I read the Cecelia Watson's book over spring break—you could get through it in a sitting; it’s pretty short and easy to read—and I came to the conclusion, which was never mentioned or entertained in the book, but for which the book did give evidence, that the paradigm of “rules” is misguided. It’s foreign to how language actually works. It’s clumsy and Occam would have hated it. Instead, I want to promote the idea of “expectations.” Then we don’t ask “whose rules?” but “whose expectations?” We put “am” not “are” after “I” in almost all cases because the people who(m) we expect to read us expect us to do that. We’re not following a rule. We’re meeting an expectation. That means that there literally are no rules. What we call rules are descriptions of the expectations of a certain audience under certain conditions. This frees every act of composition up to be and do what it needs in order to meet or defy those expectations, to manipulate the reader based on their expectations. Exactly how language actually works.
