July 12, 2021

'Try to' vs. 'try and'

“I have been arguing with my husband about the word ‘try’ for years and I think you might be the right person to help me figure it out,” a reader wrote recently. “I was taught that it is unacceptable to say ‘try and’ because it should be ‘try to.’ An example would be as follows: ‘I am going to try to remember to turn off the light’ instead of ‘I am going to try and remember to turn off the light.’

“Can you help me? Is one actually correct or is it just one of those things where both are acceptable and it’s just one of my unfounded, not-backed-up-by-reality peeves?”

As I explained, "try and” is both right and wrong, though I’ll confess I have a strong preference here. “Try and,” though acceptable, defies my sense of logic and order. When I come across it in my editing work, I always change it to “try to.” Here's a closer look in my recent column.

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July 6, 2021

How the LAPD took the bang out of its explosion announcement ...

“Our Bomb Squad officers were in the process of seizing over 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks in the area of 27th Street and San Pedro. Some of the fireworks were being stored in our Bomb Squad trailer as a precautionary measure. Unknown at this time what caused an explosion.”

That was the only tweet from the Los Angeles Police Department’s @LAPDHQ account reporting a June 30 explosion in a residential neighborhood that happened after officers had taken steps to prevent an explosion.

To someone who values transparency and accountability, the LAPD’s announcement is maddening. But to a language geek, it’s also kind of exciting. The tweet illustrates just how powerful syntax can be to shape your message, for good or for ill. Here's my recent column exploring how the LAPD buried the lede and how understanding the grammar of this tweet can help your writing.

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June 28, 2021

When is an apostrophe not an apostrophe?

Of all the nitpicky tasks I perform while copyediting and proofreading, here’s the nitpickiest: You know how you use apostrophes when you write rock ’n’ roll or ’80s or  ’twas? Well, my job includes making sure that those apostrophes are actually apostrophes and not apostrophe imposters.

Type rock ’n’ roll into Microsoft Word, look at the marks around N, and you’ll make a shocking discovery: Your software is out to get you. If your program is set to its defaults, chances are that the mark before the N is not an apostrophe but instead an open single quotation mark. You know, the ones you use for quotations within quotations, as in, “I heard someone yell, ‘Wait!’”

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June 21, 2021

Commonly misspelled words where E is the culprit

E is the most-used letter in the English alphabet. It’s also the most evil. This seemingly innocent vowel comes up in 11% of words in the dictionary, leaving second-place S in its dust at 8.7%. But in my highly unscientific analysis, E comes up in a hugely disproportionate number of spelling errors — like, maybe half of them. And I’m not just talking about typos like “teh” in place of “the.” I’m talking about actual misspellings of words that confound even smart people.

Here are just some of the words that prove the letter E is out to get you: sleight, adrenaline, hoard, breathe, envelop, gray, theater, affect, lightening. And here's my recent column on how to spell them right.

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June 14, 2021

This headline didn't prove the Oxford comma is superior — it proved it's not

The Cult of the Oxford Comma reared its ugly head recently on Twitter when an obscure California attorney tweeted an example of the Oxford comma’s supposed superiority.

The tweet was an image of a Politico headline: “How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer From Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream.” Above the image was the lawyer’s commentary: “And always remember to use the Oxford comma, kids.”

The dog whistle was heard far and wide. About 8,000 Oxford comma fanatics retweeted it and 80,000 liked it. They agreed that, without an Oxford comma after “interrogator,” the headline suggested that Harry Reid was not just a former United States Senator but also a terrorist interrogator and the front man for a rock band.

In the replies, hundreds of cultists took shots at the headline writer.

“I didn’t know Blink’s singer was named Harry Reid,” one replied.

“People who do not use the Oxford comma deserve a hefty fine, a 90 day jail sentence, and a day and night listening to lectures by Alan Greenspan,” another insisted.

Strong words from true believers. There’s just one problem. They’re wrong. An Oxford comma would not improve the Politico headline. Instead, it would make it ambiguous. Here’s my recent column explaining why.

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June 6, 2021

More thoughts on faulty parallel structure

Imagine you’re taking an editing test and you come across the following sentence. “Barbara says Jack also is enrolling in classes in libiral arts, algebra, economics and is considering joining the soccer team.”

What do you do?

You fix the spelling of “liberal,” obviously. Even if your eyes glossed over that, you catch it when you run spell-check. You pause at “says,” perhaps wondering if that informal yet popular way of conveying “said” is appropriate for the context.

You consider other places for the word “also,” perhaps putting it after the verb “is.” You question whether it’s a good idea to have the word “in” appear two times so close together. You decide to leave it as is.

Your first fix is right. As for the “says” and the “also,” you’re right if you change them and right if you leave them. In both cases, either choice is valid. You made a good call with the word “in.” It’s grammatical, even if it is a little awkward.

You take a second look at your sentence and decide you’re happy with your choices. See anything else?

According to someone who recently sent me a test with a similar question, most copy editors miss the other error. See it now? It’s in the last part of the sentence, “is enrolling in classes in libiral arts, algebra, economics and is considering joining the soccer team.”

In case you still don’t see it, here’s one final hint: It could be fixed by inserting the word “and” before “economics.” Here's my column explaining how that works.

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May 31, 2021

Suffixes: How to know whether it's systemwide or system-wide

A lot of people get tripped up on suffixes, unsure whether to hyphenate them or whether it’s okay to slap them right on the ends words, thereby forming conglomerations that send spellchecker into panic mode: words like “neighborhoodwide,” “instrumentborne,” and “dismissable.” 

The alternatives don’t look much better:

neighborhood-wide, instrument-borne, dismiss-able

neighborhood wide, instrument borne, dismiss able

What to do?

Actually, this seeming conundrum is pretty easy to deal with. First, check your dictionary to make sure that a one-word form of your desired word doesn’t already exist. For example, “communitywide” is already listed in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. So that’s a no-brainer. Just use the already-existing word.

If your main word isn’t in there, look up the suffix to find out if it’s really, well, a suffix.

Dictionaries designate suffixes with a little hyphen in front of them. For example, if you look up “wide” in Webster’s New World College Dictionary, you see the first entry is for the plain old adjective (“The street is wide”). But after that, there’s an entry for -wide, the suffix. And, like many dictionaries, this one’s very clear on how to deal with them. “The very full coverage of affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms) makes it possible for a dictionary user to understand and pronounce many words that are not entered in the dictionary. The dictionary user can form these words by combining affixes with words already entered."

In other words, as long as it’s listed in the dictionary as a suffix, you can slap it right on the end of any other word in the dictionary, spellchecker be damned. A lot of suffix entries, including -wide, make these easy instructions even clearer by including the term “combining  forms" right in the dictionary entry, meaning you can combine them to other words at will.

On the other hand, if the word you want to use as a suffix isn’t actually a suffix, for example maker, you can’t attach it directly to another word. But you can follow one of two easy styles. In Chicago style (that is, in book- and magazine-style writing), make it two words: sneaker maker. In AP style (preferred by news media and PR agencies), connect the two nouns with a hyphen: sneaker-maker.

Even if you get that wrong, it’s not too big a deal. Most readers, including editors, know the rules aren’t exactly cut-and-dried. So no one will think it so bad if sneaker maker slips into an article you’re writing or sneaker-maker appears in your book manuscript.

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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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