Here's the interesting part - I've had several people come back and tell me that they intended it to be written like that -- it's their "style." This includes things like run-on sentences, fragments (which I can live with), and misuse of commas and semicolons.
So the question is how many rules can you break in the name of style, especially if you are not a published author?

I love it when people tell me that they intended to do something a certain way. Just because they purposefully wrote a run-on sentence does not mean that they should have. It is at least good to know they are aware of this basic grammar problem, but nonetheless I encourage these people to separate intended AFFECT with purposefully writing something down.

In the case of a run-on sentence, I am often trying to create the AFFECT of a hyperacive character saying something all in one breath. Case in point: "We're going camping and it's such a pretty day and Megan got out of the hospital and can come with us after all and I found my lucky fishing pole and Dad said he could come too."

Yes, I intentionally wrote those words down like that. Yes, I know it's a run-on sentence. That part, I did on purpose. What is more difficult to do on purpose is to make those words get the right reaction from a reader. If enough readers tell me, "That's a run-on sentence." then I will know that they did not get the point, that all that stood out to them was the grammar problem.

Something that tends to work more often is a fragment:

"She almost ran after him. Almost."

Style is important as long as it doesn't aggrivate the reader.

In dialogue though, I think that you can have free reign.

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He's not flying! He's just falling... with style.

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Plummeting is plummeting, no matter how cool it may look.

Communication is the objective of most stories. Does the 'style' meet its communication objective?. Many writers obfuscate the story by employing a misguided sense of style which usually betrays incompetence rather than achieving some predetermined desired effect.

The best advice you can give to someone studying life-drawing (or any type of drawing for that matter) is to understand structure. What lies beneath the skin, beneath the muscles, beneath the tendons? Once you understand structure, the 'style' will follow. Don't create some palette of gimmicky swooshes, wriggly lines and clichéd, referential 'trademark' elements and think it is 'style' when the result demostrates the artist's inability to create compositional strength. To act that way is amateurish avoidance of the work required to understand structure.

I do agree with the comments on the dialogue. But add that you should be consistent in the way the character mashes the language. Don't have him literate and erudite in one sentence and illiterate and tongue-tied in another. ie "What yer doin' that fer?' in one sentence and 'What are you doing that for?' in the next.

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I do agree with the comments on the dialogue. But add that you should be consistent in the way the character mashes the language. Don't have him literate and erudite in one sentence and illiterate and tongue-tied in another. ie "What yer doin' that fer?' in one sentence and 'What are you doing that for?' in the next.

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I agree totally. Consistancy is important, or nobody will take you seriously.

Tom Joad was believable because he always spoke the way that he did.

The style/break the rules thing is cousin to poetic license. However, like Hoptoad basically said, you gotta know which rules you're breaking, and you better break them for a darn good reason.

I'm usually very unforgiving of spelling errors unless they are an intentional part of the dialogue. Same goes with grammar. Punctuation should be perfect throughout. That is, I'm alright with fragments if they have purpose, but don't put, commas in the wrong place (for example).

That said, I'm not always perfect with my technicality. I tend to be a bit comma-happy, and I'm sure there are other things I do wrong as well.

Now I know that some parts of grammar are getting less and less strict. For some reason splitting infinitives is all the rage now In those cases you might actually get away with it, even though all the grammar freaks like me will be throwing fits.

An expert writer could pull off a whole book of errors that is written from the point of view of a character who doesn't have very good grammar. But most of us aren't experts and should not be trying this just yet.

The following, from http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000011.htm, is technically correct:
"We often speak in run-on sentences, but we make pauses and change our tone so people can understand us, but when we write, no one can hear us, so sometimes we must break our sentences into shorter units so that they do not sound run-on."

Yet sentence fragments, as I think Christine mentioned, which are technically incorrect, can be fine in context.

Neither Christine's nor my sentence is correct, but only because of the lack of punctuation. Technically, they are simply very compound sentences. (Kind of an oxymoronic sentence. ) In fact, adding commas, which makes them technically correct, also makes them 'feel' less wrong, although still not quite right:

"We're going camping, and it's such a pretty day, and Megan got out of the hospital and can come with us after all, and I found my lucky fishing pole, and Dad said he could come too."

"They went camping, and it was such a pretty day, and Megan got out of the hospital and she went with them after all, and she found her lucky fishing pole, and her Dad said he would go too."

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I tink the big thing to remember with whatever you try to do is that it may not have the intended affect on the readers and if it does not...do something else.

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That intended effect can be a killer. The writer generally needs outside input to determine if he's getting his intended effect. ('outside input' )

Dickens and other verbose writers generally were technically correct; they didn't write in run-on sentences. They were "legally very long." It was an accepted style at one time.

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But there is definitely a style that comes with such things. My favorite is the short sentences because they contribute to the style enormously.

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Sometimes too enormously, either way:

From Ulysses, James Joyce:

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There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around Dublin and its picturesque environs, even, Poulaphouca, to which there was a steam tram, but also farther away from the maddening crowd, in Wicklow, rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for edlerly wheelmen, so long as it didn't come down and in the wilds of Donegal, where if report spoke true, the coup d'oeil was exceedingly grand, though the lastnamed locality was not easily getable so that the influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the signal benefits to be derived from it, while...[goes on for 202 words total]

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While this from A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway:

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The Italians were even more dangerous. They were frightened and firing on anything they saw. Last night on the retreat we had heard that there had been many Germans in Italian uniforms mixing with the retreat in the north. I did not believe it. That was one of those things you always heard in the war. It was one of the things the enemy always did to you. You did not know any one who went over in German uniform to confuse them. Maybe they did it but it sounded difficult. I did not believe the Germans did it. I did not believe they had to. There was no need to confuse our retreat. [continues this way throughout]

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Give me a comfortable middle ground, varied as the context best benefits.

I don't bother with grammar. I'm all about syntax.

If it clearly means what the author intended it to mean, then it doesn't matter if some grammar freak thinks it's an error. The problem is when poor punctuation, construction, wording, or other factors make it difficult to be certain what the text is supposed to mean (or when the decodable meaning is clearly different from the most probable intended meaning).

Some of them stem from trying to impose the grammatical rules of Latin onto a Germanic language.

I mean, logically, no one can explain the invalidity of a dangling participle.

...but I don't want to do bad grammar for style, except in dialog. Punctuation errors, no way.

I suspect I am one of the people who contributed to Omakase starting this thread (given that I responded in very much that vein to very much that critique).

I have always been of the opinion that the "laws" of grammar can (and at times should) be broken, so long as you know what laws you're breaking and why you're breaking them. There is a difference between someone who doesn't know they're doing it, and someone who knows they're doing it and is doing it for a very deliberate effect.

Here are two sentences to illustrate what I mean:

"It was not quite perfect."

"It was not, quite, perfect."

I have been critted for the latter usage, because the commas aren't necessary. And I agree. But read those sentences aloud and you should see a difference between them; a subtle nuancing in the second that isn't there in the first. the commas are used to pause, to emphasise, to moderate... to my mind (and I hope I'm not alone in this) these two sentences are different and mean different things. Slightly different, but I do try and put these kind of delicate, subtle shifts into my prose. And that's a stylistic choice, because I know what I'm doing is "wrong", but I feel the benefit I get in terms of the shades of meaning outweighs the disadvantages of stepping a little away from purist grammar.

Run on sentances are not style. In dialogue they are fine (Internal or spoken), otherwise its a tough one to justify. Not that it can't be done, but for most of the people writing on a help-me-with-my-writing board, they won't be able to pull it off acceptably.

Sentance Fragments are fine when not used excessivly. One every few pages of narrative is okay. Dialogue is not natural without them.

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I mean, logically, no one can explain the invalidity of a dangling participle.

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A dangling participle is invalid because it is a sentence fragment that references the wrong noun.

Examples of dangling participles:

"Being so awkward in a sentence, I never use dangling participles."

"Running through the forest, the tree roots kept tripping him."

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Ah yes, the dangling participle; this is nonsense up with which we shall not put...

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I believe the allusion to the "nonsense up with which we shall not put" is in reference to Churchill's comment about the grammar rule against putting a preposition at the end of the sentence. "Please come on up."

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"It was not quite perfect."

"It was not, quite, perfect."

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"It was not... quite... perfect."

Is that acceptable? *embarrased at his lack of knowledge*

I am reading the Harry Potter series to my children and there are lots of things in them that bug the heck outta me. And then there are those books that are in the genre I'm writing, with misspelled words, sentences that don't flow.

When I'm writing, I prize clarity---I want my sentences and words to be precise. They mean what I want them to mean, and I want the reader to understand what I mean. Bad grammar would only interefere with that kind of understanding. The grammar and spelling may be ultimately questionable, but it's not from lack of trying.

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Ultimately Bad Grammar becomes a style when used consistently to establish a particular narrative voice. The trick is to make it natural and painless to read. The entertainment factor must outweigh the cringe factor

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"It was not quite perfect."
"It was not, quite, perfect."

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While I agree that extra commas can be used for nuanced effect, I think it has to be where commas may or may not go to start -- where there's already an acceptance for them, such as before the last item in a series or to break up an especially long sentence. In this instance, the unintended effect may well be that the writer made a mistake. For the same effect, IMHO, italics might work better or, depending on the context, quotation marks. Ellipses to me would suggest someone easing into sleep or unconsciousness or baffled thought.

There is no need to be embarrassed by a lack of knowledge, Mr. Confused. The recognition of that lack is a form of wisdom.

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Not that I'd want to leave things the way I write things here...endless sentences spliced together with dashes and dots, parenthetical thoughts, etcetera...if I wrote that out in rough draft I'd try to clean it up while revising.

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Like that Internet paragraph that's making the rounds:

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I cdnuolt blveeiee taht I cluod aulacity uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. Thge rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wolhe.

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Just because we can read this, doesn't mean we should jettison correct spelling. If we didn't know how to spell things in the first place, this would be jibberish. A jumbled paragraph in Russian would be no easier for me to read than a properly composed Russian paragraph.

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When I'm writing, I prize clarity---I want my sentences and words to be precise.

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Precision is nice, and it's one of my baliwicks. But it isn't a boolean value either.

I must apologise. When I said dangling participle, I meant split infinitive (Don't know what happened.)

So should read:

I mean, logically, no one can explain the invalidity of a split infinitive.

Early grammatical authorities (read: Thomas Smith et al) realised that in Latin it was impossible to split an infinitive so decided it should be impossible in English too. This supposes that English should use Latin as a grammatical model. A language with which English has precious little in common.

To realise that in Latin a verb can have 120 inflections but that in English a verb can have a maximum of five (ie see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) is to begin to understand how different these two languages are. Sure, we borrowed words, but English was for centuries a spoken language only, used by rural peasants, and the peasantry dispensed with impracticalities with an emphasis on expressive functionality instead.

Think of the curiously persistent idea -- in reference to the Churchill quote above -- that a sentence should not end in a preposition. Why? The source of this tradition was Robert Lowth an 18th century amateur garmmarian and clergyman in his book A short introduction to English (1762).

He aslo came up with the notion that we must say "different from" as opposed to "different to".

Read Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson for more on these sort of arbitrary decisions that have become canonised by grammaticasters around the world.

Here's an example:

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"Revolutionary" is a good word. Revolutionary new household cleaning products. Revolutionary new poet! Revolutionary car design!

Don't be a counter-revolutionary! Nobody likes a Contra.

Oh, wait ... that was a different set of rhetoric ... The old war. The cold war.

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Many things in these few sentances are grammatically incorrect, but he does it for the sound. When we read this we can HEAR what he's trying to say, it's a literary technique, and though it's grammatically incorrect, it makes it interesting to read. It's these techniques I'd consider to be acceptable, but everything is based on opinion.

For another instance, Emily Dickinson is NOTORIOUS for beating her poems over the head with a large quantity of dashes:

"A poor -- torn heart -- a tattered heart --
That sat it down to rest --
Nor noticed that the Ebbing Day
Flowed silver to the West --
Nor noticed Night did soft descend --
Nor Constellation burn --
Intent upon the vision
Of latitudes unknown.

The angels -- happening that way
This dusty heart espied --
Tenderly took it up from toil
And carried it to God --
There -- sandals for the Barefoot --
There -- gathered from the gales --
Do the blue havens by the hand
Lead the wandering Sails."

I certainly learned a few new things reading the variety of responses here and I value the input.
As a young (in experience, not age unfortunately )writer I have struggled at times to express my exact thoughts without breaking some of those rules my teachers spent so much time beating me over the head with... ahem, like ending sentences in prepositions, which is no problem in informal writing.

As many noted, sentence fragments are practically indispensible to get the right cadence in sections of the prose.

It's tough to ignore some of those rules, though, since many do make the writing sound bad.

Well, off to cheerily go write some more