To Be Understood

The purpose of writing is to convey the thoughts and feelings of the author to the reader. Careful rules and procedures in writing have been determined through years of experience to help authors avoid ambiguity. Many writers see grammar as a burden, a set of rules to be painstakingly checked over and over until a piece complies perfectly. This is not so. As a fence helps to protect a child from wandering into the road, grammar shields a writer from wandering words. Without the rules, writing becomes nothing more than words on a page. Imagine a book with no punctuation, capitalization, or formatting; it would be almost unreadable. While this is an extreme example, it demonstrates the importance of rules in helping the reader to understand the text.  While these rules do not guarantee the reader will come to comprehend the author's thoughts and feelings, it provides a common framework for the writer and reader to understand one another.