Personal Disagreements with The so called Rules of Grammar

This reminds me of one of my favourite grammar memes.

 

Periods separate sentences while commas separate clauses, generally speaking. That's how I was taught and that's how I parse English when I read it. Linguistically speaking, ""I think this rule is correct," he said." is one sentence, and placing a period within the quotations ends the sentence. Personally, I sometimes/often leave out the comma because it does, practically speaking, imply a pause to many readers (including myself), even though all it truly does it separate the quoted clause from the actual verb phrase "he said". I'm surprised no one brought up the way that many European countries/languages write quotations: << >> except they're small sideways carrots or something (it's one symbol, not two; this is just the closest I can get with my English keyboard). And they usually hit enter, so each new speaker or each new "paragraph" of dialog gets a new line with new << >> marks.

The Oxford comma is what follows the final item in a list, and in my opinion is important. Without the O-comma, a list appears to actually be an independent clause and another clause (that I don't know the particular name of). The sentence "It looks like a dick, long and hard" is ambiguous if the O-comma is absent. Is "long and hard" a clause that describes "a dick", or are they two parts of a list describing "it"? Reread it as "It looks like a dick, long, and hard". Ironically, this example is naturally a bit awkward because the first item in the list is a noun while the other two are adjectives, but it works well enough to prove my point.

"Bending the rules" confuses communication in both instances. However, knowing when and how to bend the rules is just as critical as knowing them. Knowing when to use polysyndeton (run on sentences) and asyndeton (lots of punctuation) can stylistically speed up or slow down the "flow" of a piece. Polysyndeton commonly uses lots of "ands" and/or "ors" (this was a fun sentence to write, lol). Most readers view it as expressing excitement or anxiety ("he could like it or not like it or love it or hate it or think I'm desperate or think I'm clingy or think I'm sexy or...") while frequent commas in this case (asyndeton) would read more as if a character is blandly reading off a list. "Bending the rules" here is actually a native, intuitive convention of English that serves both a practical and stylistic function. Semantics rules the day, until you learn that pragmatics dictates semantics behind the scenes.

Edit: I totally switched poly and a. I fixed it once I realized.

 

If this is intended as a list, then I would write it as: "It looks long, hard, and like a dick." When listing qualities, it is usually best to order them in ascending levels of wordiness.

When I want to determine whether it's appropriate to break the rules of grammar in a particular manner, I think back to whether I've seen such use in a published work. If so many talented, accomplished authors never do X thing, then X thing is probably a terrible idea.

 

What would be the alternative to having a paragraph for each new speaker?
It would be quite confusing if you put two sentences from different speakers in one line.

 

In Ukrainian, we usually write dialogues without quotation marks. Like this:

— Bla-bla-bla. — he said — Bla-bla-bla.
— Bla-bla-bla-bla, — she answered — bla-bla-bla! (period if two parts are separate sentences, comma otherwise)

If one person is speaking then it is

«Bla-bla-bla». — he said. (but «Bla-bla-bla!» — he exclaimed.)

Periods and commas are outside quotation marks but everything else is inside.

Also, we use this kind of structure:

«Bla-bla-bla, — he said — bla-bla-bla-bla». (Yep, one pair of quotation marks)

The following is acceptable, too:

He said: «Bla-bla-bla. Bla-bla-bla». (But He said — «Bla-bla-bla. Bla-bla-bla». is grammatically incorect)

All of that is deeply ingrained in my brain and writing direct speech in another way is very uncomfortable (And I constantly do it wrong. Sometimes I notice it during proofreading but sometimes I don't.)

 

Fascinating! My experience with Spanish literature was limited so I didn't really know the details of how European quotations work, I just knew they were much different than in English (I know Spanish isn't Ukrainian, but the punctuation seems similar enough!).

 

It isn't confusing in Ukrainian. If we write dialogue in one line (we usually don't do this in casual writing but it is quite common in literature) then it will be like this.

«Bla-bla-bla, — he said — bla-bla-bla-bla». «Bla-bla.bla». — she replied. «Bla-bla?» — he asked. «Yes». — she nodded.

 

Hm... given this

the quotes seem to work as a container for one person.

So if one speaker can't have two quotes in a row like

or

it might be unambiguous as well.
(But still weird )

 

Note that no one sane will write a long dialogue in one line. Because it is, indeed, way harder to read than

— Bla-bla-bla.
— Bla-bla
— Bla-bla-bla
— Bla-bla-bla-bla-bla
— Bla!