August 31, 2020

How to Write Book and Movie Titles

Do book and movie titles go in quotation marks or italics? Neither way is wrong. It’s just a matter of style. AP style, which is followed by a lot of news media, uses quotation marks. 

The actors in “Star Wars” went on to have varying degrees of success.

Johnny read “War and Peace” in school.

Magazine titles they just capitalize, skipping the quote marks.

Jane writes for the Time and Newsweek.

Book publishers, who mostly follow the Chicago Manual of Style, skip the quotation marks and just italicize those titles instead.

We read The Road.

Book publishers also italicize magazine titles, but put article titles and chapter titles in quotation marks.

If you don't need to conform to either style,  you could just pick one way, saying using quotation marks, and stick with it. Either way, there’s no need to worry you're doing it wrong.

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August 24, 2020

Some comma mistakes are real killers

Comma mistakes happen all the time, but serious comma mistakes — errors that change your meaning or mislead your reader — are rare.

It seems like every day I see a comma placed after a quotation mark, as when someone writes about a specific “word,” but writes it “word”, which is wrong according to American punctuation rules.

Another mistake I see a lot is unneeded commas between adjectives. A gaudy Hawaiian shirt should have no comma because you only put commas between adjectives when the word “and” would make sense there. It’s not a gaudy and Hawaiian shirt. It’s a Hawaiian shirt that is gaudy. People who don’t know that write gaudy, Hawaiian shirt and I even see gaudy, Hawaiian, shirt, with a comma before the noun. (Tip: If you can’t swap the order of the adjectives, don’t put commas between them. It’s not a Hawaiian gaudy shirt, so no commas in gaudy Hawaiian shirt.)

These mistakes are harmless. No one is going to misunderstand what you’re saying about the shirt or the word “word.”

But other comma flubs are bad. None more so than leaving out the comma before someone’s name when speaking to them directly: Let’s eat Grandma. Add a comma and you have a warm invitation to break bread with a loved one. Without a comma, you’re Hannibal Lecter.

Here are some more examples of comma errors that can change your meaning.

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August 17, 2020

Yes, you can end a sentence with a preposition

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of “most common grammar mistakes” lists on the internet. And, over the years, I’ve learned they’re almost always wrong. That is, in every published list of the grammar mistakes you’re supposedly making, there’s usually one or two that aren’t mistakes at all. It’s the author who’s mistaken.

But that experience didn’t prepare me for a post I came across recently on yourdictionary.com titled “18 Most Common Grammar Mistakes.” Though this list contained more than one bit of misguided advice, No. 9 stopped me in my tracks.

“Nine. Another common grammar mistake is ending a sentence with a preposition,” the author wrote. “A preposition, by its nature, indicates that another word will follow it. In casual conversation, this type of error is no big deal, but you should avoid this mistake in your writing.

For example: Incorrect: ‘What reason did he come here for?’ Correct: For what reason did he come here?’”

This just isn’t true. Never has been. It’s a superstition — one that’s been debunked over and over by every credible authority under the sun. In fact, this fake rule has been exposed so many times in recent years that I figured it was fading into memory. But nope. It persists. Here's my recent column explaining the underlying grammar concepts and why this supposed rule is wrong.

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August 10, 2020

Why you should resist the urge to uppercase titles, products and more

If you’re writing about the president of a company, do you write his title with a capital P? What if he’s the president and founder?

What if he’s the chief executive officer, which everyone knows stands for CEO and not ceo? Do you capitalize the name of a local restaurant’s signature chili-spice fried chicken or their beef Wellington? And what’s up (literally) with bloody marys?

In a written work, too many capital letters can be the hallmark of an amateur — or a sales pitch. Companies like to treat their products, properties and people as if they’re all proper names even when they’re not. Timid writers seek to oblige, uppercasing words out fear of dishonoring someone’s title or trademark.

But if you want your writing to look more like professionally edited work, you should do the opposite. Newswriting shuns the idea that news articles should be deferential to business. If a nationwide restaurant chain wants everyone to refer to their spicy shrimp tacos as Spicy Shrimp Tacos, too bad.

If the same three words in a generic sense can describe the tacos, that’s how news most news publications lean. Obviously, that doesn’t work with a dish like Hula Pie because hula pie in the generic sense doesn’t mean anything. So the only times you’ll see a traditional news outlet treat a product as a proper name is when the name can’t be interpreted as generic description.

But those aren't the only cases when you should resist the urge to capitalize. Here's my recent column outlining even more.

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August 3, 2020

Can you evacuate a person?

In a long-ago episode of "The Wire," a reporter had written in an article that people were “evacuated” from a burning building. Wrong, her editors tell her. You don’t “evacuate” a person from a building. To evacuate a person, she's told, means “to give them an enema.”

The reporter picks up a copy of Webster’s New World College Dictionary — the Associated Press Stylebook’s designated dictionary and therefore the very one that newsroom would use — and affirming that, yes, the editors were right. “Evacuate” cannot be used to describe removing people from a building.

I wasn’t buying it. The fact that the show knew which dictionary to use had impressed me so much that I almost believed they were telling viewers the truth about its contents. But not quite.

So I picked up my own copy of Webster’s New World.

The first two definitions show that to “evacuate” a person can indeed mean to give him an enema. They are: 1. to make empty; remove the contents of; specif., to remove air from so as to make a vacuum; and 2. to discharge (bodily waste, esp. feces).

But the third definition was different:

3. to remove (inhabitants, etc.) from (a place or area), as for protective purposes

That means that you can evacuate a person by removing him or her from a place. And it contains another lesson, too. Never get your facts from people whose primary job is to entertain.

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July 27, 2020

5 ways good sentences go bad — and how to fix them

Have you ever read a sentence that just didn’t work but you couldn’t put your finger on what was wrong? Have you ever written one?

Reader-unfriendly sentences are everywhere. Many you can fix just by making sure the main clause contains a tangible subject and an action-oriented verb, like changing “It was the act of shooting the bandit that got the deputy a promotion to sheriff” to “The deputy shot the bandit. The mayor promoted him to sheriff.”

Other bad sentences are more complicated. Dangling participles, misplaced prepositional phrases, passive voice, nominalizations and vague words are common culprits. Here's my recent column on how to spot them and how to fix them.

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July 20, 2020

Bad Advice

Don’t split an infinitive. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Don’t begin a sentence with “and.” Don’t use passive voice.

If these rigid proscriptions have been rattling around your head since your school days, veteran Baltimore Sun copy editor and Loyola University Maryland editing instructor John McIntyre would like a word. Well, two words, actually: “Bad Advice.”

That’s the title of McIntyre’s new book, whose subtitle tells you everything else you need to know about what’s inside: “The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing.”

It’s a tiny tome. Just 51 pages. But it contains pretty much everything you ever wanted to un-know about grammar but didn’t know you needed to un-know it.

McIntyre explains: “Many of the things you are getting wrong in writing are not your fault: you have been badly advised. You have been taught superstitions about English that have no foundation in the language. You have been hobbled with oversimplifications. You have been subjected to bizarre diktats from supposed authorities.”

From there, McIntyre handily obliterates practically every piece of bad advice you ever got, starting with “one of the oldest zombie rules”: Never end a sentence with a preposition. Here's my recent column rounding up some of the book's best tips.

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July 13, 2020

The best reason to avoid 'whom'? The word 'whomever'

If you’re looking for a reason to avoid using “whom,” the best one I know is illustrated in sentences like this, which appeared on an ESPN blog: “The game will be determined by whomever can pass better.”

That was penned by a professional wordsmith who recognized that the sentence structure called for an object. That’s why he used “whomever,” which is an object pronoun, instead of “whoever,” which is a subject pronoun. But it was the wrong call.

I see this error a lot. It’s one of those rare mistakes that may actually be more common among professional writers than among amateurs. I suppose that’s because professional writers feel more obligated to use “whom” and “whomever,” whereas amateurs don’t feel the need to sound so formal.

“Whom” and “whomever,” experts say, are for formal speech and writing. In informal speech and writing, you can just always use “who” and “whoever” and not worry whether they should have had Ms in them.

And professional writers seem to get the basic concept: who and whoever are subjects, whom and whomever are objects.

An object is either the object of a transitive verb, like “cake” in “We ate cake,” or the object of a preposition, like “Pete” in “The book was written by Pete.”

Our ESPN writer knew that “by” is a preposition. So whatever followed “The game will be determined by” was an object. But, in this case, the object is not a single pronoun like “whomever.” It’s a whole clause like, “whoever can pass better.”

Clauses need subjects, and subjects must be in subject form. Compare “he can pass better” to “him can pass better.” The first one, which uses a subject pronoun, is clearly right while the second, which uses an object pronoun, is clearly wrong.

But here's the clincher: A subject needs a clause even if that whole clause is itself functioning as an object. So the subject form, “whoever,” is needed to make the true object, the clause, make sense: The game will be determined by whoever can pass better.

When in doubt just remember that whenever a word seems to be filling the job of both an object and a subject, the subject form wins. Or try plugging in "he" and "him." If the subject pronoun -- "he can pass better" -- works and the object pronoun "him" -- "him can pass better -- doesn't, then you know you want the subject "whoever."

Sadly, a lot of people who know the basic difference between who and whom don’t know how to handle this specific dilemma. The “whoever” vs. “whomever” issue gives them away. That’s why, if you don’t know how to use all these pronouns in all these situations, you may be safer ignoring “whom” and “whomever” altogether.

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July 6, 2020

The incredibly treacherous single quotation mark

Single quotation marks are hard. Lately, it seems they’re practically impossible. More and more I see professional editors and professionally published writing use them wrong.

To get an idea of how these little marks are confounding even professional users of punctuation, look at the following two sentences.

“Jessie just looked at me and said, ‘Goodbye,'” Ben said.

“That house is the Smiths’,” Stephanie said.

Note the punctuation at the end of each quotation. Care to guess which is correct? Is it the example where both punctuation marks come after the comma? Or is it the example in which the comma sits between the two other punctuation marks?

Answer: It was a trick question. Both are punctuated correctly. My recent column explains why.

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June 29, 2020

Sometimes apostrophes are hard

Admit it. You’ve been stumped by apostrophes before. There’s no shame in it — even for word-savvy types who know all too well the difference between “lets” and “let’s” and who can spot a misplaced apostrophe in “Welcome to the Smith’s house” from a mile away.

Apostrophes are used in many situations — too many, really — ranging from the super-easy “the dog’s tail” to the super-arcane “attorneys general’s.”

In my recent column, I looked at at the far end of the difficulty spectrum: The apostrophe uses that can stump even the very best of punctuators. Here are some of the toughest situations for knowing when to pull out an apostrophe.

Do’s and don’ts
Attorneys general’s
Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Presidents Day, Veterans Day
Single quotation mark instead of apostrophe in ’80s
Goodness’ sake, conscience’ sake, appearance’ sake
Kids’ and children’s
A’s and Bs and c’s and d’s

All those are correct. Here’s why.

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