May 24, 2021

5 times when trying too hard makes your grammar worse instead of better

Do you try to use good grammar? That’s great. Chances are your efforts pay off and you’re a better communicator as a result.

But if you try too hard, your efforts can backfire. Grammar rules are based on common usage — the way people speak naturally. So it’s a paradox of language that the more you overthink your grammar and word choices, the more likely you are to goof up.

For example "I feel badly." You can say it this way if you want to. “I feel badly” is idiomatic — meaning it’s acceptable simply because it’s so common. But if you’re choosing “badly” over “bad” because you think it’s more grammatical, you’re missing an important fact about adverbs. We’re taught in school that adverbs modify verbs. You skip happily down the street. But there’s a special kind of verb that takes an adjective instead of an adverb as its complement. They’re called “copular verbs” or “linking verbs,” and the most important member of this group is “be.” For example, “Joe is happy” uses a form of “be” — “is” — and is followed by the adjective “happy.” Try the alternative, “Joe is happily,” and you can see that some verbs say less about an action and more about the subject. “Feel” isn’t always copular. But in the sentence “I feel bad,” it is. That’s why it gets the adjective “bad” instead of the adverb “badly.”

Here in my recent column are four more times when trying too hard makes your grammar worse instead of better.

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May 17, 2021

Should you put a comma before 'too,' 'either,' or 'also'?

I don’t remember much from school (who does?) but I do remember quite clearly being told that “too,” “either,” and “also” are set off with commas in uses like:

Greg saw it, too.

I’d like some, also.

Tina didn’t come, either.

The idea is that when one of these adverbs modifies a whole sentence, and especially when it comes at the end of a sentence, it should be set off with commas. That’s what I was told and that’s what I believed.

But lately, more and more professionally written and edited material seems to eschew these commas.

Greg saw it too.

I’d like some also.

Tina didn’t come either.

When they come mid-sentence, the commas don’t seem quite as expendable. Changing “I, too, saw the accident” to “I too saw the accident” creates a weird and perhaps momentarily confusing relationship between the adverb and the verb that follows. But these commas don’t seem quite as common as they once were, either.

Turns out that, as austere comma use continues to be the fashion, commas setting off “too” and similar adverbs are less important.

How do you know whether to use them? Well, many experts point out that the comma before a “too” or “either” can give it extra emphasis, setting it off from the pack and letting it stand alone. By skipping the comma, you deemphasize the “too” by integrating it into the sentence.

If you’re looking for a guideline, use the comma when you want the extra emphasis. Otherwise, skip it. Me, I find that old habits die hard. I’ll continue to use commas before “too,” “also,” and “either” whenever possible.

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May 10, 2021

5 punctuation problems even experts can't agree on

A few years back I set out to write a comprehensive punctuation book — one that laid out the rules for proper punctuation in every situation imaginable.

How naïve I was.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time digging through reference books to know that in some situations, there are no rules. For example, do you put a comma in “What it is is a new house”? Where do you put the apostrophe and S in “Casablanca’s” best scene? How many hyphens do you put in “30-day-dry-aged beef”? Would you hyphenate “You can donate tax-free”?

The Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style lay out lots of basic punctuation rules. But in certain gray areas, they’re useless. Lots of academic books and professional style guides have basic rules, but they’re no help in tough punctuation situations.

I had an idea: Why not survey a few working editors to ask what they would do? That way, for situations with no clear rules, readers of “The Best Punctuation Book Period” could benefit from experts’ own best guesses.

The editors who took my punctuation survey disagreed on how to handle some tricky situations. Here's my recent column looking at five punctuation problems my experts couldn’t agree on.

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May 3, 2021

The airing of peeves ...

Most people have language peeves. Editors’ peeves are different. After years spent laser-focused on writers’ mistakes, we can become hypersensitive to grammar mistakes, word choice errors and reader-unfriendly language that most English speakers may not notice at all.

For example:

“Among others” with no antecedent for “others.” Consider the sentence: “This includes meals, room charges, upgrades and resort fees, among others.” Among other whats? “Other,” in this case is acting as a pronoun. A pronoun refers to a noun that came before it — its antecedent: Joe knew he was in trouble. The pronoun “he” is shorthand for the noun “Joe.” If our example sentence had kicked off with “This includes costs like meals, room charges …” then the noun “costs” would be the antecedent for the pronoun “others.” But in our original sentence, “others” doesn’t have an antecedent.

Here, in my recent column, are some more of the peeves on this editor’s mind lately.

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April 26, 2021

A semicolon is not a colon

Here's a mistake I've seen several times lately; using a semicolon instead of a colon in a sentence like this.

Colons can introduce information, sort of like a drumroll.

I saw what you were doing: nothing at all.

Semicolons separate complete clauses — units that could stand alone as sentences.

Joe has many fine qualities; courage isn't one of them.

You could just as easily break those two clauses into separate sentences.

Joe has many fine qualities. Courage isn't one of them. (In fact, I'd recommend this method.)

In the first sentence of this blog post, the semicolon doesn't separate complete clauses. Using a semicolon instead of a colon in a sentence like this can't stand alone as a complete sentence because there's not verb for the subject using.

Semicolons and colons have other jobs. For example, semicolons can be used as separators for items that already have commas, like We drove through Bakersfield, California; Eugene, Oregon; and Spokane, Washington. But in most cases, semicolons indicate a sentence is longer and more cumbersome than it needs to be. If you can avoid using them, do.

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April 19, 2021

Of 'of'

For a tiny word, “of” causes a lot of trouble. It pops up where it doesn’t belong in sentences like “I should of known.” It baffles even word-savvy users in expressions like “too big of a deal.” And it has an uncanny power to promote wordy, inefficient prose.

If you grew up speaking English, you never really had to learn “of.” Unlike “photosynthesis” or “gerrymander” or “noun” or any other word that teachers actively teach, “of” is so fundamental to the language that we can use it intuitively almost as soon as we start stringing sentences together.

A lot of English speakers probably don’t know that “of” is a preposition. Most of us couldn’t give a good definition for it. And most of us, if we ever looked it up in a dictionary, would struggle to understand what we were reading. For example, here’s the first definition of “of” in Merriam-Webster’s: “used as a function word to indicate a point of reckoning: ‘north of the lake.’” Here’s definition two: “used as a function word to indicate origin or derivation: ‘a man of noble birth.’”

When you think about how poorly we understand “of,” it’s amazing we can use it at all. No wonder we stumble sometimes. Here's my recent column about these common errors.

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April 12, 2021

Prescriptivist grammar rules that are dying out

About a decade ago, I read a blog written by a linguistics student who proclaimed, “Prescriptivism must die!!!”

He was talking about the school of thought that believes that textbooks and other language authorities should lay down rules about how to use certain words and grammatical structures. This school of thought, which ruled the day in the 1950s and ’60s, says we need a Big Book of Grammar No-Nos and that everyone who doesn’t follow those rules is wrong.

The alternative to prescriptivism is descriptivism, which points out that language rules aren’t static and can’t be forced. What was wrong a century or two ago is right today. For example, the word “girl” used to mean a child of either sex. So it would have been wrong to insist “girl” referred specifically to a female child. Our language is always in flux, with every word in transition between incorrect and correct. So it doesn’t make sense to insist that “cool” is a temperature and not a state of Fonziness.

Some say this is linguistic anarchy. Not true. Descriptivism recognizes that language has rules. They’re just more liquid than prescriptivists would like. And those rules are made by everyone who speaks the language, not a few tweedy academics trying to boss everyone else around.

But it seems to me that prescriptivism is already dying. Here, in my recent column, are some prescriptivist rules I used to hear a lot and don't hear anymore.

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April 5, 2021

Shined or shone? 4 tricky past tenses

No matter how long you’ve been speaking English, no matter how hard you’ve worked to perfect your grammar, some past tense verbs can stump you.

For example, the day after you decide to grin and bear it, would you say “I grinned and bore it?” Beared? Born?

That shiny car you saw yesterday, would you say it shined as it drove by? Or it shone?

Would you say you weaved baskets or that you wove them?

The questions are frightening, but luckily the answers aren’t far out of reach. Dictionaries list past-tense and past participle forms for every irregular verb. So you can always look them up — if you know how.

Here's my recent column that looks at four verbs with tricky past tenses: shine, weave, bear and bare.

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March 29, 2021

7 tips to take on bad writing

There are a million ways to write badly, from corny dialogue to illogical juxtapositions of facts. But at the sentence level, some problems crop up again and again. And a lot of them are easy to fix, or at least improve.

Here are seven tips for fixing some of the most common writing problems I encounter.

1. Make sure the main clause of your sentence contains the information you most want to highlight. Compare these two passages. “After shooting his business partner in the face, John felt tired.” “John shot his business partner in the face. He collapsed, exhausted.” Your main clause is the marquee position in any sentence. Readers automatically know this is the main point. A subordinating conjunction like “after” suggests the stuff that follows is not the main point. So give your best information the billing it deserves by making it your main clause.

2. Break up long sentences. Compare: “I fired him even though I didn’t want to because he gave me no choice.” “I fired him. I didn’t want to. He gave me no choice.” Shorter sentences pack a punch. Longer sentences use connectives like “because,” which create a hierarchy among the ideas, subordinating some information in a way similar to what we saw in our first tip.

Five more, which are explored in full here in my recent column, are:

3. Choose the most specific and tangible nouns and verbs.

4. Delete adverbs that don’t add information.

5. Fix unclear antecedents.

6. Dispense with state-of-mind verbs.

7. Ditch connective words and phrases.

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March 22, 2021

A test to decide whether to delete adverbs and adjectives

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“When you catch an adjective, kill it.”

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.”

These three bits of writing advice, from experts Stephen King, Ben Yagoda and the team of Strunk and White, aren’t just their authors’. They’re pervasive in writing and teaching circles.

The idea behind them is that “A totally scary and extremely mean-looking person hurriedly moved toward me” is a poor substitute for “Freddy Krueger lunged at me.”  Some people rely too much on adjectives and adverbs to convince readers of whatever point they’re trying to make. But it’s usually better to give readers solid, efficient, information-packed nouns and verbs and let them draw their own conclusions.

A lot of writing experts take issue with this advice. Just telling students and writers to avoid adjectives and adverbs is stupid, and often hypocritical, these folks say. As an example, linguist Geoffrey Pullum points out the Strunk and White dictate: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place,” and Pullum notes that Strunk and White themselves needed three adjectives to say it: weak, inaccurate, and tight.

So what’s a writer to do?

Well, in my editing work, I scrutinize a lot of adjectives and hack out a lot of adverbs. In the process, I’ve noticed something that could help struggling writers: The adjectives and manner adverbs that are worth keeping are often the ones that add new information. The ones that should go are usually the ones that contain value judgments. They tell readers how to feel about something rather than giving them the facts and letting them decide for themselves.

Compare:

a totally awesome and cool car

and

a sleek, high-performance sportscar

“Sleek” and “high-performance” are a lot more substantive than “totally awesome” and "cool." They contain at least some solid information. That’s why the second sentence is much more like one you’d find in a professionally written and edited article.

Some adjectives are even more information-packed: A red Italian sportscar.

Manner adverbs like uniquely, exquisitely, totally, and my personal least-favorite truly often do more harm then good. However, manner adverbs like slowly, quickly, eventually, drily, solemnly, and rarely usually contain information above and beyond what the verbs and nouns can offer. When they do, they're justifying their own existence.

“Dave quickly moved toward the door” tells us more than just “Dave moved toward the door.” But “Frank angrily punched his boss in the back of the head” doesn’t measure up as well against “Frank punched his boss in the back of the head.”

So when you’re wondering whether your adjectives and especially your adverbs measure up, ask yourself whether they contain any solid new information. If the answer’s no, it may be time for them to go.

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