Right now in my editing group, we are talking about an article that just came out called “8 Words to Seek and Destroy in Your Writing”. One of the words that the author wanted to destroy was the word that. Like many of my colleagues, my response to that article was not good. There is the Chicago Manual of Style, and Words into Type, so yes, rules. But there is the requirement that the words on the page not derail the reader. Sometimes, the omission of that, for instance, makes the reader have to take a second look to get reoriented. Every time you kick the reader out of the narrative, you risk the reader’s putting the book down and walking away.

For example, compare, “He didn’t know George was a secret giraffe” with “He didn’t know that George was a secret giraffe.” The first sentence makes the reader decide whether he didn’t know George, or that he didn’t know George was a secret giraffe. Then the reader gets to the other half of the sentence and learns which it is. All of this takes place in a split second, true, but for that split second, the reader isn’t in the narrative. The more the writer forces the reader out of the narrative, the less receptive the reader becomes, and the less effective the writing becomes.

Good writing doesn’t automatically follow 8 Rules (speaking of which, you’re not supposed to start sentence with a numeral).