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18. AVOID SETTING ANYTHING IN CONCRETE

© Sherry-Anne Jacobs

When you’re polishing your work, stay flexible and stay focused on what you’re doing, not what anyone else says you should be doing. We hear experts pontificating about various “rules of writing”, saying “You mustn’t do this.” “You must do that.” ’Tain’t so! The only rules I would offer – or use myself! –are:

1. produce the very best, most professional work of which you are capable. 2. learn the rules of grammar and stick to them most of the time, because they usually make your meaning clearer and you don’t want to confuse the reader eg the girl’s hair = the hair of one girl the girls’ hair = the hair of several/many girls

Apart from those two caveats, I feel you should avoid setting anything in concrete or blindly following anyone else’s so-called rules.

THE CONTINGENCY THEORY When I was studying for my Master of Business degree, I learned about something called the Contingency Theory, which seemed to boil down to the fact that you had to consider the specific circumstances before taking action.

I like to apply the Contingency Theory to writing. Take a look at the piece of work, the genre, your writing style and your readership before considering setting guidelines.

SOME DOUBTFUL RULES I’VE MET I’ve met quite a lot of so-called “rules” during my years as a writer. These are some of them. There are plenty of others, depending on who you’re talking to. For example, grammar rules might say the last clause in the previous sentence should be ‘to whom you’re talking’ but it would sound stilted and unnatural since I’m using a conversational style in these articles, so I didn’t apply strict grammar here.

False Rule 1 – Cut out all the adjectives I heard this one from a person in a position of authority in writing circles and winced as he said it. Why on earth would a writer want to avoid using a whole category of words? Words are the wealth of a language.

Instead, look at what you’re writing and adopt an appropriate style of language for that material. If you’re writing a crisp article for a newspaper, using a lot of adjectives would indeed be inappropriate, but you might still need a few telling adjectives. If you’re writing a fantasy novel, you’re going to need a lot of description and that includes adjectives, because you’ve invented a whole world and need to bring it to life for the reader. (I know, because early on in my career I wrote fantasy.) If you’re writing a thriller, you won’t want lush descriptions, but terser, active prose.