How important do you think the rules are?

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As far as I can tell the only two things which matter in writing are your purpose and your intended audience. Anything and everything you write, no matter what it is, will depend on these two things and nothing more. How relaxed your grammar is, what words you use, how you organize everything, it all depends on your purpose and your audience. I dislike it when english teachers refer to things being correct or incorrect. It all looks like an art to me. And since it is a living goddamn language how can you even think of it as being possible to be correct or incorrect. For it to be a matter of correct or incorrect it would have to be unchanging.

Now this could either be two things, either some people would like to simplify language into having rules, and that anyone who deviates is wrong, and that these people are just being close minded. Or that there is a some group of people who have the true understanding of what is correct and incorrect, and by me not attempting to learn their decisions on language that I being lazy and ignorent.

So what do you think?

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The English language doesn't change very quickly. The writing styles two hundred years ago may look different because of a difference in word choices, but you'll notice they follow the same rules we use today. Over hundreds of years, yeah, languages change, but not in a lifetime. Like AntiEverything said, grammar exists for a reason. But I think any author should be free to deviate from the accepted rules if it will improve the writing, under the one condition that they have a solid understanding of how "perfect" English is structured to jump off from. Chuck Palahniuk is a master at this.

Oh and I think factoring in your intended audience before you write is a recipe for disaster. The purpose is everything. Whether the product will be accepted by the public or not should be irrelevant, because the best writing is for your own pleasure. You won't succeed by catering to a certain group of readers.

i agree about knowing the rules before you start breaking them. you can write a blinding piece, but bugger up all the punctuation and formatting rules - it makes it incredibly difficult to read, and any editor will just chuck it in the "no thanks" pile after one or two paragraphs. and it is unbelievably frustrating, as the reader.

audience IS important. writing for yourself is fine, but it can be very uninteresting for others - i'm thinking of all that very personal poetry written from profound feelings, which come over as melodramatic angst, when read by others.

i suppose i depends on who you are writing for, but you yourself are an "audience", so you still have to consider it. and actually, for financial/publication success, you DO have to cater to what others will read. after all, writing is about communication, and if someone can't understand what you're trying to say, then you ain't communicating.

I guess you do have to think about the audience at least a little, but personally, I've always done far better writing (not my judgment) when I stop giving a s**t about what other people think. Stephen King has always said that he writes what he likes to read, and what he likes to read happens to be what a hell of a lot of other people also like to read, so he ended up making squillions of dollars by just writing honestly. You can fake it and write in a genre that you hate but usually pays the bills, but it won't be honest, and readers pick up on that.

nonsense!

Well... I suppose fantasy has its merits... but nothing else!

[/bias]

nonsense - i'll have you know that none of my 3 novels, or any of my poetry belongs to the horror genre. by the by - third novel off to do the rounds of agents v soon - i'll let you all know and you can wish me luck!

I dont like looking at language as being correct or incorrect. I am perfectly willing to learn of a system of writing, but i hate thinking about it as perfect english. I see them as guidelines. And when i talk about intended audience i also include what the dominant majority of who you are intending to reach considers the correct methods of reading. I believe that in writing you should be aware of what various groups of people consider the "correct" way to understand a passage. And part of learning to be a good writer is to learn how people read, and what people consider correct, and pleasing to the mind. I believe that people experiance reading differently enough that thinking of english in terms of correct and incorrect is limiting and simple.