March 18, 2019

How to Use a Colon: The Basics

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The colon has a couple of different jobs, all of which can be explained in these broad terms: A colon introduces something. Sometimes, the idea is just to tell the reader, “Here you go. Here’s that thing or things I wanted to tell you about.” But to master their use, you need a deeper understanding of the basics plus a few advanced insights. For example, in Associated Press Style, you use a lowercase letter after a colon unless the stuff that follows is a complete sentence. But in Chicago style, you use a lowercase letter after a colon unless the stuff that follows is two or more complete sentences.

Another fine point about colons that a lot of people miss: Don't use one after the word "including" or to introduce objects of a verb. That is, in "Bruce likes apples, oranges and pears," no colon follows the word "likes." And though that's pretty clear in a short sentence like this, longer sentences make this fact harder to keep a grasp on. Here's my recent column covering everything you need to know about colons.

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March 11, 2019

Some Things You Just Gotta Know

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Years ago, I worked for a team of editors who hired someone from another department in the company. It became clear pretty quickly that the newly minted editor was out of his element — not the born wordsmith his colleagues were.

Like those other editors, he would send me, the copy editor, an email to tell me when an article was waiting to be reviewed in a shared computer folder.
But, whereas the others would tell me there was a story waiting for me in the queue, he would report he’d sent me something in the “cue.”

Some things you’ve just got to know. If you’ve heard the expression “eek out a living,” you’re not going to check your dictionary to see if that’s a valid definition of “eek.” Only by having read and noted, either consciously or subconsciously, that the correct term is “eke out a living,” would you understand that “eek” is an error.

My recent column looks at some other things that, as I’ve learned in my editing career, you’ve just got to know: ordnance, till, sleight and why you shouldn’t use a serial comma before an ampersand even if you use a serial comma before “and.”

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March 4, 2019

Happy National Grammar Day!

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Monday, March 4, is National Grammar Day.

The holiday was started 11 years ago by author, super-mom, and all-around cool person Martha Brockenbrough, Founder of Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, Brockenbrough started the holiday 11 years ago as a way to help people focus on grammar learning. Organizations like ACES, the American Copy Editors Society, come up with creative ways to celebrate every year, like these fun punctuation cookies ACES aces showed off last year.

My personal recommendation on how to spend the holiday: Spend a little time thumbing through the front matter of a dictionary — especially the "How to Use This Dictionary" stuff. It helps you unlock mysteries like, for example, whether you can use "graduate" as a transitive verb or whether it needs a preposition "from" to connect it to an object.

Another way to celebrate: Check out Saturday Evening Post copy editor Andy Hollandbeck's post: Celebrate National Grammar Day by Not Being an Insufferable Know-It-All.

 

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February 25, 2019

Do You Know About Nominalizations?

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Here's a terrible sentence:  "The delaying of the closing of the stores until 10 p.m., which was a decision of the CEO, enables the staff to have greater productivity and the company to have greater profitability."

If you wanted to make this better, it helps if you know the term "nominalization."

A nominalization — or buried verb — is a noun rooted in another part of speech, usually a verb or an adjective.

The adjective "happy" has the corresponding noun form "happiness." The verb "delay" has the corresponding noun forms "delay" and "delaying." The verb "change" has the corresponding noun form "change." For example, in "I changed my hairstyle," change is a verb, but in "I made a change to my hairstyle," it's a noun.

So you can see that some nominalizations are formed by adding a suffix like "ness" or "ing." Other times they're identical with their verb forms. What makes them nouns is how they're used in the sentence.

Of course, not every word derived from a verb that ends in "ing" is a nominalization. Again, it depends how it's used in a sentence. In "I am painting my house," the -ing form is functioning as a verb, so it's not a nominalization.

In "I took a painting class," the -ing form is functioning as an adjective. But in "Painting is fun," it's working as a noun: Painting is actually the subject of the true verb "is." So this is a nominalization. In fact, this particular kind of nominalization has its own name. It's called a gerund, which means any "-ing" form of a verb doing the job of a noun.

Nominalizations are serious problems for some writers. If you accept the principle that the best writing uses vivid subjects and lively verbs (as most professional writers and editors do), you can see how nominalizations can hurt your writing. Here's a column on how to best deal with nominalizations.

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February 11, 2019

6 Punctuation Mistakes That Fly Under the Radar

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Punctuation errors are often pretty glaring. A missing period at the end of a sentence, an extra period in the middle of a sentence or a comma placed outside of quotation marks leaps right out at editors and avid readers.

But other punctuation errors aren’t as easy to spot. Here are six that you may not be catching:

Hyphen instead of an em dash

Hyphen instead of an en dash

Parentheses instead of brackets inside a quotation

Ellipses for effect inside a quotation

A question mark with “Guess what”

No comma to set off a direct address

If you think you could commit any of these minor but meaningful punctuation flubs, here's a full explanation of how to avoid them.

 

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February 4, 2019

Some Mistakes Come at You Out of the Blue

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Editing and proofreading might seem like a dull profession. Scanning page after page for errant commas, badly conjugated verbs and the occasional misused “whom” sounds dull indeed.

But in fact, the job is often terrifying. Errors you didn’t expect — including errors you didn’t know existed — can broadside you when you least expect it. And the mistakes you’re not looking out for are the easiest ones to miss. Here are some of the errors and general weirdness I encountered recently in my editing work.

 

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January 28, 2019

All the Boys Had a Black Eye or All the Boys Had Black Eyes?

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“After the fight, all the boys had a black eye.”

Editors see sentences like this all the time. They’re painful. They remind us that, no matter how much we know about grammar and sentence structure, our powers are limited.

The problem, of course, is that the boys don’t share one eye. So, it doesn’t make sense in the singular. But if you made it plural, eyes, it would sound as though each had both eyes blackened.

You probably already see a way out of this. Just recast the sentence: Every boy had a black eye. That’s a great solution, when possible.

 But not every sentence can be recast. So what to do when you have no choice but to make the subject “all the boys”?

Don’t answer that yet, because I have more examples of sentences with agreement problems that put writers and editors in a bind.

“From carrot sticks to apple slices, healthy snacks give your child a boost of energy and a positive outlook — two things they will benefit from greatly as they go through their day.”

In this sentence, “they” and “their” are the issue. Theoretically, a singular “child” shouldn’t be referred to with “they” and “their.”

We’ve talked before about these “plural” pronouns representing singular subjects. In short, it’s fine (more on that in a minute). But today I’m talking about a problem that goes well beyond debates about singular “they.” And, as I explain in this recent column, sometimes it's best to set logic aside.

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January 21, 2019

Whom in a Predicate Nominative

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Raise your hand if you know how to use whom. Now keep it raised if you’re confident you can explain its use in the following sentence: “One would do well to ask whom that was and by what means the communication took place.”

Now keep it raised if — and only if — you figured out that this usage of “whom” is wrong.

My guess is no one’s deltoids are getting a workout right now. As I’ve said in this space before, “whom” is usually more trouble than it’s worth. Just when you think you have it down, you can get it wrong. And since the whole reason to use “whom” in the first place is to be proper, it doesn’t help when “whom” leads to errors. Here's my recent column on how you can get even this "whom" right.

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January 14, 2019

A Very Questionable Mark

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Ever question the question mark? I don’t recommend it. Inquire about this quirky little squiggle and you’ll end up with more questions than answers.

Its history is a mystery. And its use can be downright puzzling.

Some theorize that the question mark was inspired by the tail of a cat — a sort of hovering commentary on the mysteries of feline nature. The ancient Egyptians often get credit, since they worshipped kitties to an extent the world wouldn’t see again till Grumpy Cat took the internet by storm.

Some researchers say the cat in question belonged to a monk who represented its tail at the end of questions in a manuscript.

Another theory claims scholars in the Middle Ages put the Latin word “quaestio” (question) at the end of a sentence, then abbreviated it to “qo,” then started positioning the q above the o to create something that looks like our modern-day question mark.

But the most common theory has it that an adviser to Charlemagne named Alcuin of York created the “punctus interrogativus,” which 1,000 years later became known as the question mark.

Chances are, we’ll never know where this mark came from. Chances are, too, that we’ll never fully master how to use one. Yes, I know it’s pretty easy to use a question mark in most cases. But most cases aren’t all cases. In my recent column, I look at where to place question marks relative to quotation marks, when they can be used in the middle of a sentence and the rare cases when a question mark is immediately followed by a comma.

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January 7, 2019

A Semicolon Firestorm and Some Practical Semicolon Advice

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An essay published online set off a social-media firestorm last week. The too-hot-to-touch topic wasn’t Syria or impeachment or even Stephen Miller’s new hair. It was about something far more incendiary: semicolons.

The title will tell you everything you need to know: “The semicolon is pointless and it’s ruining your writing,” the headline on the Writing Cooperative website proclaimed. If the author was looking for attention, mission accomplished.

“Idiotic,” author J. Robert Lennon tweeted.

“Rules about writing from someone who doesn’t understand writing,” a Twitter user named John replied.

“Time to remake those Worst Take of 2018 lists,” Slate editor Sam Adams tweeted.

The author gave his detractors plenty of fodder. For example, the essay asserts that prescriptivists, people who are sticklers for certain artificial language rules, are usually copy editors. Not true.

In fact, there were a lot of faulty premises in the piece. But it just so happens I agree with the central point: semicolons can be bad news. Here's my take and what you need to know.

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