Outdated Grammar Rules To Break

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.

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