About This Website
CAVEATS
You might think, maybe, that having a period after every word in a sentence is cutting edge. It's not. It's old. If it's cutting edge in your genre, fine. If it's new to you, great. But it's not cutting edge. You can read my book on Modern Grammar and Punctuation.
So this is about things that seem new to me. Are they really new? How would I know? But they seem new. So there you have it. And if my sources aren't the first to use these? Well, I'm not claiming they are. But they seem like one of the first to me. If you want to disagree, fine, email me. Or, for that matter, email me with anything you think is new.
VALUE
I want a historical record. For you, the value is that any of these might be useful in your writing.
Or maybe it's just interesting. Note that dictionaries do this -- find new words and add them to their dictionary. And they explain the meaning, which explains how the new word is to be used. I am just doing the same thing for grammar.
Or I want to build traffic. This seems to be a new idea. March 19, 2017.
TYPES OF NEW
We think of language as arising out of convention. So, something new would be some conventional agreement. That's pretty much impossible, and I only mention it because a few new things actually fall into this category.
Second is the rule-breaking. To be useful, it has to follow what I call SePG. My guess is that this is played out. But who knows?
The third category is taking things that are familiar and using them to build new tools.
NEW MEANINGS
To me, a word can be "new" just because it has a new meaning. Same for grammatical constructs.
GENRE
Cutting edge can be found in any genre. However, Young Adult has better toleration of new things and probably even encourages it. But any construction -- new or old -- has to work. So Y/A is the ideal ground for cutting edge. Or that's my impression.
Online is also another great place for cutting edge.
In theory, Adult Literary should be cutting edge. They encourage things to be different. But I don't see the pressure to make them work; and that pressure is what forges truly new things (as opposed to random variation). Anyway, as you might guess, I am no fan of Adult Literary.
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