Style, Spelling, and Grammar or Nobody's Perfect Getting all the mistakes out of a newsletter is a thankless task, and quite impossible, but it is important that you try. The English language cannot withstand infinite amounts of abuse; a word used improperly won't last any longer than a fine track bike that is bounced over rocky forest trails, stored outside in the rain, and denied grease and maintenance. Nor will a word used incorrectly serve you any better than a sturdy, knobby-tired mountain bike would serve a velodrome racer. People who delight in abusing the language will tell you that it's a living thing and always changing, so you have no right to object to their innovations; and people who delight in abusing children will tell you that a good beating toughens a kid. Every time you allow a word to be used to hint at a meaning that's directly opposite to its own, or perhaps only slaunchwise related, you attack the first-amendment rights of every English-speaking being in the universe. How can I speak my mind if every word I use can have any of half a dozen meanings? If you mistake "comprise" for a highbrow spelling of "compose", if you use a plural pronoun to refer to a singular antecedent, if you say that a road is "impacted" when you don't mean that there is so much traffic on it that nothing is moving, and if you then wail, "but you _knew_ what I _meant_" when someone complains that what you said makes no sense -- that's not writing, it's attempted ESP. Read the "Elements of Style" to soak up the correct attitude toward your mother tongue, and collect a few references to help you settle irksome questions. References are not authorities: what they say has to make sense. In the "McGraw-Hill Style Manual", for example, Longyear defends the misuse of "hopefully" in a way which clearly shows that she has mistaken it for "hopeably". Since "hopeably" is an awkward, unpronounceable, and unusable word, we shall have to resign ourselves to confessing that it is we who hope. And let us take off our hats for a moment of respectful silence to lament the passing of "God willing" and "if the cricks don't rise". **** STYLE **** In writing, "style" is used in two different ways: "Literary style" refers to those aspects of writing that enable us to distinguish one author's writing from that of another. To an editor, "style" means all the rules that aren't a matter of being correct or incorrect, but are adopted for the sake of consistency. There are a great many instances in English in which two or more perfectly- correct alternatives are mutually exclusive. For example, "catalog" and "catalogue" are both correctly spelled, but it is a mistake to use both spellings in one document. Another example: any size of type that's bigger than your body type and small enough to fit on your paper will do for headlines, but if two headlines are in different sizes of type, your readers will think that they differ in importance. Once you have chosen a type size for a given class of headlines, other sizes become incorrect. Your editorial style is the sum of the decisions you make when more than one way is correct. When only one editor is working on a publication, consistency of style comes more-or-less automatically, but a style book is a great help when you are undecided, and many also warn you of the most-common ways to be flatly wrong. ### Since style books abound, I will address only one matter of style: serial commas. It is frequently accepted as correct to delete the last comma in a series if it comes just before an "and", and a great many people defend the practice by saying that one ought not to include unnecessary parts and the last comma is not needed. Such persons say that when someone reads "The jersies came in red, black, yellow and blue," he will know that there are four colors of jersies available, rather than two solid colors and one two- color pattern, because he encountered a period without coming across another "and". This strikes me as like saying that you don't need to put a Dan Henry mark before a T-road, because a person who takes the wrong branch will notice that there is no mark after the turn and go back. A reader has enough work to do when you mark the route as plainly as you can; don't throw unnecessary confusion in his way. You can't always stop him from mistaking a compound term for the end of the series, but you can and should stop him from mistaking the end of the series for a compound term. And be a nice guy: so many people _do_ leave out the last comma that you really ought not to put a compound term last: if the jersies come in black and white, red, blue, and yellow, don't say they come in red, blue, yellow, and black and white. You might go so far as to hyphenate "black-and-white", or change it to "white with a black design". Though I dislike abbreviations on general principles, "&" is one way to distinguish compound terms in a series, for example: "the photographs are black & white, duotone, and full color." **** A FEW COMMON ERRORS **** Never create a word without making a reasonable effort to find out whether a suitable word already exists, unless you are writing humor or fantasy -- and even there, made-up words should be used with discretion and for specific effect. ### "Gender" is a property of words. "Sex" is a property of living things. Words come in "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter". Mammals come in "male" and "female." Other creatures come in a fascinating array of sexes --- certain algae come in "+" and "-," for example, and Physarum polycephalum appears to have thirteen sexes --- but this in not an essay on biology. Sex is in no way related to gender. Speakers of other languages in which inflection is less degenerate have a head start on understanding this point: a German who communicates the idea that the girl put her purse on the table by saying "It put her on him." is not likely to confuse gender with sex. In English, the former habit of referring to a ship as "she" was about the last gasp of purely grammatical gender; even when bitten by a dog, we want to determine its sex in order to know what gender of pronouns to use while cursing it. What inflection remains to us can be hard to see because imports have replaced some of our native words; the third-person singular nominative feminine "he," for example, was displaced by "she," but "her" and "hers" remain. And, to the consternation of the uneducated, the third-person singular nominative non-committal "he" also remains. Just to confuse the issue, "Gender" can also refer to a property of non-living things such as electrical connectors and snap fasteners. An object of the "male" gender has a protruding part which fits into a socket in the corresponding "female" object. How this symbolism survived the Victorian era is beyond me. Persons new to the idea that both sexes are human often believe that "non-sexist" writing must be as awkward and ungrammatical as possible in order that no-one may miss their change of heart. If a sentence is truly non-sexist, the reader will never suspect that the writer gave the matter a moment's thought, even though all discriminating readers know that an effortless style is evidence of hard work. One way to call attention to the anti- sexist-ness of your writing is to slap "their" in for "his" wherever it may occur, and to slap in plenty of extra _his_'s to give yourself scope. A typical example is "Every boy should bring their pencil to class tomorrow." This sentence implies that there is some "they" whose pencil should be brought; perhaps the teacher has just recommended a specific pencil company and wants each boy to bring one of their pencils with him; perhaps the pencil belongs to a group and is so large that it will take every boy in the class to carry it. Yet the confusion is far from necessary. Not even the most rabid anti-sexist could object to using "his" to refer to "boy". What's worse, the teacher doesn't care _whose_ pencil each boy brings as long as he has one, and surely does not want to imply that each boy has only one pencil to his name. The proper way to express this idea is "Every boy should bring a pencil to class tomorrow." Now let us consider a sentence with genuine difficulties: "There is to be no more trading: I want every student to eat his or her own lunch." "His or her" isn't something you can say to a roomful of six-year-olds intent upon evading their prescribed diets. A change of person, rather than a change of number, is appropriate here: "There is to be no more trading. I want each of you to eat the lunch you brought to school." Considering the probable context, the best way might be: "No trading! Eat your own lunch!" The oft-recommended change of number is legitimate as long as you remember that the antecedent of "their" must also be changed to plural, and that you must frisk the sentence for other words which must be changed to match. For example, "_Every student_ must bring _his_ penmanship _book_ to class tomorrow" would, by a change of number, become "_All the students_ must bring _their_ penmanship _books_ to class tomorrow." There is no rule that you can blindly apply to every situation. ### "-ly" is a wonderful suffix; attach it to any adjective and _voila_! --- an adverb. It's so lovely that many gleefully attach it to the first word that comes to mind, thereby creating an awkward and unidiomatic phrase; many create adverbs where the original adjective was wanted; some will attach it to words that are already adverbs. Think twice when you find yourself using "-ly"; sometimes the entire word proves to be unnecessary. ### I know of five uses for quotation marks: to indicate that you are reproducing the exact words of a person being quoted, to show that a word is being talked about rather than used, to distinguish a minor title, to indicate that a word is being given a non- standard meaning, and to indicate that you are lying. When you use quote marks to indicate non- standard meaning, or to indicate that you are lying, the word is quoted only on the first reference. The quotes are a shorthand way of saying "The technical term is ____" or "I'm going to call it ____ even though it's something else." It may be necessary to quote throughout if a specialized word is also used in its standard meaning, or if a lying word is also used sincerely --- as in "While John exercised in the gym, I 'exercised' in the hot tub." A great many people seem to think that quotation marks can be used to emphasize words. If you are tempted to this folly, compare "John brought his _wife_ with him" and "John brought his 'wife' with him." Some people are so benighted as to use quote marks to apologize for slangy (or otherwise offensive) terms. This is lower than farting loudly and then looking about in puzzlement to see who did it. If you can't stand behind a word, don't use it. ### "Mrs." means "the wife of" and is, therefore, never used with a woman's own name. There used to be an exception to this rule to deal with the awkward case of a divorced mother, but "Ms." has obviated this difficulty. John Smith's wife is "Mrs. Smith" even if her name is Mary Doe. A woman's title can be touchy. If you call Mary Doe "Miss Doe," you are calling her a high-school girl or an old maid. If you call her "Mrs. Doe," you are calling her "the wife of Mr. Doe," which may be irrelevant to the situation, and it's as likely as not that she's the wife of somebody else. It used to be that calling her "Ms. Doe" meant that you had got her name off a mailing list; nowadays it has lost that meaning, but has gained an implication that she espouses a set of views which she may well despise. If she has a PhD, you can get around all these difficulties, but "Dr." can be as patronizing as "saleslady" if you "Mr." the male PhDs of your acquaintance. It's best to avoid using any title at all whenever you can get away with it. In particular, you should never use a title with a full name unless the title is an important part of the identification. If the name is part of a list and everybody else on the list has a relevant title, you should include the "Mr." or whatever so that people won't think the lack of a title was a typo. ### If you feel good, you are happy. If you feel well, you are healthy. If you feel bad, you are unhappy. If you feel badly, you are wearing mittens. ### The whole comprises the parts. The parts constitute the whole. end of sample chapter