I love language. I study it, I play with it, I wrap it around my fingers like yarn. But grammar rules? They feel like the clingy ex of the writing world. They mean well, but they just don’t get the memo that sometimes you don’t want to place the comma where the pause naturally occurs.
Sometimes, you want to throw the comma across the room and let the sentence breathe like it’s running a marathon.
The gut knows best
I trust my gut because it has read more books than my 6th-grade English teacher who swore contractions were ‘lazy writing’. Sorry, but if Hemingway can use ‘don’t,’ then so can I. My gut tells me when a sentence needs to run on forever (like my avoidance issues) or when a brutal period will punch harder than any semicolon ever could.
Authenticity > obedience
Readers don’t fall in love with Oxford commas; they fall in love with voice. And voice, friends, does not care if you start a sentence with ‘And.’ (Yes, I did. What are you gonna do? Call the grammar police? They’re busy correcting Facebook captions.)
Rules are tools, not chains
Rules are useful. So useful! They’re like IKEA instructions. Do you need them? Technically, yes. But if you decide the bookshelf looks better upside down and can still hold your books, you still win. Language isn’t about worshiping the manual (and I’m one to say that); it’s about building someone that doesn’t collapse while still looking like it belongs in your weird little living room.
If my writing makes you feel something (laugh, cry, roll your eyes, whatever), then I’ve done my job. No dangling modifier or missing apostrophe is going to cancel that out.
So yeah, I’ll keep trusting my gut over grammar. Because at the end of the day, nobody ever said, Wow, this story changed my life because the verb tenses were flawless!
— Montse
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