A lot has happened here since I last posted and I'd like to address a few areas (if I can remember everything I've been thinking of).

I taught high school creative writing. (I'm not sure that's a credential or not, but I learned an awful lot preparing myself for my classes.) When I returned my students first piece of writing with their grammatical errors highlighted in yellow, I said the following: We all have our own style of writing, and the genre in which we write demands certain style expectations. Learn to write different ways for different genres.

We also tend to make our own specific kinds of grammatical and structural errors. Learn where your specific errors are so that in the future you can avoid them. (I used the example in my last post of overusing the conjunction "and"). (That means, CC, Lynn and others, that you don't have to know all the rules and the "dos and don'ts", you just have to know where you need to work on your own writing to make it even better.)

So this addresses some of the concerns that I've read on this thread.

Knowledge is a wonderful tool. The more we know and understand, the better writers we become. We don't have to be professionals, we just have to enjoy the craft. (I love it when I bake a souflee that doesn't fall down. I'm proud of it and I try to improve on it. That doesn't mean I want to be a chef.)

Don't let the so-called rules turn you off from writing. A lot of them don't apply to "you" because you've internalized the concept. Find the ones that do apply to you and work on them. (I think I'm repeating myself, but it's worth it.)

Language changes and rules of writing fiction change with time (and the expectation of the readers). Sentence fragments are more acceptable in fiction today than it was 100 years ago. The important thing is that the "error" shouldn't take away from the reader's understanding of the passage.

(For example, we start a new speaker in a new paragraph. If not, the reader gets confused seeing the change of a speaker in a paragraph. That's a convention of writing that we accept. If it's not there we (the readers) are confused. Just as we accept an amber light at an intersection as a warning to prepare to stop, we accept certain conventions in writing.

We're very lucky to have beta-readers. I hope that many of these people help us become better writers. I know mine have. (I know it's not beta-reader appreciation day but I don't care. That's you ML, Jude and CCMalo I'm talking about.) These women have shown me areas of weakness both grammatically and structurally that I've learned from and hopefully helped me become a better writer. (When I read my first fanfics I cringe in embarrassment. ) I hope that I will continue learning and that as I do I will become a better writer, even if my writing goes no further than these boards.

And that's the importance of discussions like this, that we become aware of what is written about the writer's craft so that we can learn from it (and use everything in moderation.)

And remember what George Orwell said about writing: "Break any of ...rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

gerry