In the first year of my writing career, I wrote a lot of sentences that my dear wife told me were hard to understand. And in my head I was always screaming "No they're not! I understood them perfectly!" This is, of course, the confused cry of an idiot. Early on, I failed to recognize that the burden of clarity was on me, not the reader.
Stunk and White helped me a great deal when it came to clarity. But I feel that, despite all its wisdom, The Elements of Style can easily be taken to advocate an overly rigid, dry style of prose. After all, if we all followed all of Strunk's rules all the time, The world of fiction would be a cold, dry place indeed. The rules do need to be bent and broken. But that doesn't mean that there's no reason to learn them. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj put it best: "You cannot transcend what you do not know."
And that's really what we want, right? We don't want to break the rules, we want to rise above them.
You're not transcending the rules if you're unaware of them, you're ignoring the rules, and when your writing works it'll be a happy accident at best. In writing, every word should be a choice, and you cannot make good choices if you are uneducated. Once educated, you can feel free to take risks, and choose to transcend the rules in service to your own design, but it must be done with purpose.
Breaking the rules with purpose is what Sin and Syntax is all about. It's not a good starter text, because without fundamentals like The Elements of Style, you might walk away from this book thinking that the gatekeepers have it all wrong, with their highfalutin' rules about sentence structure and verb choices. But the truth is those rules have good reasons to exist, and every one you flout is a risk. You must do so with fear and trembling, or you deserve your place at the bottom of the rejection pile.
Constance Hale gives writers a great road map of grammar. In 18+ years of formal education, I don't think I ever received a better lesson on English than I did in Sin and Syntax. My understanding of the parts of speech and how they affect fiction has been greatly enhanced since reading this book, and only since reading it can I tell you the difference between a phrase and a clause. But what makes this book so special is that in addition to the road map, Hale gives you a solid overview of all the little back alleys, basement dive bars and sewer tunnels that run through the city of English grammar. She takes you down to the wrong side of the tracks, and shows you the good, the bad and the downright sinful.
Any writer who has done their time in the trenches of Strunkian sparseness deserves a look at Sin and Syntax. It's the grammatical equivalent of jail-breaking your iPhone or rooting your Droid; it cuts away the blocks built into the software and shows you what the hardware is really capable of.
In my career as a writer, I've read only two books I consider more revolutionary to my understanding of the craft, and he first of them is next.
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