A FRIEND recently took me to task for a grammatical error I made in a Facebook post. I haven’t caught up with him since, so I don’t know whether he was being serious or not, but he was right: I made a grammatical error, and I did it deliberately.
I had written, “Me and the Mrs B …” My friend pointed out the error, adding: “You are a distinguished writer for goodness sake”. I accept the compliment with gratitude.
Grammatically, he is correct: ‘me’ is wrong, it should have been ‘I”, as in ‘The Mrs B and I …’ The rule is simple enough: you use ‘I’ when you are the subject of a sentence, and ‘me’ when you’re the object.
But as I said, I broke that the rule deliberately. ‘Me and the Mrs B’ or “The Mrs B and me” has a certain symmetry. It is alliterative, it has rhythm and it rhymes. It’s also a nod to my working-class roots: ‘me and the missus’ is the sort of thing Andy Capp, a cartoon character from Hartlepool, would have said, and I like to use my Northern voice on social media. To my ear, ‘The Mrs B and I …’ sounds a little like our late Queen beginning a speech, ‘My husband and I …’ It’s not the tone I was aiming for.
None of this is especially important - it was only a Facebook post, after all. But it got me thinking about how creative writers deal with the strictures of grammar. The simple answer is that they don’t - they break the rules for effect whenever it suits them.
This is not to say that they don’t know the rules, they almost always do. Nor is it to suggest that they might commit the common grammatical sins (paraded daily on social media) of confusing ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ or ‘there, their and they’re’. They are professionals, after all.
If I were writing a brochure for a firm of accountants or lawyers where formal English would probably be appropriate I would observe the rules diligently, but I might choose to break them if writing an ad slogan, just to get the tone of voice or the rhythm right: it happens all the time.
For instance, Apple’s iconic ‘Think different’, should really have been ‘Think differently’ - if you think about it at all. And how about Mercedes’ ad for its C-class coupé: ‘More power. More style. More technology. Less doors’ or Staples’: ‘We got that’.
Stepping away from the world of copywriting, where people are arguably paid to do things differently (to use the correct adverb), any novelist who stuck to grammatical rules rigidly would be unreadable. Dialogue, for instance, would sound ridiculous because nobody speaks in perfectly grammatical sentences - even if they think they do. (Trust me on this: I have transcribed hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, and I know.)
Fiction writers break the rules for stylistic reasons too. Think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which ends with Molly Bloom’s 24,000 word soliloquy punctuated by only one comma and two full stops, or JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in which Holden Caulfield narrates the tale in the informal and colloquial voice of a teenager, or the anarchic punctuation of e.e. cummings and Cormac McCarthy. Even Jane Austen used double negatives to great effect, as in this quotation from Emma: “She owned that, considering everything, she was not absolutely without inclination for the party” And thriller writers are usually masters of the sentence fragment, since it can be used to create tension.
In fact, I would argue that only ever writing or reading perfectly grammatical English is a little like only ever listening to music by the same composer - you are missing so much.
As Pablo Picasso said: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
NB You’ll see I used the term ‘creative writer’ - poets, novelists, scriptwriters, copywriters and (sometimes) journalists fall into that category. People writing exam answers, technical reports, research papers and board minutes do not - they would be well advised to follow the rules. They should also understand why it is neither wrong to split an infinitive nor to end a sentence with a preposition or even to begin a sentence with a conjunction. And I might just write about that in a separate post …