[thelist] Question...

[Stephen Rider]

Stanley's long (and accurate) email can be summed up in a saying I've 
held to for many years now:

You have to learn to draw inside the lines before you can draw outside 
them.

Or to put it another way, if (for example) a poet knows grammar very 
well, then he is free to make specific (and entirely deliberate) 
choices about how he wants to "play" with it.  If he doesn't know _how_ 
to properly put a sentence together, anything worthwhile he produces 
will by necessity involve a large dose of dumb luck.

Learning and understanding grammar gives _you_ a great deal more 
control over your own writing.

Respectfully,

Steve Rider


On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 11:50  AM, Stanley Coen wrote:

> Ryan - I... cannot ignore the implication that to engage in proper 
> spelling and grammar is nothing more than slavish adherence to norms.
<snip>