February 2, 2015

When to Use "Inc.," a State, or a Year

Writers sometimes don’t know when to include a state after a city, a year after a specific date, or an “Inc.” after a company name. The answer, oversimplified, is: only when it’s necessary.

News media usually don’t include years for dates in the past 12 months or the next 12 months. So a speech that took place 11 months ago would say the date only, “The president spoke on March 1 to congress.” That’s because events, in news media, are presumed to mean the most recent occurrence of that date unless specified otherwise: “The president spoke on March 1, 2009, to congress.” Ditto that for upcoming dates. If it’s happening in next 364 days, no need to state the year: “The concert will take place March 1.” And that’s true even if you’re writing about it in February of 2015 but it doesn’t happen till January of 2016. That will, in fact, be the next January. So no need to mention the year.

“Inc.” and other legal designations after company names are less necessary than a lot of writers realize. Sure, the company might like you to write their name exactly as they say. But unless you’re working for them, you don’t have to. The New York Times talks about Coca-Cola and Apple and General Motors without mentioning their incorporation status – or including ugly registered or trademark symbols. If they can, so can you.

As for state names after city names: Have you ever noticed a sentence like this? “The meeting will be held in Atlanta, which is a change from previous years in which it was held in Austin, Texas.” That is, have you noticed how sometimes states are included after city names and other times they’re not? A lot of publications designate certain cities as “standalone cities.” They’re the big ones – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, San Francisco, London, Paris and so on – chosen because they’re immediately known to most readers with no mention of the state or country required. They’re pre-designated, for consistency’s sake. And the system works out really well, when you think about it: If you mention Paris without the country, readers correctly assume you mean Paris, France, and not Paris, Texas.

In all these cases, you can see the same general idea: omit needless stuff. If it's not necessary, then it's just clutter. 

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January 26, 2015

Should You Hyphenate Compound Adverbs?

You could read the hyphenation rules in every stylebook and you still won’t know whether to put a hyphen in this sentence.

Enjoy dessert guilt-free/guilt free.

The style guides talk a lot about compound modifiers in general and, in particular, compound adjectives before and after a noun.

That is, they say to hyphenate a compound adjective like “guilt-free” before a noun like “dessert”: a guilt-free dessert.  And they tell you that you also probably want to hyphenate it after the noun, too, if the intervening verb is a form of “be”: This dessert is guilt-free. But they completely ignore the question of what to do when you’re modifying not a noun but a verb: Enjoy dessert guilt-free. Here, the compound is modifying the verb “enjoy,” not the noun “dessert.” So it falls outside the style guilds’ express instructions for compound adjectives.

So a while back, I asked some experts their opinions for my punctuation book. And here are the cases they couldn’t agree on:

The combatants fought gladiator-style/gladiator style.

You can donate tax-free/tax free.

Enjoy treats guilt-free/guilt free.

They were talking all drunk-like/drunk like.

He only works part-time/part time.

We’re surviving day-to-day/day to day.

She always flies first-class/first class.

Drive extra-carefully/extra carefully.

He dances old-school/old school.

They sell it over-the-counter/over the counter.

He gets paid under-the-table/under the table.

Interestingly, they were unanimous in the view that They walked arm in arm should not be hyphenated.

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January 19, 2015

Some Common Editing Errors: Altar, Forgo, Palate

When I copy edit an article, it’s always after another editor has read it. But that editor has a different job. He or she isn’t supposed to know every little thing about language and punctuation and word choice. Instead, he or she oversees the whole section – deciding what the stories will be, assigning them to writers, getting photos, and so on.

They’re not supposed to know everything about copy editing, but they know a lot. Or, I should say, most do. I have, in the past, worked with a couple (I’m thinking of one guy in particular) who weren’t really qualified for the job. And it showed. For example, the one guy I’m thinking of would send me an e-mail to let me know whenever a story was ready for me in the “cue.” He meant queue. He should have just said “folder.”

But even the good ones don’t know everything a copy editor does about word use, which is clear in the little errors they let slip by.

Here are a couple mistakes that editors -- good editors -- have missed recently.

“Forego” in place of “forgo.” If you’re talking about doing without something, do it without the E. The version that’s correctly spelled “forego” is so rare that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it used. Somewhere between 99% and 100% of the time, you want “forgo.”

“Eek” out a living. This error sneaked past several editors, including the one at my job who probably has the best copy editing skills there. Worse, it appeared in an article that we were reprinting from a well-known national magazine. So that "eek" had already showed up in print, then it got past my editor at work. It should have been “eke.”

“Alter,” “altar.” The publications I edit cover a wide and ever-changing range of topics, sometimes including wedding trends. I’ve seen confusion about "alter" and "altar" go both ways, with wedding stories that talk about a church’s “alter” and other stories that say you should “altar” your plans. Those are both wrong. The one in the church is an “altar,” to change is to “alter.”

“Palette,” “palate.” Confusion about these two is so common that I don’t expect anyone but copy editors to know the difference. “The menu is filled with creations to delight the palette.” Nope. That should be “palate,” a part of the mouth. The other one is about colors and color schemes, like an artist’s palette. A third spelling, pallet, is a wooden platform used to stack and move merchandise in a warehouse.

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January 12, 2015

Bring and Take: The Ultimate Micro-nitpick

The first time I heard someone fuss over the difference between “bring” and “take,” I figured he was talking about a serious error people make in their speech and writing. It took me years to figure out that, really, they’re micro-nitpicking – zeroing in on the tiniest and most insignificant shades of two words with no reason other than a chance to say “gotcha.”

It’s not like they’re being helpful. I doubt anyone in the history of time has gotten drenched in a storm for not knowing whether to “bring” or “take” an umbrella.

Still, if you want to steer clear of the bring-vs.-take police, here’s some advice I’ve doled out before.

"Take" suggests movement away from the speaker. “Take this raincoat with you.” “Bring” suggests movement toward the speaker. “Bring me my raincoat.”

Of course, when the motion isn’t in relation to the speaker, this isn’t useful, as illustrated in the examples “My father used to bring/take bags of groceries to my mother” and “If we are going to the zoo, should we bring/take the camera?”

In my opinion, this proves that the stickler rule is almost as useful as no rule at all. People don’t really have problems using these words. A case-by-case sense on which one sounds better usually gets you better results than all the fussing and parsing in the world.

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January 5, 2015

A Tough Case for Subject-verb Agreement

There are some bits of advice that I’ve been dishing out for so long that I can’t remember where I picked them up in the first place.

A particular subject-verb agreement issue is an example. I’ve been saying for so long that “a team of rivals” can take either a singular verb or plural verb that I don’t remember how I arrived at that conclusion. Did I read somewhere that the verb can agree with any noun in a noun phrase? Or did I deduce it myself through a process of elimination? (That is: Research shows there's no rule against it, therefore it’s okay.) Either way, it’s a little unnerving when I realize I can no longer remember the basis of something I’ve been saying for years.

That's why I was so happy recently to rediscover a passage from Barbara Wallraff’s “Word Court”:

"The issue of agreeement that most often comes up has to do with whether phrases like ‘the committee of one hundred’ and ‘a crowd of well-wishers’ are singular or plural. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to finesse, because such constructions may go either way, depending on meaning.

“Start by assuming that the main, singular noun (committee, crowd) is what should be agreed with. If that results in something illogical or terribly peculiar, switch to agreeing with the plural object of the preposition (one hundred, well-wishers).”

 Thanks, Barbara.

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December 29, 2014

Telling Typos

I’ve been reading a self-published e-book. I didn’t realize it was self-published when I bought it. If I had, I would have thought twice before buying. I know lots of great books are self-published. But books vetted by agents and publishers are more likely to be good. 

In this case, there’s no doubt a traditionally published book would have been better edited. This one was riddled – absolutely riddled – with errors, averaging a major boo-boo every page or two. After some soul-searching, I decided not to mention the title, mainly because Amazon customers have already ripped the author for the mistakes in their reviews and the author herself replied. She apologized to readers wrote that the book went through six different edits and she has no idea how all those errors got in. Her best guess is that the wrong file got sent to the publisher. And whether or not that’s true, she’s had enough humiliation.

But I bring it up today because the types of errors were interesting. Some were the careless mistakes everyone makes while writing. Missing punctuation. A wrong word (“no suck luck” where she clearly meant “no such luck”). A “your” where it should have been “you’re.”

Anyone whose mind is preoccupied with dreaming up story and dialogue and characters can easily make those mistakes. But other mistakes were more damning. They were made not in haste but because, quite clearly, the writer didn’t know any better. Even if the author had cleaned up all the typos, these errors would have tipped her hand that the book wasn’t professionally edited. They’re the stuff editors know and most other people don’t:

1. “Everyday” as a noun phrase. The one-word “everyday” is an adjective, “everyday values.” The noun phrase is two words: “We’ll visit every day.”

2. Repeated instances of “door jam” and no instances of the correct “door jamb.”

3. She “would pour over maps for hours.” This is one editors watch out for. It should be “pore.”

4. Consistent use of one-word “awhile” after “for.” The one-word form is an adverb and, as such, can’t be used as a noun that’s the object of a preposition. So you can “stay awhile” or “stay for a while,” but you can’t “stay for awhile.”

To me, those mistakes are a dead giveaway that no professional editor was involved – at least not in the version I paid good money for.

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December 22, 2014

Dinky Problems with Parallels

Here’s a dinky problem that comes up a lot in my editing work. See if you can find the (did I mention it’s dinky?) error in this sentence.

“The island boasts a sprawling water park, large boating marina, a seaplane harbor and a golf course with views of Abu Dhabi's futuristic skyline.”

Technically, if you want the coordinated objects of the verb “boast” to be parallel, you need the word “a” before “large boating marina.” So you’d write: “The island boasts a sprawling water park, A large boating marina, a seaplane harbor and a golf course.”

Or, of course, you could let all the coordinated noun phrases “share” an indefinite article the same way they “share” the verb: “The artificial island boasts a sprawling water park, large boating marina, seaplane harbor and golf course.”

That seems the better choice. But the truth is that I tweaked the original sentence for simplicity’s sake. The real sentence read, “boasts a sprawling water park, large boating marina, a seaplane harbor and an 18-hole golf course.”

The addition of “18-hole” complicates things. This term would be preceded not by “a” but by “an” because its pronunciation begins with a vowel sound. 

So could you drop all but the first indefinite article -- “a water park, boating marina, seaplane harbor and 18-hole golf course”? Here, all the items share the word “a” in a way that implies that, really, each gets its own “a.” But “18-hole” doesn’t take “a.” It takes “an.”

I’ve asked other copy editors over the years how they feel about this. They’re decidedly undecided. Technically, it seems wrong. But is it worth all those extra “a’s” just to give one an “an”? No one knows for sure.

The structure reminds me of transitive properties in math, so I feel like a mathematical precision is required. That’s why I would give each item its own article in a sentence like this. But who’s to say whether the alternative is wrong?

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December 15, 2014

Hoist With His Own Petar

I don’t know much about Shakespeare. Suffice it to say that there are some gaps in my education. So when I learn about an expression like “hoist with his own petard,” it’s usually from a “Simpsons” episode.

And it’s always fun to look up these new expressions.

Garner’s Modern American Usage has some interesting discussion on this term, which the guide describes as a Shakespearean phrase meaning “ruined by one’s own scheming against others.”

“The actual line in ‘Hamlet’ is ‘hoist with his own petar,” Garner’s says. “The form ‘petar’ is an archaic variant of ‘petard,’ meaning ‘an explosive device used in ancient warfare to blow open a gate or to breach a wall.’ Thus, ‘hoist with one’s own petard’ literally means to blow oneself into the air with one’s own bomb. In modern journalistic sources, ‘petard’ outnumbers ‘petar’ by a 66-to-1 margin. So almost every writer who uses the phrase updates Shakespeare by using ‘petard.’”

Garner’s adds that the verb "hoist" is normally “hoisted” in the past tense, but that Shakespeare used “hoist” as the past participle for the archaic verb “hoise” (to raise aloft). But by a 2-to-1 margin, modern writers update “hoist” and make it "hoisted.”

Also, there’s some controversy about whether the preposition is “with” or “by.” Shakespeare’s was “with,” “but ‘by’ now preponderates by a 4-to-1 margin,” Garner’s reports.

Summing up, Garner’s says, “Almost every contemporary writer who uses this popular phrase misquotes Shakespeare in some way and it would be pedantic to insist on ‘hoist with his own petar.’ The usual renderings are ‘hoist with his own petard’ and ‘hoisted by his own petard.’ Some preference might be given to the first of those. But because the second is nearly four times as common, it shouldn’t be labeled incorrect."

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December 8, 2014

A Silly 'Vis-a-vis'

In the 2000 movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” George Clooney plays a 1930s Southern convict with a penchant for hair pomade and flowery language. His puffed-up vocabulary is intended to make him look silly, and it works, especially when in his striped prison PJs he says stuff like, “It does put me in a damn awkward position, vis-a-vis my progeny.”

Fancy talk just sounds silly sometimes, which is probably why simple language gets so much more respect in the professional publishing world. The ability to express something in simple everyday language demonstrates a mastery of the topic and of the language itself.

So vis-a-vis often sounds silly. But it sounds especially silly when used to mean “in regard to.”

“The literal meaning of vis-a-vis in French is ‘face to face,’ and it has had some use in English (as in French) as a preposition meaning 'face to face with,'” writes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. “But vis-a-vis is far more familiar in its two extended senses, 'in relation to’ and ‘in comparison with,’ which it also has in French, and both of which have been in use in English since the 18th century.”

Merriam-Webster’s says that, in these senses, the term can impart “something of a continental tone” (uh, if you say so) and adds that these uses are pretty uncontroversial.

The controversial usage is the one from the movie quote above, where it’s used to mean “in regard to.” But, Merriam-Webster’s notes, “our evidence shows it to be relatively rare.”

My evidence disagrees. Pretty much the only time I hear vis-a-vis is in the meaning “in regard to,” which, to me, usually just sounds silly.

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December 1, 2014

Usage Guides

There are a lot of different kinds of books you can use for language studies and editing. Style guides are indispensable. Dictionaries are more useful than many people realize, offering not just spellings but past participles and other inflected forms like superlatives plus variant spellings and  more. A good “grammar” like The Oxford English Grammar offers a sort of scientific analysis of sentence mechanics, which can be extremely useful.

But my real secret weapon is a good usage guide. Usage guides look like dictionaries. One of them – probably the best one – even has the word “dictionary” in the title: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. This could be why most people don’t know about them: at a glance they look like they offer nothing you can’t find at dictionary.com. But a closer look reveals these books are goldmines. Yes, they’re voluminous tomes of alphabetized entries about language. But they’re not just definitions and pronunciations. Each entry contains everything you want to know about the usage and correctness of the term.

Turn to the Ls and you’ll find a whole discussion on the difference between “less” and “fewer.” Turn to the Ps and you’ll find very a thorough discussion of pronouns and how to make them agree with their subjects (as well as other nuances of the pronoun). Under the I’s, you’ll learn the difference between “imply” and “infer.” Under the Ps there’s a discussion about the “possessive with gerund.” Under the Cs you can learn about “complement” and “compliment.” Under the U’s you’ll get an earful on whether sticklers are right to complain about the word “utilize” as well as some insights into the colloquial “used to could.”

Almost every question you could ever have about word usage is right at your fingertips in one of these guides. And if everyone knew about them, there’d be a lot less confusion about language, though there would be a lot more confusion about what I would do for a living.

The best-known usage guide is Fowler’s Modern English Usage, kind of the daddy of them all. But it’s from a British perspective and so is sometimes less useful to American English speakers.

Garner’s Modern American Usage is an antidote for this. It’s good, asking good questions, but sound a little prescriptive at times.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is written in the voice of someone exasperated with silly language myths, and the contrarian undertones can get tiresome. But this point of view forces the authors to rely exclusively on research to arrive at conclusions. As a journalist taught that sourcing of information is crucial, this appeals to me most of all. But really, you can’t go wrong with any of them.

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