Happy Holidays, all. Hoping, however you celebrate them, you enjoy a peaceful, lovely time. Fending off much snow here, but that's not unusual
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A lot of the grammar rules that are taught in school (old and new) are 1) based rather dubiously on idea about symbolic logic and Latin that have little or nothing to do with effective English style and 2) applicable to academic non-fiction, but not necessarily to creative prose. After all, even in the third person a writer is trying to create a sense of character "voice," which means incorporating informal and colloquial language to a certain degree.
In re "but": I could give you a rant about generative phrase structure and constituency, but that's just because I just finished writing a paper about conjunctions under X-bar theory. :-) Suffice to say there's two different English lexical items "but": a coordinating conjunction ("different but nice") and an adverb similar to "however." Teachers and style manuals unfairly decry adverbial "but" either because it gets used incorrectly or because they confuse it with a coordinating conjunction. (Though somehow "yet" is perfectly okay to start a sentence with?)
Comma before coordinating conjunction is a rule that varies from style manual to style manual, so I wouldn't sweat it.
Thank you! I'm not a pro and definitely needed a bit of guidance. Being aware of the creative prose aspect, I don't want to stifle character voice in respect to colloquial language and informality. So I will probably not worry so much about it. Times they are a changin'.
In re "but": I could give you a rant about generative phrase structure and constituency, but that's just because I just finished writing a paper about conjunctions under X-bar theory. :-) Suffice to say there's two different English lexical items "but": a coordinating conjunction ("different but nice") and an adverb similar to "however." Teachers and style manuals unfairly decry adverbial "but" either because it gets used incorrectly or because they confuse it with a coordinating conjunction. (Though somehow "yet" is perfectly okay to start a sentence with?)
Comma before coordinating conjunction is a rule that varies from style manual to style manual, so I wouldn't sweat it.
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