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Strunk & White's Elements of Style was an excellent recommendation. Well worth the pittance it cost me.

Must be a painful experience to be an editor. Trying to tell creative types that there are actually rules to follow strikes me as an eternally uphill battle.

RotGtIE wrote:Strunk & White's Elements of Style was an excellent recommendation. Well worth the pittance it cost me.

It's a tiny book!
-- I was stunned when I got my first copy.

RotGtIE wrote:Must be a painful experience to be an editor. Trying to tell creative types that there are actually rules to follow strikes me as an eternally uphill battle.

According to my editors, it IS.

Be creative with your plot and characters; not your Grammar!
-- Editor in Chief at Mojo Castle Books:

The thing that made the difference to me about "following rules" was when I understood that by consistently doing so I was *helping my readers,* because an experienced reader can tell when a different character acts simply from the layout of the text.

Once the reader trusts you to get it right, then keeping track of the characters is one less thing for them to worry about. You have more of their attention, so it's easier to get them involved yadda yadda. Be warned though, that because it's a trust issue, muff things up *once* and all the benefits vanish from there on. In fact they may find it so jarring that they stop reading altogether.

Be careful about following paragraphing examples from printed text though - it's important to remember that new paragraphs take up space, which means more paper, more weight and more costs for the publisher and distributors. So printed books can be a bit of a compromise between grammatical purity and commercial necessity. Electronic text is the first time we've had all the white space we want, for free.

As always, thanks for an interesting and thought provoking post.