Breaking the rules

In 2019, author Lucy Ellmann published her novel Ducks, Newburyport, a stream-of-consciousness meditation on life in an age of distraction and uncertainty. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the book is notable for its style as much as for the story it tells. Ducks, Newburyport is comprised (almost entirely) of a single sentence – specifically, a series of clauses that begin with the phrase the fact that. Here’s an extract from its opening pages:

The fact that the raccoons are now banging an empty yoghurt carton around on the driveway, the fact that in the early morning stillness it sounds like gunshots, the fact that, even in fog, with ice on the road and snow banks blocking their vision, people are already zooming around our corner, the site of many a minor accident, the fact that a guy in a pickup once accidentally skidded into our garage, and next time it could be our house, or a child, Wake Up Picture Day, dicamba, Kleenex, the fact that a pickup truck killed Dilly, the fact that she’d successfully dodged cars for three whole years, the fact that she knew all about cars, but during that time the traffic grew, the fact that it’s crazee now, the fact that after she got killed the kids painted a big warning sign with a big black cat on it and stuck it right by the fence, but nobody notices it, the fact that they’re all going too fast to see it…

Running for over 1,000 pages, the book breaks all the rules. There are no full-stops, no paragraph breaks, no independent clauses. But it works, no matter what Strunk and White might say (‘The fact that…should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs’). The novel paints a portrait of a woman whose thoughts – about parenthood, about popular culture, about cancer, about police brutality, about social media, about ailing parents, about environmental catastrophe – threaten to overwhelm her, just as the novel’s length threatens to overwhelm the reader.

Notice what Ellmann does in the passage (and in the rest of the book). The repeated phrase the fact that brings a degree of stability, of structure, to an otherwise fragmentary text. The effect is hypnotic, but also clarifying. We wouldn’t know where one thought ends and another begins if it wasn’t for this odd little turn-of-phrase, the fact that. It reminds us that life itself is nothing other than a lumber yard of facts, some weightier than others, all piled up on top of each other, and we just have to make sense of it – to assemble it into some kind of jerry-built meaning – as best we can.

All this is to say that it’s ok to break the rules if you have a good reason for doing so.

Academic writing has its own rule-breakers. Take organization theorist Gibson Burrell. In his classic book Pandemonium, Burrell offers an ‘escape from normal conventions of textual presentation’ (1997: 1), conventions that limit how we think and what we say in Western social science. Part research monograph, part autobiography, part travel guide, and part gothic novel, Pandemonium is a reminder that writing rules exist only to be bent out of shape – perhaps until they snap.

Burrell experiments with his prose to dizzying effect. Eschewing a table of contents, the book opens with an illustrated map of Pandemonium, the capital city of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. There’s an emergency exit for the faint of heart. There’s a scratch-and-sniff card to activate the reader’s senses. There’s a municipal library, an airport lounge, and a hall of mirrors. Most audaciously, each page of the book is divided into two halves, an upper half and a lower half, separated by a ‘central reservation’. In the top half of the page, the text flows forwards until the last page of the book; here there is a ‘turnstile’, which redirects the text backwards along the bottom half of the page until the end of the book on page 1. More than twenty-five years after its publication, Pandemonium continues to delight and confound – not least because of its refusal to abide by the accepted rules of writing.

There are plenty of other rule-breakers in organization studies. Some write journal articles in the form of poetry, art exhibits, and Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries. Others adopt more genre-bending writing styles, informed by radical feminism, such as dog-writing, meat-writing, and dream-writing – attempts at writing differently within a buttoned-up disciplinary field. Like Burrell, such authors explore the outer perimeter of academic writing. It’s not just a question of style, of course, but also a question of politics. To wit: write the change you want to see.

Rules are there to be broken, so write as Nietzsche philosophizes – with a hammer. Just make sure you know what you’re smashing up, and why.