Category: Grammar

Wadded paper“We’re developing a situation where a whole group of young people is growing up having no real sense about how our system of justice works.” – Chief Justice John Roberts

That line’s been quoted in several news sources and is included in a lot of Facebook rants about the Supreme Court’s performance of late. Without getting into what I think of the current Court, I do want to point out this showed up in someone’s latest rant. Before launching into why the poster thought Roberts was out of line, he stated even the grammar is wrong.

This is an editing blog. Did you think I was going to waste space on the undeserving crooks in Washington? Specifically, he said it should have been “a whole group of young people are…” instead of “is.” Actually, the poster is wrong. But you can’t fault him. The sentence looks wrong. It has “people” and “is” next to each other in the sentence. But “people” is not the operative word. “Group” is. And group, by definition, is a singular object. The members of a group are plural. And “people,” in most cases, is plural. But the subject of the clause is “group.” Therefore, the correct verb is… Well, is.

Bill Clinton must feel vindicated. (Google it. I remember that incident, and I’m still scratching my head.)

Roberts is, before anything else, a lawyer. I learned to edit from a lawyer, and believe me, it’s a great way to learn how to clean up your prose. However, the law has its own quirks and sticks to rules even corporate writing no longer recognizes. Like capitalizing every other noun in a sentence and not using contractions outside of quotations. I’ve had one editor flag that in my manuscript and stetted the hell out of it. But the bottom line is lawyers almost always get their grammar correct. So while it took me a decade to shed the legal habits of editing, the core of what I learned remains.

So why bring this up? Well, first, I needed a topic this week. And odd noun-verb pairings seemed obvious when I read the chief justice’s quote. Yes, they slip by sometimes when I edit. One could make a case for AI taking over the job, but having had some recent experience with ChatGPT for a project, make sure you stamp your passport for the frying pan on your way to the fire. AI is worse at it. Go Google “Hallucinations” and “AI.” Some of the results are hilarious.

But why is this so hard? Your brain sees “people” right next to the word “is” and goes, “That ain’t right.” But before “people” in the above quote is “group.” The group is growing up, but the people aren’t. “People” is only a descriptive noun telling the reader what group this is. So do I ever let this slide knowing the right way will hurt some people’s heads? Yes, actually. 

A good editor can forgive a lot of rule-breaking in dialog and first-person. The person is talking, and I don’t give a damn what your English teacher told you (unless it was Mr. Murphy, whom I had in the 11th grade. He was cool!) People break rules speaking. They mismatch tenses. They swallow words and syllables. They use the wrong words. They even use the same word to start too many consecutive sentences. Your goal is to make it readable, not please Mrs. Chaucer (not her real name, but suck it, Clara.)  

But once in a while, the right way is going to sound wrong. Leave that to third person narrative. (Send me second person, and I’ll print it out, shred it, and send back the shreds. I am not an avant-garde editor.)

Sentence fragments. Annoy some people. Found in Dickens, though. Bad writing? Or stylistic choice?

Why not both? Girl meme social reaction | StareCat.com

It’s both. My current assignment comes from a writer who breaks a lot of rules. And it’s clearly done on purpose. He writes present tense, which drives a lot of readers batty. And he writes almost completely in sentence fragments, especially when his story gets going.

“Wow, TS. It must take you an hour just to get through one page!”

Not really. The point of editing is to make sure the writer not only gets their point across but also doesn’t get in their own way. In other words, cutting out all the writing for the sake of writing. Mind you, I edit mostly fiction. Non-fiction requires a different set of rules, and let’s not get started on corporate editing, which means the Chicago Manual of Style is a polite suggestion when the company has a style manual to be treated like the Bible. (Which most translations probably violate. ‘Cuz, yanno, God never went through the mandatory employee orientation.) 

So occasionally, you get people who break rules on purpose. Is this bad writing? Well, it depends. Your ultimate audience is your reader. However, reviewers may or may not get to your work first. So guess what? The lady on the beach might think you’re just swell, but the reviewer will be leaving a two-star review because you insist on ending every sentence with a preposition. While I think that’s a fake rule, it is annoying when writers do that too often. They should check out the Elements of  Style from the library, assuming they know where the library’s at.

Where were we? Sentence fragments.

Much of what a writer puts down is dictated by rhythm and cadence. Most of us who write hear the words in our heads. That’s why that last sentence occasionally gets out in the wild as “Most of us who write here the words…” Sometimes, the brain just picks a spelling and runs with it. So, as in the case with my current author, you sometimes get long blocks of prose written in punchy, short phrases. And yet in context, it works. It might not get over the transom, but it works. (This one, by the way, did get over the transom, or it wouldn’t be on my desk.) Now, if this person wrote bestsellers, one of two things would happen: hundreds of acquisitions editors would be flooded with similarly written stories (most of which would be badly written) or publishers, smelling a buck, would insist their writers adopt the style (also resulting in a flood of bad imitations.)

Fragments are the more readable version of the run-on sentence. The difference is, writing in an age of declining attention spans, where it’s hard enough to get people to cue up a book on a Kindle, never mind a print book, run-ons are an abomination that should be weeded out. An argument could be made for chopping up that last sentence, though technically, it’s not a run-on.

 

An apostropheThanks to clickbait and social media, use of the apostrophe (or “sky comma”) is a lost art. The most common (and often ridiculed) error is, of course, your/you’re. When you’re typing at a million miles an hour and want the words down, it’s easy to “hear” a word and pick the wrong spelling. For all the jokes about your/you’re, it’s something a ninth grader doing a proofread of your manuscript can spot. Assuming that ninth grader doesn’t believe texting should be the basis of grammar. Spoiler alert: It shouldn’t. k thx bye!

For the most part, people get contractions right. “He’s,” “they’re,” and “can’t” are all common examples. Frequently, I do see the apostrophe left out of “can’t.” In a manuscript, I’ll flag it. That’s what I get paid to do, among other things. Reading it, it’s not the most egregious apostrophe error out there.

Where do we get it wrong? Possessives. People can’t seem to wrap their head around when an apostrophe should or should not use it to denote possession. After all, we use his/her/their for third person possession. Where’s the apostrophe? Pronouns, aside from being the most monumentally stupid thing for politicians to whine about, are their own thing with their own rules. No formal name or specific noun denotes the possessor. Except…

There’s that pesky pronoun “It.” “It’s” is not possessive but rather a contraction for “It is.” When, as a pronoun, “It” possesses something, then you write “its,” no apostrophe. The easiest way to remember it is pronouns don’t use apostrophes for possession: Mine, our, your, his, her, their, and its. 

Now, let’s talk about where people really grind my gears: Slapping an apostrophe in to indicate plural or omitting it to indicate possession. STOP DOING THAT!!!  You know I’m worked up about that if I use three exclamation points after a sentence. That, in and of itself, is extremely bad grammar. So hopefully, I made my point.

Every so often, I’ll see a sign as I’m driving along or even online where someone wrote something along the lines of “Drink’s and Sandwich’s.” One had it as “Johnnys Bar.”

If you needed more proof civilization is in decline, there it is. It’s “Johnny’s Bar” and “Drinks and Sandwiches.”

Worse, some people labor under the delusion that the apostrophe goes before every “s” at the end of a word, especially if it’s a plural. STOP DOING THAT!!!

Now, the question on everyone’s mind once they realize how easy apostrophes are: What if a name or noun ends in an “s”?

Well, as we say in SQL Server work, “It depends.” This is one where the style guides vary wildly. Are we going to Charles’ house or Charles’s house? The Chicago Manual of Style says “Charles’s house” while the AP and various British guides suggest “Charles’ house.” Even Jess Zafarris and Rob Watts of the Words Unraveled YouTube channel can’t agree. Rob himself, a former BBC reporter now living in Germany, says he’s been forced to change with every style guide his work requires. And if it’s “Charles’s,” do you pronounce that second “s”?

Here is TS’s guide to the sky comma when it comes to nouns ending in “s.” It’s possessive, so use “‘s” at the end. However, it’s an S, followed by an S. You don’t have to say it out loud. This is what I learned in school, what a potential agent told me to use (I laid down the law on the Oxford comma, but she was in agreement it’s mandatory. Get over it.), and ultimately, what the Chicago Manual uses.

 

My current project has em dashes in place of quotation mQuotation markarks, which is a challenge. Em dashes (or for the more pedantic, dialog dashes. Hate to burst your bubble, nitpickers, but the readers who pick up on this don’t care. Neither do I.) are generally used in Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, or French. I’m not sure why writers in English–any dialect of English–choose to do this, but then Cormac McCarthy dispensed with quotation punctuation altogether.

But having to adapt to a different style of quoting dialog underscores another issue: You still have to follow the rules of dialog. And to follow said rules, the reader has to know who’s talking and when. Even the great Lawrence Block, whose books taught me to write novels long before Stephen King graced us with On Writing, munged dialog once. If the greats do it, you need to watch out, too.

So, let’s review, shall we?

  • “Said” is an invisible word. It takes less than second for the reader to blow by a “said” phrase to pick up on whose talking.
  • That said, the old chestnut of not using any word but “said” (except maybe “asked”) needs to be put down like Old Yeller. (Um… Spoiler alert?) In an age of audio books, it is absolutely nerve-grating to hear “said” twenty-six times in a thirty-second passage. Yes, you can use mild alternatives like “shouted,” “mumbled,” even “intoned.” Just don’t get fancy with it. There’s a reason more old-school editors insist on “said/asked.” “‘Well,’ he queried” is still bad writing no matter how much you’re bored with “said.” </rant>
  • Action beats are your friend. You don’t have to tag every line of dialog. In fact, don’t. Dialog-heavy scenes have the disadvantage of encouraging “white rooms.” Two characters are talking. Where are they talking? What’s going on? Half the time, it’s just exposition, and exposition is death in our era of short attention spans. Sorry, but that’s the reality we’re working in today. Have your characters eat a salad or lift weights or knit a sweater. Anything to convey where the conversation takes place.
  • When exposition is unavoidable, put the Pope in a pool. This is one of my favorite storytelling tools from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. He talks about a movie where a bunch of cardinals have to set up the movie and can only do it through rambling dialog. So the screenwriter put an old man in a swimming pool listening to the cardinals. It takes the viewers a minute or two to figure out the guy swimming is the Pope. They get an infodump, but their attention is held because they’re forced to figure out who’s in the pool. (I loved that so much, I put a character named “Mr. Pope” in a swimming pool in one story. Then I killed him in that same pool in another story. Yes. As an author, I’m mean to my characters.)
  • Untagged dialog: No more than five lines before you insert a “said/asked/pontificated” (Don’t use that last one. The reader will throw your book in the trash, and for good reason) or an action beat. The reader needs to keep track of who’s talking. And so do you.
  • Tagging or adding beats: If two people are in the conversation, unless they are the same gender, get their names out quickly and stick with he/she/they*. Once you’ve established who and what they are, the reader can pretty much follow along. More than one person? Or two of the same gender? You’re going to need to drop names a little more often. 

*The common use of singular they today is not political. It’s the means by which I get to spike the football on a pedantic English teacher’s grave. My favorite English teacher, who just turned 90, would heartily approve.

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Broken pencil while writing
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Copyright: CC0 Creative Commons

Ah, the lowly dash. And it’s many forms. We so love using them, especially Gen X and Millennial writers. We especially love our em dashes (— ). Nothing wrong with that, though I wish Cormac McCarthy had made peace with quotation marks before he died. Blood Meridian was brilliant but hard to read.

And yet, as I go through my latest editing project and look back on my previous one, I keep seeing a dash error that drives me to distraction. The previous project came from the pen of a guy who started doing this before I was born. (My first election was Reagan’s reelection bid, for perspective, when David Lee Roth sang for Van Halen on Ye Olde Victrola whilst we drove the ol’ La Salle to the Woolworth’s for a grape Nehi.*) Yet, I also received back the latest Jim Winter offering back from Dawn Barclay, my talented colleague at Down & Out Books. As I am Jim, I received a rude awakening. I do the same damn thing! What is this horrific atrocity in writing?

Grandpa Simpson yells at cloud.
Fox

Everyone, and I mean everyone, including your humble narrator, hyphenates adverbs. STOP THAT! (Pauses to go yell at both TS Hottle and Jim Winter and hopes wife doesn’t call the men with the butterfly nets and strait-jacket.)

What bugs me about Dawn’s horrific revelations is the next Winter book is a collection. Which means two-thirds of these stories were edited by someone else before I cleaned them up. Eek! That’s two editorial passes that missed that error. Strangely, I never get called out on em dashes. Once, when Second Wave was beta read, I did get a note on the difference between the em dash and the en dash and a hyphen.

  • Hyphens: Hyphens are used to join two words into the single idea. Most often, you see it in some last names, like Alec Walker-Jones. It also can join two adjectives, such as “music-obsessed.” Occasionally, it’s used with nouns, but not often. Technically, hyphens are not dashes. They are not to be used to join any word ending in –ly to another word. So, the phrase “criminally-wrong” is just “criminally wrong.”
  • En dashes: Sometimes used to join words the way hyphens sometimes do. Calling a hyphen an en dash in a number, time, or date range (200-300, 1939-1945, 3:00-3:45) is technically correct, which is often the best kind of correct. But never best-kind, because “best” is an adjective, which is like all those “-ly” words Stephen King tells you not to use yet frequently abuses.
  • Em dashes: Em dashes are the favorite punctuation mark of any writer born between 1964 and 1997. We love them! We use them in lieu of parentheses—though inside a sentence, they must be used in pairs—and to indicate someone’s speech has been interrup— Why the disdain for parentheses? Why not use ellipses(…)? Ellipses indicate trailing off. As for parentheses, believe me, when I first started writing, I was a serial parentheses abuser. Someone pointed out I wrote too many asides in my essays—which, by the way, can get annoying. (See what I did there?) As Microsoft Word improved, along with its alternatives and tools like Scrivener, grammar tools helpfully autocorrected the double hyphen (“–”) into an em dash. Em dashes may or may not be technically correct—still the best kind of correct, but not best-kind of correct, but they really do enhance readability. My tenth-grade English teacher may disagree, but my tenth-grade English teacher thought Led Zeppelin would give me a heart attack and Heinlein would rot my mind. (Jury’s out on the latter.) So, suck it, Clara.

So there you have it. Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

*Do they still make Nehi?