TALKING THE TALK

“Aren’t conventions just rules with another name?” Not entirely. Conventions—agreed-on language practices of grammar, punctuation, and style—convey a kind of shorthand information from writer to reader. In college writing, you will want to follow the conventions of standard academic English unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. But unlike hard-and-fast rules, conventions are flexible; a convention appropriate for one time or situation may be inappropriate for another. You may even choose to ignore conventions to achieve a particular effect. (You might, for example, write a sentence fragment rather than a full sentence, such as the Not entirely near the beginning of this box.) As you become more experienced and confident in your writing, you will develop a sense of which conventions to apply in different writing situations.