on Fiction University:

Some rules are absolutely made to be broken.

There are tons of rules in writing. Some we need to follow to be understood, others are more like guidelines, and some have gotten lost in translation, and no longer mean what we think they mean. Some are even stated as if they were absolutes, such as, “You should never use adverbs.”

It’s a lot to remember. However, once you know the rules, you can break the rules.

The trick is knowing which ones to ignore.

I know how to spell, but that doesn’t give me the freedom to misspell everything in my manuscript because I think it’ll look cool. If you read my work you wouldn’t think, “Wow, she’s being really creative with the spelling. She must know what she’s doing.” You’d think, “Wow, she didn’t even bother to proof this.” Or worse, “She has no clue what she’s doing.”

And that’s the danger with breaking rules just because you can. Unless it’s very clear why you’re doing it, the reader is going to assume you made a mistake or don’t know any better.

For example, knowing the rules so you can break them means that if you know how to write a sentence and you understand what a sentence fragment is, then you can write something that uses a sentence fragment in a way that gives it dramatic punch and improves the overall story. It won’t just be a weird choppy fragment in the middle of a sentence.