options are well constructed and are not straw men—and that is why these sections are the most effective parts of the article. The direct comparisons (and the analysis with which he follows them) demonstrate the ways in which breaking the rules can lead to clarity and emphasis that are probably more consistent with the authors’ intentions.

Schuster provides ancillary examples of good rule-breaking writing alongside the two main examples; however, the majority of these come from creative-type writing (fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction). My guess is that his awareness of this is why he ends the article with a section entitled, “But What about Formal English?” This is certainly a fair question, and Schuster attempts to address whether rules can be similarly bent in formal writing. However, the piece he selects as an example of formal English is David Foster Wallace’s introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007. The paragraph Schuster examines is quite good, and, as he points out, it does break many common grammatical and stylistic rules. I wish he had looked at something else, though. While DFW’s piece is “formal” in the sense that it is public, non-fiction, and edited, the rhetorical situation for which he was writing is different from the “formal” ones in which many college students will be asked to compose, such as the business world or the sciences. What is needed (and perhaps exists, although I have not come across it) is an analysis of which grammar rules matter in disciplines far removed from English. (Larry Beason’s 2001 CCC piece, “Ethos and Error,” in which he examines business-people’s reactions to a variety of common “errors,” is a major step in this direction, but stands mostly alone—again, at least as far as I’ve been able to uncover.)

Still, Schuster’s article is well worth the time to read for its lucid and careful examination of specific samples of writing, which provide support for the claims some of my other authors made for how professional writers bend and break rules for a rhetorical purpose.