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Author Craft / How far to take Grammar
« on: November 07, 2011, 05:34:02 PM »
I'm mainly thinking proper use of commas and semicolons right now.
The purpose of writing a story is to entertain and convey the situation you are writing as convincingly as possible. As a reader I have always perceived commas and semicolons(and dashes/ellipses) as pauses of varying length. Stylistically that is how I'd like to approach them, but grammatically this is incorrect(At least according to MS Word, I never payed much attention in actual English classes, my knowledge is largely intuitive and observational.)
How should I be approaching this, the intuitive way, or the by the letter of the rules approach?
The purpose of writing a story is to entertain and convey the situation you are writing as convincingly as possible. As a reader I have always perceived commas and semicolons(and dashes/ellipses) as pauses of varying length. Stylistically that is how I'd like to approach them, but grammatically this is incorrect(At least according to MS Word, I never payed much attention in actual English classes, my knowledge is largely intuitive and observational.)
How should I be approaching this, the intuitive way, or the by the letter of the rules approach?