Following Broken Rules

I learned writing through trial and error, mostly. I learned the basics of writing at school, but writing wasn't a lot more than filling in blocks of information and repeating the same things over and over. At university, I too a technical writing class, which guided me into specific ways of thinking about writing, but I learned academic writing through writing academically. I wasn't able to understand what I needed in writing as well as why I needed it, thereby becoming more of a "creator" than an "imitator" until I had made mistakes in writing, a lot of them, and until I had read both as a reader and a writer.

There's a really fine line, and a very interesting one, between following a rigid structure in writing on the one hand, filling in blocks in an organized structure that's been imposed, and understanding that what needs to be said should be said according to this structure. And I think that, either way, I would have learned writing through writing. According to Noel Burch, to learn a skill, we have to pass through four stages: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious incompetence. Getting to the last stage is complicated and definitely not a linear path.

What got me thinking about this is an article titled "7 Writing Rules You Can Totally Break" which talks about -- clearly -- rules, or "preferences" as the author says, that can be broken in writing. While the article talks more about writing creatively, the title intrigued me: that we want to break these rigid "rules." However, I find myself not thinking about all the rules and just following what makes sense to me -- and that's the stage I hope I can guide my students to. While I belt out rules and structures, they might not understand the logic behind them at first. And when they do, they might just follow it. But I really hope they get to the stage where they don't need these pre-structured modes and can use writing really as what it is meant to be: a medium of expression.