RANDOM | ABOUT WRITING STYLES | RESISTING RULES
No Full Stops, Period
And other rules of grammar we, as writers, break.
I edited a Medium story recently in which the writer followed her grammatical rule of no period if the sentence ends with an emoji.
Her approach made me remember a fantastic book by Terry Macmillan called How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Terry bucked traditional rules requiring sentence structure.
McMillan’s writing style in Stella has received criticism due to her use of free-flow sentences and paragraphs without intervening punctuation marks. She defends her choice by saying that it is representative of the stream of consciousness, which does not require punctuation. She decided not to edit the sentences and paragraphs because she wanted to capture the flow of her thoughts as they came to her. Source.
As a reader of her book, I interpreted her choice in another way. At first, I found the style disconcerting. Then, as Macmillan’s telling continued, I naturally ‘thought of’ and filled in the punctuation marks. It was so instinctual that when, halfway through the novel, these parts of speech made their way back in, I did not immediately see it. I did feel the change, though.
