Remember hitting the space bar twice because we were supposed to leave two spaces after a period? (That was a hard one for my muscle memory to relearn.) Grammar rules change and evolve over time to reflect the audience, and the look of documents. Also, how something sounds: to boldly go. Although the rules are important, it is also important for a language to adapt and change to stay relevant. It’s a fine, tricky line.
What are some examples of rules evolving to stay relevant? Look at the phrase all right. More and more, the word alright is the replacement. Maybe not so much in formal documents, but it’s the new norm. Trying to explain this change to my students was tricky because they had hardly noticed all right and defaulted to alright in their work. They couldn’t figure out why someone would use two words when one word was easier.
The most celebrated example of a rule changing (in my opinion) is the use of they as a singular pronoun for folkx who don’t identify with he or she. They as a singular pronoun is even recognized by style guides and associations like APA and MLA. While I was completing my Professional Editing Certificate, the conversation about singular they came up quite often. Sometimes it takes the style guides and associations a long time to adopt changes that are already being accepted in the writing community. They as a singular pronoun was something that was being used over a hundred years ago to refer to individual people, so the change isn’t that radical when you look back at the history. But the intention of the change to include they holds so much power for those folkx who identify as they.
What about those grammar rules, though? Yep. They are changing, and not just the move to single space after a period. A great example of how we modern readers don’t like clutter in our documents is the move to get rid of the Oxford/serial comma. (The Oxford or serial comma is the last comma in a list before the word and.) Although the Oxford comma can add clarity to some sentences, style guides around the English-speaking world are removing them from business documents. No more clutter. But I do believe that it is becoming acceptable to add in the Oxford comma when it is needed to create clarity (My roommates, Jen and Eden are going out for dinner tomorrow night. How many people are actually going out??). So, don’t be afraid to be inconsistent with the serial commas, as long as you are consistent about adding clarity to your writing!
The same goes with the choice of apostrophe use with words that end in an s already: Tansis’ not Tansis’s. Now, the official MLA and APA would say to add that extra s (Tanis’s), but in business writing (and in some other areas of writing), the trend is to avoid clutter for the reader and leave off that extra s. Will this trend be picked up by the academic style guides? Only the future knows, but I feel like this is one grammar rule that might change soon. (Or not…people like consistency, and missing letters sometimes adds confusion.)
At the end of the day I think the real question is what makes a document better for the reader? Clarity, less clutter, identification, connection to spoken English. These are all things to keep in mind. For those of us who love rules, it’s ok (okay?) to let the rules bend sometimes.
