The grammar police nabbed me recently. A client whose academic paper I was editing objected to one of my corrections. He pointed out that in a sentence where the subject is in the form “Not only…but also,” the verb must agree with the noun in the “but also” part.

Example: “Not only language ninjas but also Rocky Mountain English professors know this rule” and “Not only the Language Ninja, but also the Rocky Mountain English Professor knows this rule” are correct, but “Not only language ninjas, but also the Rocky Mountain English Professor know this rule” is not.

Did you know about this rule? I sure didn’t, despite my English degree and nearly 20 years of professional writing and editing experience. I had to look it up. Turns out he was right.

I hate it when that happens.

In any case, although I wanted to tell my client that a sentence like that is one that only academics could love, I politely agreed that he was correct and to please revert my offending edit. Sometimes, you just have to let clients be right.

When to Break the Rules

But sometimes, you gotta break the rules. (I broke two in the previous sentence alone!) Why? I’m glad you asked: Here are some good reasons for breaking English grammar rules:

• Rhetorical effect: Vernacular, double-negatives, and the like, when used judiciously, can help emphasize or drive home a point. Just don’t overdo it.
• Avoiding awkwardness: Some rules seem to be designed to make getting your point across as awkward as possible. When you can’t write a sentence clearly without breaking a rule, break it. That rule that says you can’t end a sentence with a preposition? It’s often impossible to follow that rule without ending up with stilted, awkward, unreadable prose. As Sir Winston Churchill is alleged to have written, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”
• When it’s a made-up rule with no basis in reality: A long time ago some pointy-headed grammarian decided that because you can’t split infinitives in Latin, you shouldn’t do it in English, and made a rule about it. Never mind that they are different languages. Never mind that it’s physically impossible to split a Latin infinitive because it’s only one word, not two as in English. It’s a ridiculous “rule” that usually can’t be followed without completely obfuscating your message. Fugeddaboudit.
• When it “sounds” wrong: To my ear, “Not only the Language Ninja, but also the Rocky Mountain English Professor knows this rule” doesn’t sound right, because clearly the subject, taken as a whole, is plural. If a rule is likely to cause the reader to think, “Wait, what?” then consider breaking the rule. Or just recast the sentence: “Both the Language Ninja and the Rocky Mountain English Professor know this rule.”
• Trademark style: Joe Bob Briggs, the famously good reviewer of infamously bad movies, has a signature style that dispenses with numerous rules and standards of English spelling and grammar. It works, though, and would not be nearly as effective or entertaining otherwise.

Don’t Go Crazy, Though

Most English grammar rules exist for the sake of clarity; with mostly-followed rules, writer and reader are more likely have a common understanding of a given sentence. Without the rules, English would be utterly incomprehensible. Thus, rule-breaking should be done with caution, and for the right reasons. Here are some tips:

• Know the rule before you break it. To effectively break a rule, you need to understand the rule and its purpose first. Then you will understand why it makes sense to break the rule in a particular situation.
• Don’t break rules out of spite. Despite the wrongheaded origins of the rule against splitting infinitives, it does occasionally add clarity to a sentence if an infinitive is not split. Don’t break it just because you hate it.
• Don’t break rules willy-nilly. Breaking a rule should be done to make the writing better, more clear, more concise. Injudicious, arbitrary, and inconsistent rule-breaking just obscures your message and makes it look like you don’t know how to write.

When you can break grammar rules effectively, your writing will seem so natural that most readers, and even some editors, will not even notice they were broken. Follow these guidelines (given the context, I hesitate to call them “rules”), and you won’t have to answer to the grammar police.

Morris Vaughan is a technical writing consultant in Los Angeles, California.