“Aren’t conventions just rules with another name?” Not entirely. Conventions—agreed-on language practices of grammar, punctuation, and style—convey shorthand information from writer to reader. In college writing, you will generally 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 also choose to ignore conventions at times to achieve a particular effect. (You might, for example, write a sentence fragment rather than a full sentence, such as the Not entirely at 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.