Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway

Mechanics

Significant detail, the active voice, and prose rhythm are techniques for achieving the sensuous in fiction, means of taking the reader past the words and the thought to feeling and experience. None is much use if the reader’s eye is wrenched back to the surface; for that reason a word or two ought to be said here about the mechanics of the written language. 

Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are a kind of magic; their purpose is to be invisible. If the sleight of hand works, we will not notice a comma or a quotation mark but will translate each instantly into a pause or an awareness of voice; we will not focus on the individual letters of a word but extract its sense of whole. When the mechanics are incorrectly used, the trick is revealed and the magic fails; the reader’s focus is shifted from the story to its surface. The reader is irritated at the author, and of all the emotions he was willing to experience, irritation at the author is not one. 

There is no intrinsic virtue in standardized mechanics, and you can depart from them whenever you produce an effect that adequately compensates for the attention called to the surface. But only then. Unlike the techniques of narrative, the rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation can be coldly learned anywhere in the English-speaking world – and they should be learned by anyone who aspires to write. Poor mechanics read instant amateurism to an editor. Perhaps a demonstrated genius can get away with sloppy mechanics, but in that case some other person must be hired to fill in. Since ghostwriters and editors are likely to be paid more per hour for their work than the author, this would constitute a heady drain on the available resources of those who publish fiction. 

I felt like this had to be posted.