Published October 11, 2024

Given a chance to pick another career 40 years ago, I’d probably not choose a lifetime in journalism. Given a chance for a do-over in how I did journalism, I’d probably want to break the writing rules even more than I did.

Some of the most boring writing I’ve ever seen follows all the rules and sees that as the most important part of the process. I’m not talking just about other writers. Sadly, this applies to too much of what I wrote during my career. It’s often an outgrowth of what we’re taught from an early age (who doesn’t want good grades?) and can continue for the rest of your life if your mentors never let fresh air into their thinking.

It doesn’t always make for interesting storytelling.

So I perk up when I see other word people talking about this on LinkedIn.

Jenny O’Reilly wrote, “Grammatically correct writing isn’t automatically good writing.”

Allison Rossi wrote, “So, here’s the thing: you can’t follow every single rule and expect your writing to stand out.”

Jenny is a professional editor and a member of an editors group with me and hundreds of others. Allison does marketing consulting, copywriting, ghostwriting and social media marketing, among other things. They’d agree that different types of writing call for different approaches, and that following “rules” is no guarantee of interesting writing.

I know about “learn the rules before you break them,” but too many editors in newsrooms don’t know when it’s fine to bend or break the rules. Serving the rules rather than the reader is a mistake that’s all too common. It makes the gap between newsrooms and their audience bigger and bigger, and that doesn’t seem to be changing.

A hill I will die on

This is part of why the demise of legacy news media is accelerating. I will be saying more about this. I will probably never shut up about it.

It’s why this is a hill I am willing to die on.

I could tell my days in the Catholic Church were numbered when I immediately agreed with controversial priest, sociologist and novelist Andrew Greeley when he warned against boring homilies. Bodices didn’t need to be ripped, but lots of first and final drafts needed to be.

(Greeley shocked many when he wrote his first novel that contained sex scenes. How could he write about having sex if he’d always been celibate, people asked as they clutched their pearls or their rosaries. Greeley said he’d never killed anybody but could write a murder scene if necessary.)

Anyway, yes, learn the rules before you break them, but don’t wait too long to start breaking them.

Photo of iPhone, coffee and pretty nails, three of my favorite things, by senivpetro via Freepik.

Oh! When I launched this site in 2015, someone said using typewriter keyboard photos would make me look old. It occurs to me that laptop photos might do the same now. So enjoy a nice iPhone photo!