Don’t Mind the Syntax, Love: Why Broken English Makes Better Books

Standard English has had a good run. It gave us the novel, the train timetable and the passive-aggressive office email. But somewhere between the creative writing workshop and the copy-editing software, the well-made sentence has become a gated community: tidy, guarded, and suspicious of anyone who arrives with a dropped ‘h’ and a verb that refuses to behave.

This is not a call to burn the dictionaries. It is a call to notice what gets flattened when every narrator sounds like a broadsheet book review. The irregular verb is not a wart on the face of prose. It is a muscle. In British fiction, especially fiction that bothers to sound like it comes from a place, wonky grammar is often the engine of voice – and voice is what makes a book more than a sequence of correct sentences.

The Grammar Police Are Missing the Point

Let’s start with the obvious: non-standard grammar is not failed Standard English. It is grammar with a different job. In parts of Northern England, ‘I were’ and ‘we was’ are not random errors; they are part of a system that speakers navigate with the same unconscious precision as any BBC newsreader. Scots has ‘cannae’, ‘ken’ and ‘no’ doing work that Standard English needs whole clauses to manage. Welsh English has tag questions and sentence rhythms that can turn a statement into a shared joke or a gentle challenge. None of this is noise. It is syntax with a postcode.

The literary archaeologist in me likes to think of it as strata. Standard English is the topsoil: useful, portable, a bit thin. Beneath it are older layers – dialect words, Celtic sentence patterns, Norse consonants, Caribbean intonation, South Asian code-switching – all pressing up through the pavement. The best fiction does not pave over them. It digs.

A Dig Through the Dialect Strata

James Kelman’s How late it was, how late (1994) is the obvious exhibit, but it is obvious for a reason. Kelman does not sprinkle Scots spelling over a Standard English sentence like Hundreds and Thousands on buttered white bread. He lets the grammar carry the consciousness. The reader has to work, and that work is the point: you are not observing a Glaswegian from a safe distance; you are inside a mind that thinks in its own rhythms.

Agnes Owens does something similar with less fuss and more menace. Rachel Trezise’s Welsh valleys voices, Niall Griffiths’s west Wales narrators, Dylan Thomas’s radio play cadences – these are not ‘colour’. They are structures of feeling. In Northern English writing, from Alan Sillitoe to Barry Hines, the dropped subject and the blunt verb can make a sentence sound like a door closing. The grammar is doing characterisation, class and geography all at once. That is not a decorative flourish. That is engineering.

The trap is what I call stage dialect: a few apostrophes, a ‘tha’, a ‘bairn’, and suddenly everyone is a comedy farmer. Real dialect grammar is subtler. It is not about spelling ‘going’ as ‘goin’’. It is about which pronoun gets dropped, which tense gets used, where the negative lands, how a question is shaped. You can write a whole page of broad Yorkshire syntax with standard spelling and it will still sound like it comes from the right kitchen.

The Tyranny of the Well-Made Sentence

Contemporary publishing has a house style, and the house style is afraid of the wrong kind of sentence. It likes prose that is smooth, legible, and faintly apologetic. It likes characters who think in complete paragraphs. It likes dialogue that is technically realistic but grammatically house-trained. The result is a lot of fiction that reads as if it has been through airport security: nothing dangerous, nothing leaking, nothing likely to start an argument.

I am not saying every novel should be Finnegans Wake with a Yorkshire accent. Readability is not the enemy. The enemy is homogeneity – the assumption that the only good sentence is the one that could be posted on a corporate website without causing offence. A novel can be clear and still have grit in it. A narrator can be unreliable without being ungrammatical. But if every voice is smoothed to the same grain, the novel loses one of its great powers: the ability to make the reader feel language as a place, not just a medium.

Prompts for Getting Irregular on Purpose

If you want to write your way out of the well-made sentence, start with constraints. Constraints are kinder than inspiration.

1. Ban the verb ‘to be’ for one page. No ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘was’, ‘were’. Watch what your sentences do instead. They will start to move.
2. Transcribe overheard speech without correcting it. Sit in a café or on a bus and write down five sentences exactly as you hear them. Then write a paragraph of narration using that grammar. Do not add apostrophes for decoration.
3. Translate one standard sentence into three regional grammars. Take ‘I was going to tell him, but he had already left.’ Rewrite it as if spoken by a Scots speaker, a Northern English speaker and a Welsh English speaker. You are not looking for parody. You are looking for rhythm.
4. Drop the subject. English loves a pronoun. Cut it. See how much more urgent the sentence becomes.
5. Write a paragraph in which the narrator disagrees with their own subject-verb agreement. Let the grammar wobble when the character wobbles. This is not sloppiness; it is characterisation by syntax.
6. Use a double negative and mean it. Not for a joke. For emphasis, for intimacy, for the way a real voice insists.

A Small Manifesto, With Biscuits

None of this is about pretending that Standard English is wicked. It is about refusing to let it be the only room in the house. The irregular verb is your friend. The dropped subject is your friend. The sentence that ends where you did not expect it to end is your friend. They are all sitting in the pub garden, waiting for you to stop proofreading and start listening.

So next time a workshop tells you to ‘clarify the syntax’, ask whose syntax they mean. There is a difference between a sentence that is confused and a sentence that is alive. British fiction has a long, noisy, argumentative history of choosing the latter. Long may it continue to sound like it comes from somewhere – and long may its verbs refuse to behave.