Writing: Goals, not Rules

[unspeakablehorror]

A lot of times people talk about writing in terms of whether there are or aren't rules, but I really think this is the wrong way to start thinking about how to approach writing.  Instead, writing should be looked at first in terms of the goals it is intended to accomplish.  Once you've evaluated those, you can look at whether this or that method or technique is worth pursuing and whether this or that rule applies.  A rigid set of rules cannot possibly apply to all types of writing, because different pieces of writing can have vastly different goals, and different goals can require vastly different actions to satisfy them.  There's no point in following a path that does not take you where you want to go.  Different destinations require different paths, and different goals require different rulesets.

When we're writing, we should therefore ask ourselves the following three questions about our goals:
1. What am I trying to communicate?
2. What do I want to accomplish with this work?
3. Who is the intended audience of this work?

Only then can we properly decide what rules do and do not apply to what we have set out to write.