5.7 Breaking Rules (With a Purpose)
Erin Kelly; Sara Humphreys; Natalie Boldt; and Nancy Ami
Students often come to university having learned a number of rules about academic writing (or maybe about “writing” in general). Some of the ones we hear students repeat most frequently are the following:
- Never use “I” in academic writing.
- Never start a sentence with “because.”
- Paragraphs must have at least three sentences.
- Sentence fragments are wrong.
- Don’t use slang or colloquial language in an essay. Be formal.
Yet, students who pay attention to the texts they are assigned to read for their classes readily notice that professional writers and academic writers violate these so-called “rules” in work that is published and highly respected. A famous scholar who writes about Shakespeare started a book with the sentence “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”[1] An important linguist has titled a book about online language Because Internet.[2] Journalists writing for The New Yorker produce paragraphs as short as one sentence long. Advertisers and politicians make frequent, effective use of sentence fragments: “Real change”; “One nation, one flag, one leader”; “A Canada that works.” And one of the most important articles published on English renaissance drama features as part of its title the colloquial phrase “Nobody’s perfect” (Stephen Orgel).[3]
Let’s use as an example an academic text that breaks a number of commonly taught rules: Andrea Riley-Mukavetz’s article “Developing a Relational Scholarly Practice: Snakes, Dreams, and Grandmothers,”[4] which was published in one of the most important academic journals in the field of writing studies, College Composition and Communication. The first sentence of Riley-Mukavetz’s piece is “I come to you with a good heart.” The author then writes a paragraph about her experiences of ophidiophobia (the technical term for a fear of snakes)—but she does so through vivid descriptions of moments from her childhood. Only a bit later in her essay does she make explicit how this material connects to the goals of the article:
These stories are snake stories and are used to theorize a relational scholarly practice that draws from the decolonial option in cultural and Indigenous rhetorics. By reflecting on the complicated and somewhat obsessive relationship to snakes, I articulate a relationship to land-based practices and land-based methodologies in my writing. It is easy to write joyfully about the practices that are easy and uncomplicated (are there practices that are easy and uncomplicated?), but what about the practices that scare us, challenge us, leave us with few answers or unarticulated meanings? Like my relationship with snakes, I am, in fact, somewhat obsessed with the concept of relationality—a core practice and worldview that guides and frames my orientation to knowledge making.[5]
This author uses first-person voice (I statements). She includes a number of grammatically simple sentences (as wh