In some languages--like German and Chinese and Russian--writing help is fairly straightforward. Such languages offer plenty of rules, consistent syntax, overall logic, and relatively few exceptions. The same can be said for French and Japanese. English, on the other hand, has minimal logic, only a few rules, scads of exceptions, and even more opinion.

Writing Help in the Sand

What this means is that most writing help and advice you see is more definitive than it has any right to be. Instructors--or editors arguing with authors--mistake usage for rules. Former English teachers turned social scientists or lawyers are the worst of the lot. Language gets reduced to subsection E, paragraph 21 slash 8.2 and that's an end to it. There's a right and a wrong, they say. You must use semicolons here, parentheses there, capitalize this word, hyphenate that one, and italicize all foreign words.

You mustn't do anything of the sort. All you must do is begin sentences with a capital letter, end them with a punctuation mark, include a subject and verb (which needn't be explicit), make sure those two "agree" (person to person, singular to singular, plural to plural), and spell correctly. There are, admittedly, a few more fine points in the rule category. Beyond that, however, it's all usage and style.

What the best writing help does, then, is drill you mercilessly on subject and verb agreement, which English makes as complicated as possible. It then raps your knuckles with a ruler on spelling, which the autocratic nun who taught me in fifth-grade used to do. Your eyes will then glaze over at the gymnastics of 10 punctuation marks and how they slip so easily into places they do not belong. Good help should also introduce in broad strokes when one usage (style) tends to be more appropriate than another. And that is the key to effective writing.