I learn while I drink and drink while I learn

I bought a cup.
It’s one of those tall mugs, (caffeine addicts covet), with printing and drawings all over it like the Sunday comics. Largest among the adorable vignettes, the title:
ENGLISH GRAMMAR & PUNCTUATION.

I love it, not only because it’s clever, it’s super appropriate for me and beyond practical.
Have I ever mentioned I flunked English?
Yup, I did.
In high school we had to complete entire notebooks of diagramed sentences. Every day, new ones until I simply zoned out. Actually, that’s about all we did during the second half of sophomore English in Eureka Missouri. It was tedious and boring.

What I remember. The sentence went on the main line and then we had to draw slanted lines away from key words and label what they were, like, verb, adverb, noun, pronoun and all the rest. I got the nouns and verbs right but once you had to add more lines, which made the sentence look like a stick figure broken ladder, I got terribly lost. I always thought, who cares what the words are called, as long as they sound right and get your point across.

We moved a lot, (three high schools), so I had many teachers who loved what I wrote, but when considering analysis, I was a failure. My spelling sucked too but that's another story.

Anyway, now I have my mug. It tells me everything and gives me examples.
Problem and observation: be very careful when reading mug-rules.
Coffee is hot.
 
Do you stick to the rules or write what sounds ‘write’?