March 21, 2016

Apostrophe vs. Single Quotation Mark

A quick refresher:

Jane said, "I like the word 'awesome.'"

Bubba said, "Stop your cussin'."

Note how both those sentences are punctuated. They end differently, yet they're both correct. Why? Because the first one has a single quotation mark before the regular double quotation mark, but the second one has an apostrophe.

A single quotation mark works just like a regular quotation mark. In American English, they both come after a period or comma. But an apostrophe represents a dropped letter. It's part of the word. So it wouldn't make sense to separate it from the rest of the word by putting a period before it.

And if you can master that, it'll put you ahead of about half the professional editors I know!

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March 14, 2016

Another Grammar Chicken Little Bites the Dust

Fun quiz:

1. I got an email from a man who reads my column in his community news insert to the Los Angeles Times -- the physical newspaper that lands on his doorstep every morning. Was his name:

a. Jayden

b. Josh

c. Fred

2. This reader wrote to me because:

a. He thinks it's awesome how young people keep reinventing the language and making it their own.

b. He wanted to pitch me SEO services.

c. He's alarmed that the very, very important rules of grammar he was taught in his glory days are going straight to hell as young ignoramuses who don't know the rules of language continue to do it permanent harm.

You guessed right. Fred's pissed about young people's bad grammar. Here's an excerpt from his email:

I see bad writing everywhere: Awkward sentences, minimal punctuation, misspellings, misuse of words, references to things not previously mentioned, use of acronyms not previously noted, etc. The reason those in my age group fuss about this so much is because we have seen our culture spiral down, which the younger generation can’t see (yet!).

Here's how I responded.

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March 7, 2016

Bad Teachings, Corrected

A reader named Al was taught the word "towards" is for physical direction while "toward" is for more abstract uses.

My friend Tracy was taught that the word "percent" must always follow a number, while "percentage" is for all other uses.

A user on a grammar message board wrote: "I was taught in 1974 that 'ly' never belonged on the words 'good' or 'bad.'"

A writer for the Guardian was taught that "'between' applies only to two things, and 'among' should be used for more than two."

I once met a woman who was taught that you should never begin a sentence with the word "it."

What's up with those? The facts are in this recent column.

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February 29, 2016

More Stuff I Fix That You Don't Have To

"Compose" and "comprise" aren't the only words that force editors like me to play the nitpicker. Because editing style is stricter than general grammar and usage rules, there are many terms we fix that would be fine for anyone else. Here's a column I wrote recently containing just a few examples.

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February 22, 2016

"There's a lot" or "there are a lot"?

I don't know where I got the idea that "there's" is incorrect to introduce a plural, as in "There's a lot of animals here." But somewhere along the line this idea became deeply ingrained. I suppose it's possible I arrived at this conclusion on my own. After all, when you consider the correct sentences "There is a cat outside" and "There are cats outside," it's pretty clear that the noun governs the verb. (This is called a notional subject.)

But when you throw in a modifying term or two, it shifts the focus away from the noun, causing people to stop caring whether it's singular or plural. That is, the modifying phrase "a lot" sounds singular. So people who would never say "There's animals here," instead opting for the plural verb form in "There are animals here," are affected by the interceding "a lot": "There are animals here," but "There's a lot of animals here."

That's why "there's" before a plural is often considered idiomatic -- basically, correct. But to me "There's a lot of animals here" will always sound as wrong as "There is a lot of animals here."

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February 15, 2016

Another Case of a Tricky Comma

My Facebook friend Mike recently kicked off a discussion about a comma job that can confuse even the most punctuation-savvy person. Consider these passages.

The class was assigned to read Herman Melville's most famous work. Students were told to buy the book, Moby Dick, before Tuesday.

The class was assigned to read the book Moby Dick and watch the film Casablanca.

Both passages contain the phrase "the book Moby Dick," but the first puts commas around the title while the second one does not. And they're both correct. How is that possible?

There are a couple ways to parse this, but the simplest is captured by the terms "restrictive" and "nonrestrictive" information. When a word or phrase is restrictive, it narrows down the scope of things you might be talking about.

For example, the first sentence of this blog post mentions my Facebook friend Mike. If I only had one Facebook friend, the name Mike would in no way narrow down who I was talking about. But because I have more than one friend, the name Mike literally restricts the scope of the noun "friend." It narrows down the field to a specific person.

The rule is: restrictive information takes no commas, like the name Mike in my first sentence. Nonrestrictive information, which Mike would be if I had only one friend, is set off with commas. I

In our first passage, we already specified which one book we were talking about: Melville's most famous. So the title Moby Dick doesn't narrow down the range of things we might mean by "the book." But in our second passage, the reader wouldn't know what book you were talking about without the title. So that's restrictive information and takes no commas.

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February 8, 2016

Grammar Is Going Down the Tubes ... Right?

In celebration of the one jillionth time a reader of my column told me that the language is going to hell in a handbasket, I published a column on the subject. I cited a number of heavy-hitting educators who agreed with my correspondent. The twist? They're all dead. Long dead.

Here's the column

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February 1, 2016

A Common Misconception About 'That'

Related to, but not the same as, this week's podcast, here's a helpful fact about "that" and "who." A lot of people believe that you can't use "that" to refer to people: "There's the man that I was telling you about." People, these people will tell you, take "who."

If you look up "that" in the dictionary and read through its many, many definitions, you'll see that "that" can sometimes be used as a synonym of "who," making "the man that I was telling you about" grammatically correct.

But is it a good choice? That's another question entirely. In copy editing, we like to use the most precise words possible. If it's true that "that" can mean a person or a thing, "who" is the better choice for people because it can only mean one of those. It's more specific. But that's a preference, not a rule.

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January 25, 2016

A Throwback to Diagramming Elections Past

Some language experts I follow on Twitter, including @Fritinancy, were tweeting recently about a 2008 article by sentence-diagrammer extraordinaire Kitty Burns Florey, author of "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: A History of Diagramming Sentences." In the Slate piece, Florey diagrams some of the sentences of then-vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.

Regardless of where you stand on Palin, the article's well worth your time. For one thing, it lends insight into the art of diagramming, which itself lends insight into the mechanics of sentences. But most of all, it's just a shining example of really good writing. Here it is if you want to check it out.

If you want to know more about sentence diagramming, I've never seen a better resource than Florey's "Sister Bernadette's" book.

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January 18, 2016

Rob and Burglarize and Why Only Cops and Lawyers Should Care

I got rapped on the knuckles recently when I mentioned in a column that "rob" can be used to mean "burglarize." So I had to do a whole column about why I was right in the first place, darn it. Here's the whole column, but if you want the CliffsNotes version: Cops, lawyers and journalists should reserve "rob" for face-to-face confrontations. But the dictionary allows the rest of us to use "rob" to say that someone sneaked into our house while we were away and took something.

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