May 30, 2017

Cleft Sentences

When you don't know grammar terminology, a term can be off-putting to the point of being intimidating. Luckily, grammar terms are fun to learn. Here's one from the Oxford English Grammar to add to your mental jargon folder.

Cleft sentence: a sentence that is cleft (split) so as to put the focus on one part of it. The cleft sentence is introduced by 'it,' which is followed by a verb phrase whose main verb is generally 'be.' The focused part comes next, and then the rest of the sentence is introduced by a relative pronoun, relative determiner, or relative adverb. If we take the sentence 'Tom felt a sharp pain after lunch,' two possible cleft sentences formed from it are 'It was Tom who felt a sharp pain after lunch' and 'It was after lunch that Tom felt a sharp pain.'

In other words, structures like "It was he who" or "It was the (noun) that" are cleft sentences.

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May 22, 2017

Adviser or Advisor?

This question is coming up a lot lately: Is the correct spelling "adviser" or "advisor"? Answer: It's both. The Associated Press is a longtime holdout for the E spelling: adviser. And because it's coming up in the news so often lately, we're seeing the "adviser" spelling more than ever. But "advisor" is just as acceptable for anyone not using AP style.

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May 15, 2017

Report to 'Me and John' or 'John and Me'?

I got an email recently from Amy, whose boss had written a memo that seemed odd to her. One sentence in the memo noted that an employee at the company “will have a dual reporting relationship to both me and John."

This wording struck Amy as a potentially bad call. “Is that correct grammar? I was told that you always put the other person first.”

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May 8, 2017

Your Regularly Scheduled Reminder to Place Periods Inside Quotation Marks

With each passing day, it gets more acceptable to punctuate sentences like this:

Steve said his necktie was "way ugly".

But acceptability in punctuation isn't the same as acceptability in usage. Unlike words and idioms, punctuation isn't an organic, naturally evolving thing. It's a constructed set of rules. So whereas using the word "friend" as a verb becomes correct when enough people do so, punctuation rules aren't crowdsourced.

American punctuation rules on where to put a period or comma relative to a closing quotation mark have not changed. Unlike in British punctuation, a period or comma always comes before a closing quotation mark. A colon or semicolon always comes after. And a question mark or exclamation point can come before if it applies to the stuff inside the quote, or after it if applies to the whole sentence. Here are correct examples of each.

Steve said his necktie was "way ugly."

The word "totally," as has been mentioned, is overused in this article.

Here's what to do when you encounter a sign that reads "Do not enter": do not enter.

They explained the terms "shooting the pier"; the explanation was confusing.

You sometimes see the company name written "Yahoo!"

That guy is what I call a total "yahoo"!

Alfred E. Neuman's catchphrase is "What, me worry?"

Is it true he called you "dude"?

Is Bart Simpson's catchphrase still "Ay, caramba!"?

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May 1, 2017

Mistakes, I've Made a Few

In a recent column, I wrote: "You need either commas or the coordinating conjunction 'and' between the adjectives. Without neither, you have ..."

Several people wrote in to ask whether I shouldn't have used "either" because "without" already supplied to proper negation to the clause. Why, yes. Yes, I should have. Here's the full column.

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April 24, 2017

Beware the 'Apostrophiser'

The town of Bristol in the United Kingdom has its very own apostrophe vigilante. He goes around at night with a wooden stick, his “Apostrophiser,” and uses it to apply stickers to poorly punctuated signs.

In some cases, the stickers cover up erroneous apostrophes, such as the one in a manicurist sign advertising that they do “nail’s.” Other times, he applies a needed apostrophe to signs advertising “gentlemens outfitters.”

Inspired by this mysterious crusader, I dedicated a recent column to apostrophe basics. Here's everything you need to know to avoid the punctuation vigilante's wrath. 

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April 17, 2017

'Or' in Place of 'And'

Here's a weird issue that's coming up a lot in my copy editing lately: or in place of and. Here's an example:

Visitors can choose from an array of activities including hiking, biking or snorkeling. 

If find this pretty interesting. The or clearly speaks to the logic of the sentence. You can choose X, Y or Z.  But it's not quite the same. In the structure of our example sentence, options include all three activities. That is, the options include X, Y and Z.

Just one more reason to keep your thinking cap on when you're editing!

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April 10, 2017

Bristol's Apostrophe Vigilante

An anonymous “grammar vigilante” prowls by night in one UK town, erasing misplaced apostrophes off shop signs and adding apostrophes where needed. As Quartz reports, he's been at it for 13 years! He's even been caught on video, which is linked in the Quartz article about this mysterious punctuation vigilante.

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April 3, 2017

Serial Commas Again

Following up on last week's post about serial commas, here's a Quartz piece on why people are just so passionate about them. The writer does a better job explaining my take on the court case than I did.

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March 27, 2017

Serial Comma Fans Gone Wild

The serial comma made headlines recently after a Maine court ruled that state employment laws were unclear due to lack of a serial comma.

A group of delivery drivers were suing their employer for overtime pay. The state doesn't require employers to pay overtime for a number of activities, including "canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution."

Note that there's no comma after "shipment." Without one, the court asserted, it's unclear whether "distribution" is an object of "packing for." The drivers don't do "packing for distribution." They do distribution, but not packing for distribution.

The court saw this as an opportunity to preach its punctuation partisanship. Without the "clarifying virtues of serial commas," the court wrote, there were two possible interpretations of Maine's statute. The court was forced to choose between the two interpretations and, in the end, sided with the drivers.

The court blew it.

That statute is unambiguous. It doesn't need another comma to be clear. It already states that "distribution" is a separate list item and it's not an object of "packing for." How do we know this? Because of the conjunctions.

In English, a conjunction precedes the final item in a list: Red, white and blue. Red, white, purple, green and blue.

Now look at this sentence: "The sandwiches we serve at our restaurant include turkey, tuna and ham and cheese."

That's three sandwiches. We know that "ham and cheese" refers to a single sandwich because there's an "and" before it.

Now look at: "The sandwiches we serve include turkey, tuna, ham and cheese."

We took out "and" before ham and now we have four sandwiches. The only remaining "and" in the sentence indicates that "cheese" is a separate list item.

The Maine statute was a more confusing example of the same dynamic. "Canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution" lists nine items. The court thought it was just eight, with "packing for shipment or distribution" as the final item. But without a conjunction like "or" or "and" before "packing," that's not possible.

For a longer explanation, here's a column I wrote about it.

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