Outdated Grammar Rules To Break Part Two

schlesadv
2 days ago
2 min read

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.