: Story teller dilemma Without the ability to use proper grammar and no knowledge of punctuation and the convoluted intricacies of writing techniques will a book reviewer reject a story written

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Are you capable of writing with proper grammar and punctuation and you think this "unorthodox fashion" is more appealing for some reason? Or do you not know how to use proper grammar and punctuation?

If you don't know how, I'd say, "learn". There are times when it is effective to break the rules. But if you don't know what the rules are or what the purpose of the rules is, you are not in a position to say whether breaking them is a good idea or not.

It's not that hard to learn proper grammar. When I graduated high school I had very little knowledge of grammar. My first year of college they made me take a remedial English class. In one semester I learned about 90% of what you need to know. Buy a grammar book and study it. If you made a serious effort you could learn the most important rules in a couple of weeks, I would think. If you said you had a very limited vocabulary or problems with spelling, correcting that would require memorizing a lot of words, something that could take a long time. But something like proper punctuation ... it's not like there are thousands of punctuation marks to learn. There are, what? -- period, question mark, exclamation, comma, apostrophe, quote, colon, semi-colon, hyphen -- nine that are used routinely. Some of those have several uses, but it's not like there are hundreds of rules to learn, more like maybe 20 or so. (Depending on how you count, etc.)

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Short answer: Write in the character's voice and develop your own writing style.

Long answer: If poor grammar and technique are intrinsic to the character/narrator, editors will tolerate it to a point (to what point exactly, though, is a risk you take as a writer). If poor grammar and technique are intrinsic to the writer's abilities, they will most likely reject the story within a few sentences. If they read your cover letter, you could get rejected even quicker. While "outsider art" is welcomed in the visual art world, outsider art in text is very difficult to get accepted unless an editor decides to champion it.

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Give me a break - this isn't a "knowledge" issue - if you can write about "the convoluted intricacies of writing techniques," you can at least put a question mark at the end of your sentence.

If you chose to use a non-standard style, you'd better be damn sure you use it WELL. In this case, I don't see how your style added anything to your post, so, no, I wouldn't think a novel written in this style would be successful.

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I had trouble just following this post. Generally, if the book is good and able to hold it's own, if can succeed even without an orthadox style of writing. Otherwise, it won't do well.

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