Whether you’re a writer by trade, or simply crafting an email, a thank-you note, or a particularly important text, the message matters. But rules were made to be broken, and — despite our love of the Oxford comma and proper spelling — that’s especially true with English grammar. As the culture and means of communication change, so do words and how we use them. The next time you’re facing writer’s block, break free from your strict grammar bonds and embrace doing something different. Here are five outdated rules you can leave behind.
1) Don’t end your sentence with a preposition.
English teachers may cringe, but this rule is just begging to be broken. Conversation is becoming more casual, and ending sentences with a preposition is a side effect of that. For example: “He’s someone I can have a meaningful conversation with.” According to traditional construction rules, the “with” should appear earlier, as in, “He’s someone with whom I can have a meaningful conversation.” But when you read that out loud, you quickly understand this rearrangement of the sentence sounds fusty and out of touch with how most people talk today.
Rules are meant to help people understand language with agreed-upon guidelines, and breaking this one doesn’t make anything harder to understand. If you need some evidence to back up this rule-breaking, turn to Merriam-Webster. The dictionary explained in an Instagram post that the controversial rule comes from 18th-century grammarians who were trying to make English fit Latin sentence structures. Romance languages (French, Italian, etc.) don’t make sense with sentences ending in prepositions, but English doesn’t work that way.
If you can’t conceive of ending your thought with a preposition, change up your sentence structure altogether, as in, “He’s someone who can carry a conversation.”
2) Don’t start your sentences with conjunctions.
When you were learning how to write, you were probably taught by some teacher, somewhere, that starting a sentence with “and” was inexcusable. But that’s simply not true — even grammar books don’t eschew the practice anymore. If you need proof, historical writings dating back to the ninth century are guilty of the construction.
Kicking off a sentence with a conjunction (use the mnemonic FANBOYS to help you remember “for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so”) can help drive home the point you were making in the previous sentence while giving the reader a break between thoughts. And if it helps you sleep better at night, a review of some of the world’s most well-regarded writing contains 10% or more sentences that start off with conjunctions.
3) Don’t use contractions.
Conversational tone is becoming the preferred way to write just about everything. And guess what? You use contractions — such as “we’re,” “I’ll,” and “should’ve” — when you speak. The one place contractions typically aren’t welcome is in academic writing, but if you’re drafting a social media post, blog, email, or advertising copy, there’s nothing wrong with shaving off a word or two with a contraction.
4) Don’t create sentence fragments.
More than a few grammar purists would be horrified to learn that people might dare craft a sentence without a complete subject, noun, and verb structure. Too bad. The fact is, short sentence fragments are useful, particularly when you want to draw attention to or put extra emphasis on something. One caveat? Moderation.
5) Don’t split infinitives.
If your elementary school grammar lessons are failing you on what an infinitive is, relax. It’s basically adding the word “to” before a verb. It’s the unconjugated (not really a word, but it explains the opposite of “conjugated”) form of the verb. For example, “He agreed to leave the party,” is a perfectly acceptable use of an infinitive. “He agreed” is the conjugated verb phrase, and “to leave” is the infinitive. But if you want to tell a more complete story, you might say, “He agreed to quietly and quickly leave the party,” which gives the idea that this guest was asked to discreetly excuse himself. According to the rule of split infinitives, the grammatically correct version could be either: “He agreed to leave the party quietly and quickly” or “He quietly and quickly agreed to leave the party.” (Did he exit quietly? Or was the agreement made quickly?) As you can see by the two “correct” options, a split infinitive in this case makes it clear what the adverbs are modifying.
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