If the life you're trying to portray isn't perfect or rigid, why have the characters speak as if that was the rule, not the exception?

Exactly. Which is why in a lot of contemporary fiction, grammar has mutated, for lack of a better word. People do not speak formally at all times in the modern world -- when they do on the page (even if it's not dialogue but narrative voice) it strikes me as off. One writer friend of mine never *ever* has her characters use a contraction in speech, which also drives me batshit. I keep asking her, "Where do these people live?!" But she genuinely doesn't *hear* the difference in what the way she speaks in everyday life and what she writes for her characters. Like Susan said, some folks don't pick it up right away.

Just to be perfectly clear, there's a difference between expecting writers to learn and understand the rules and a rigid insistence that they never be broken. I use sentence fragments all the time, for example, especially in dialogue but frequently in the sort of tight POV that amounts to internal monologue. IMO, it's very easy to tell the difference between rules broken for stylistic effect and rules broken because the writer just doesn't get it.

Heh. Susan, I'm a Fragment Nazi. They drive me batshit; it's a quirk. I'll leap on an overuse of those long before I'll check the proper placement of commas. Nothing breaks a story into molar-destruction faster for me, except a pointless use of profanity.

Amy, I used to work with a very sweet, very repressed, very well educated German bloke named Elmar. This was back in London. All his correspondence was gramatically perfect; it was also unreadable. He never understood why his secretary would cross things out and type it her way, and then just tell him to sign his damned letter and don't argue with her.

Honestly, had she sent it out the way he'd written it, the recipient would have thought he was bonkers, or a time traveller.

Susan, I'm a Fragment Nazi. They drive me batshit

Crap. Most of my drabbles are entire fragments.

hides drabbles from Deb.

Sometimes I just type things the way I think of them. I guess I don't think in conjunctions.

I think in semicolons and italics. It's bad.

hides drabbles from Deb

No, no, not in drabbles - with a 100-word discipline imposed, I'm all about the fragments.

I meant in 96 bazillion word novels. Something like:

I crawled down the stairs. It was night. Dark. Chilly. I crawled. Those damned stairs.

Alas. My hands itch for a red pen, which would then write "Why is this continuing thought split into three different sentences???"

I think in semicolons and italics. It's bad.

So do I; and it is not bad!

I think I'm terrible at all the rules basics of the craft. I know I need to pay more attention to it, but I just don't. Blargh.

And yet somehow, Liese, I always remember what you've written...

Well, thanks, deb. That's nice of you to say.