Grammar Is Not the Enemy: A Writer’s Guide to Mastering the Rules

A companion deep dive to our Way-Word Writers conversation with grammar expert Patty McGee: EPISODE 109: ​Grammar as a Craft Choice with Patty McGee

There’s a moment I’m so familiar with. (Heather here.) I’m in the middle of a scene that’s finally coming alive! The dialogue is crackling, the emotion is real, the words are flowing! And then a little voice in the back of my head pipes up. Is that a comma splice? Should that be “who” or “whom”? Am I allowed to start a sentence with “because”?

The flow stops. Gah! The editor in me just can’t let go.

For a lot of us, grammar carries a psychological weight (instilled in elementary school) that other craft elements don’t seem to have. We don’t freeze mid-scene, worrying about whether our metaphor is too extended or our pacing too slow. But grammar? It comes with memories of red-inked papers, of being corrected in front of a class, of rules that felt arbitrary and punitive rather than useful. Grammar feels like a test we were never quite prepared for and have never stopped taking.

Thank you, Patty McGee, for coming into my life!

Patty McGee is a nationally recognized literacy consultant and author of Not Your Granny’s Grammar. She wants writers to understand that the red-pen, rule-following, fear-inducing version of grammar is not the whole story. In fact, it might not even be the most important part of the story.

What I loved about Patty’s framework is that grammar becomes a living tool rather than a cage for your prose. She helps her readers and listeners to see grammar as a set of levers and switches that, when you understand how to flip them on and off, give you enormous creative power. The goal isn’t to follow every rule perfectly but rather to understand how the rules change the meaning of your writing. Only when you know and understand these rules can you decide, deliberately and with a surety in your craft, when to follow them and when to bend or break them.

That reframe changed everything for me, and I hope it will for you, too.

I’m old but not so old I got my hands slapped with a ruler at school. That was my mom’s experience, unfortunately. But almost as tragic is that the way most of us learned grammar had almost nothing to do with writing. We learned it through worksheets, diagramming sentences, and correcting errors in isolation. The exercises were completely disconnected from the actual act of putting words on a page. We were drilled on rules without context, explanation, or any sense of why those rules existed or what they were trying to accomplish.

It doesn’t take a genius to see why most of us learned to associate grammar with judgment and shame rather than craft. Grammar became something that controlled our writing rather than a tool we reached for while writing.

This is the failed “fix it” model that Patty has spent her career pushing back against. When grammar is introduced only as a correction mechanism, it doesn’t stick. Writers either become afraid of it (and freeze) or start to ignore it entirely (and miss real opportunities to strengthen their prose). Neither outcome serves the writing.

What serves the writing best? Understanding grammar the way a carpenter understands a set of tools. These can’t be rules imposed from outside. They have to be techniques with specific purposes that you choose intentionally. A carpenter doesn’t hammer a screw, because they know what each tool does and why. That’s the relationship with grammar we need to reach for.

Being 100% practical here. Before we talk about creative rule-breaking, it helps to have a clear look at the grammar fundamentals that trip writers up most often. There’s no need for shame here. This is only to realize that understanding grammar rules is the first step toward controlling them. I’m not going into detail, as you can find all the grammar rules you need at the Purdue OWL.

The comma splice. Two independent clauses separated by a comma creates a comma splice. Each half could stand alone as a sentence, so the comma isn’t the appropriate grammar. ‘Correct’ options are a period, a semicolon, a coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so), or a subordinating conjunction that changes the relationship between the clauses. However, comma splices when used intentionally can create a breathless feeling, like you’re in a rush, or give the reader a fragmented effect. Cormac McCarthy built much of his style on unconventional punctuation choices. Know the rule so you can tell the difference between a mistake and a move.

Who vs. whom. I did research on this because I still get it wrong. Maybe this will be the last time! I have a little fit every time I have to use whom, hah! From what I’ve learned, there’s a trick. If you could answer the sentence with “him” (or “her” or “them”), use whom. If you could answer with “he” (or “she” or “they”), use who. Who called? → He called. Whom did you call? → You called him.

And now you know.

Dangling and misplaced modifiers. Modifiers attach to their nearest noun; make sure that the noun is the one you intend.

Affect vs. effect. The classic: affect is almost always a verb (to affect), and effect is almost always a noun (an effect). But exceptions exist.

Its vs. it’s. The apostrophe in it’s does only one thing: it marks the contraction of “it is.”

Lay vs. lie. I hate this one and always will. I’m probably responsible for making this the most Googled grammar question. You lay a thing (or person or pet) down. It has to have a direct object. Lie is something you do yourself. You lie down. When it gets really complicated is in the past tense, because the past tense of lie is lay. Brilliant, right? I feel badly for anyone trying to learn English as a second language. We native speakers can’t even get it right.

Subject-verb agreement with collective nouns. Groups of people (a team, a committee, a family) are technically singular in American English. Consistency within your manuscript matters most here; pick a convention and stick with it.

This is the exciting part—where grammar starts being about art.

Every sentence contains grammatical choices that carry aesthetic weight. The length of sentences, their rhythm, and the way clauses stack or don’t stack. Do you favor coordination or subordination? How much you use the passive voice, and where you place your most important information. All of these are grammatical choices, and they all contribute to our unique voice.

Short sentences can create urgency. Emphasize words. Convey finality.

Long sentences that unspool through multiple clauses and accumulate detail and momentum as they go can create a sense of thought in process, of time stretching, or of a mind that can’t stop until it’s finished saying everything it needs to say.

Neither is better. Both are tools. and writers who use them most powerfully know exactly why they’re choosing one over the other in any given moment.

Next is active vs. passive voice. There are times when passive voice will add meaning. “The door was opened” versus “The clown opened the door.” The active voice is often stronger because it puts the character in the subject position, which is where we naturally look for cause. But sometimes the object of an action is what matters more, and passive voice lets you put it first. You may even want to withhold the character entirely, because the mystery of who did something is the point. “The letter had been opened” is more unsettling than “Someone opened the letter” in certain contexts. Know what effect the passive voice has before you decide.

Consider where you put the most important information in a sentence. The end of a sentence gets the most emphasis. It’s the position of stress in English prose, the place the reader’s attention naturally lands. If your key word or idea is buried in the middle of a long sentence and trailed by a subordinate clause, it loses power. Put what matters at the end. Watch what happens to your sentences when you start rearranging them with that principle in mind.

Consider the semicolon. Writers either love it or avoid it like a typo. But the semicolon is one of the most expressive pieces of punctuation available to you; it connects two independent clauses in a way that says they’re more than related—they’re in dialogue with each other. The pause it creates is longer than a comma but shorter than a period. It suggests balance, echo, or tension between two thoughts. Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with a passage built on semicolons for a reason.

And here’s our favorite part: the intentional rule-break.

Starting a sentence with and or but. Writing fragments. Using a comma splice for effect. Ending with a preposition. Using unconventional capitalization or punctuation for stylistic reasons. All of these violate grammar “rules,” and all of them appear in the work of celebrated, award-winning literary fiction.

THE RULE FOR RULE BREAKING (which makes rule-breaking a little less fun, I know)

The principle that makes intentional rule-breaking work: you have to know the rule you’re breaking, and you have to be breaking it on purpose, in service of something specific.

You can use a fragment to create emotion. A hard stop of truth. She couldn’t wait to see her pup again, hear his bark when he saw her coming. Her train pulled into the station, and her father stood there. Alone. The single word ‘alone’ is more powerful.

If you want your prose to sound more like spoken word, starting sentences with conjunctions—and, but, or, so—closes the gap between prose and thought. The only issue I ever notice with this is when it’s overused.

The key question to ask yourself about any unconventional grammar choice is: What is this doing? If you have an answer (if the comma splice is creating pace, if the fragment is landing an emotional beat, if the run-on sentence is mimicking the character’s overwhelmed mental state), then you’re making a craft decision. If you can’t articulate what it’s doing, it’s likely better to apply the rule.

This is why learning the rules deeply, not just as arbitrary commandments but as systems of meaning, makes you a better writer even when you’re breaking them. You can’t subvert something you don’t understand. The rule-breakers who do it brilliantly are the ones who understand exactly what the rule is trying to accomplish, and they’re breaking it in full awareness of what they’re giving up and what they’re gaining.

A word about timing, because this matters more than most craft discussions acknowledge, in my opinion.

Grammar is a revision concern, not a drafting concern.

If you are policing your grammar while writing a first draft, you are splitting your cognitive attention at the worst possible moment. The first draft is for getting the story down, following the heat of the scene, discovering what your characters do and say, and building the architecture of the narrative. The drafting brain and the editing brain need different things from you, and trying to run them simultaneously usually produces worse results than running them sequentially.

Write badly if you have to. Write in fragments and run-ons if that’s what comes out. Write there when you mean their (you’ll fix it later). Give yourself full permission to draft without the grammar voice in your head, because that voice, however well-intentioned, is almost always counterproductive at the drafting stage.

Then, in revision, look at grammar deliberately. You can look at your sentences, paragraphs, and scenes with the right craft questions. Is this as specific as it could be? Does the rhythm ebb and flow?

Some writers (me included) find it helpful to do a dedicated grammar pass. This separate read-through focused specifically on sentence-level choices, distinct from the developmental pass (does this scene work?) and the line-level pass (does this prose sing?), is where you take control of your words and the power behind them.

Breaking revision into distinct layers prevents the feeling that you have to solve everything at once.

Patty McGee’s work ultimately invites us to shift our relationship with grammar. It’s no longer a test we’re trying not to fail or a set of rules imposed by an authority figure. Grammar is a craft conversation between you and language itself.

Language is alive. It changes. Rules that were ironclad a century ago have softened; constructions that were once considered errors have become accepted style. What we call “correct” grammar is always, at some level, a moving target—a consensus about what helps communication and what hinders it. The way we choose to string words together is a snapshot of how we participate or engage in a society that has agreed to share meaning at a particular moment in time.

Rules matter. The work our punctuation marks are doing matters. The clarity of specific phrasing matters. All of these rules, followed or broken, adds up to your relationship with grammar. Please, don’t simply follow the rules out of fear or break the rules because you think it’s cool.

The writers who make the most interesting sentences aren’t the ones who know every rule. They’ve developed an intimate relationship with how sentences work. Masters of writing can feel when something is off and diagnose why, know when a rule can be bent in service of something truer, and who use grammar not as a constraint but as a palette.

That’s the invitation. Grammar isn’t the enemy of your voice. Understood well, it’s one of the primary ways your voice becomes defined.

Want to go deeper? Listen to our full conversation with Patty McGee on the Way-Word Writers podcast — and explore her book Not Your Granny’s Grammar (Corwin, 2025, co-authored with Tim Donohue) for an innovative, writer-centered approach to grammar that will change how you think about sentences forever.