How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013
Still wrong
How to not write wrong
Certain grammatical mistakes are commonly made in spoken but not written English, and thus won’t be addressed at length in this book. Examples include ain’t; of instead of have in expressions like He could of come; them instead of those in expressions like one of them things; and regionalisms like He done wrecked the car. The one that probably comes up the most—as it’s a feature of many nonstandard dialects, including African-American Vernacular English—is a transposition of past and participle forms of irregular verbs.
[He seen it coming.]
He saw it coming.
[I had went to watch that movie when it first come out.]
I had gone to watch that movie when it first came out.
a. Subjunctive
The subjunctive mood has been losing sway in the English language over the centuries, but it’s still got some sway left. Basically, the subjunctive calls for a shift in the verb to be in reference to untrue scenarios; the word if is usually a giveaway.
[If I was you, I would take that class.]
If I were you, I would take that class.
Note that if the scenario followed by if is not necessarily untrue—that is, if it’s in doubt—the standard past tense is called for, and the subjunctive is hypercorrection.
[I asked him if he were happy with our marriage.]
I asked him if he was happy with our marriage.
[Check what’s in the refrigerator to find out if he were in the house last night.]
Check what’s in the refrigerator to find out if he was in the house last night.
b. Like (III)
Like still doesn’t cut the mustard when it’s followed by in:
[Like in France, American TV is a case of dumb and dumber.]
As in France, American TV is a case of dumb and dumber.
That’s an easy fix, but a comparable misuse of unlike is more challenging.
[Unlike in the higher atmospheres, airplanes frequently encounter turbulence when they’re about to land.]
Airplanes often run into turbulence when they’re about to land. That’s not true in higher atmospheres.
c. (Don’t) Let ’Em Dangle
A similar like mistake is:
[Like his first trial, Morgan was acquitted.]
Again, the fix is to use as in:
As in his first trial, Morgan was acquitted.
This error is an example of a dangling modifier. Here are some more examples from students’ writing:
[By including several charts along with the story, readers are encouraged to understand the long-term trends.]
[Being the most spectacular event of the year, newspapers were obligated to devote major coverage to the hurricane.]
[As an expert on fiscal recovery, his comments were listened to with intense interest.]
[By reversing the color scheme, the eye is captured.]
[Claiming to be a simple man leading an ordinary life of a male as he enjoys watching football with his buddy’s, Smith’s lifestyle is far from ordinary]. (For buddy’s, see “Apostrophes,” II.B.1.)
(From a review of a new bra by Victoria’s Secret) [Sitting in class or dancing at the bar, the bra performed well…Though slightly pricey, your breasts will thank you.]
The grammatical problem in those sentences (and I apologize if I seem to be stating the obvious) is that Morgan didn’t resemble his first trial; readers didn’t include the charts; newspapers were not the most spectacular event; the eye doesn’t reverse the color scheme; his comments were not an expert; Smith’s lifestyle didn’t claim to be a simple man; the bra doesn’t sit in class or dance at a bar; and the reader’s breasts are not pricey. (Pause for snarky comment.) In each case, the italicized word or phrase is the subject of the sentence, and the opening phrase—up to the comma, that is—has to modify, describe, or characterize the subject and nothing but the subject.
To get technical for just a minute, I’ll note that this is a problem only with introductory phrases (which do not contain a subject and verb), not clauses (which do). So there is no dangler issue in the following:
Since he is running for mayor next year, he is resigning all his board memberships. (Opens with dependent clause.)
Kris is the starting center on the basketball team, but Jessica wants to replace her. (Opens with independent clause.)
An interesting thing about danglers is that a rather select group of writers commit them: the minority who would even attempt a complex sentence. They haven’t quite mastered the skill of putting one of these together, and thus can get themselves in rather spectacular trouble, but at least they realize that this level of complexity is, as Hamlet said, a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Relevant as well is that danglers are very common—and, to a certain extent, acceptable—in speech. When talking, some “mistakes” are okay. Did you notice that the previous sentence has a dangling modifier (mistakes don’t talk)? In conversation, I bet you wouldn’t. As another example, let’s suppose I’m speaking with someone who’s an expert in ancient religion, and I say: “As an expert in ancient religion, I wonder what you think of devil worship.” That is a dangling modifier: “I” am not a religion expert. In speech, we give this a pass. In writing, we—and by we I mean the professors and editors of the world—do not.
That’s unfortunate, because danglers spring incessantly from many writers’ fingers; it takes a substantial amount of discipline and rigor to prune them from our prose. (If you haven’t guessed, I am one of those writers.) Consequently, much more so than the other errors on my list, they show up in well-respected publications, such as the New York Times Book Review (rather than providing the meticulous examination of the process of looking…we are treated to rhetorical flights that provide little perspective of any useful kind), the New Yorker (A major political donor, his greatest concern is to protect Israel), and the Chronicle of Higher Education (Having made it successfully through all three gantlets, all of the rejections I experienced along the way have become only vague memories).
How to avoid danglers? A simple strategy will help you smoke these bad boys out. First of all, you have to recognize sentences that have this structure: MODIFIER-COMMA-SUBJECT-VERB. The vast majority of the time, the part of such a sentence before the comma will either:
· Begin with Like, Unlike, or As. (Example: Like most of the student body, Rogoff has spent an inordinate amount of time avoiding hard classes.)
· Contain a gerund, that is, a verb in the —ing form. (Being an inquisitive sort, I wonder what you ate for breakfast.)
· Begin with the infinitive form of a verb. (To maximize your chances of losing weight, you should avoid fried food.)
· Begin with one or more participles. (Shaken and not stirred, James Bond’s martinis are a twentieth-century icon.)
· Consist of a noun phrase. (A popular mayor, Potter is running unopposed for reelection.)
Once you recognize the sentence, circle the subject, the modifier, and the verb. Then see if it makes sense if you keep all the elements but change the order to this: SUBJECT-COMMA-MODIFIER-COMMA-VERB. If it does—as in all of the examples above—you’re good to go. If it doesn’t, you have a dangler.
So take one of my students’ troubled sentences:
[Being the most spectacular event of the year, newspapers devoted major coverage to the hurricane.]
Shifted, it would be:
[Newspapers, being the most spectacular event of the year, devoted major coverage to the hurricane.]
Obviously no good. There are any number of ways to fix this sentence. Probably the best thing to do is to follow the student’s original instinct and start with the hurricanes. So:
The hurricane was the most spectacular event of the year, and newspapers devoted major coverage to it.
To make matters even more complicated, danglers are sometimes okay.
That sentence is an example of a certain class of opening modifiers, sometimes referred to as sentence adverbs, that get a pass when it comes to the whole dangling-modifier question. These are words or phrases that, rather than modify the subject, convey the speaker’s or writer’s attitude, or generally characterize the content of the rest of the sentence. For example:
Fortunately, the game will go on as scheduled.
To be perfectly honest, that course is pure hogwash.
Summing up this section, it’s pretty easy to spot a dangling modifier.
d. Parallel Universes
The parallelism problem crops up most commonly in lists. You want to make sure that every item is in the same basic form.
[I like to hike, play disk golf, and just goofing off.]
In the example above, the phrase I like to applies to the first two items in the list, but is mysteriously dropped for the third. As the Beatles once sang, “You can’t do that.” So change to:
I like hiking, playing disk golf, and just goofing off.
Sometimes, you need to just be listless:
[He has experience in copyediting, graphics, and has won two professional awards.]
He has experience in copyediting and graphics, and has won two professional awards.
The alluring phrase as well as creates a parallel problem in 1, below. It’s technically fixed in 2, but the sentence is awkward (a word you will run into again in Part III, many times).
1. [World AIDS Day is devoted to spreading further awareness of HIV and AIDS, as well as a time of remembrance for the millions who have died because of the virus.]
2. [World AIDS Day is devoted to spreading further awareness of HIV and AIDS and is a time of remembrance for the millions who have died because of the virus.]
3. World AIDS Day is devoted to spreading further awareness of HIV and AIDS. It’s a time of remembrance for the millions who have died because of the virus.
e. The Sports Conditional
This isn’t exclusively found in a sports context, but for some reason, athletes, fans, and commentators are unaccountably drawn to the phrase would have in considering scenarios that didn’t happen.
[If Johnson would have caught that ball, the Bisons would have won the game.]
If Johnson had caught the ball, the Bisons would have won the game.
The sports conditional seems particularly irresistible when wishing or hoping is involved:
“I wish I would have took a swing at that ball,” Prendergast said.
Well, you can’t change a quotation, but if Prendergast were writing his sentiments, the correct grammar would be:
I wish I had taken a swing at that ball.
Not technically an error, but pretty hackneyed, is “the sports present,” in which athletes and sportswriters recite hypothetic or conditional events in the present tense.
[If he makes that interception, the whole game changes.]
If he had made that interception, the whole game would have changed.
f. Between You and I, This One Bears Some Study
Take a look at this sentence and try to spot the problem word:
[It would be great if you could come to the concert with my wife and I.]
It’s the shortest and final one, I. Traditional grammar dictates that it should be replaced with me, on the principle that prepositions (such as with) are followed by the objective (me) rather than the subjective case (I).
It would be great if you could come to the concert with my wife and me.
When only one pronoun is involved, absolutely no one has trouble with the principle. No one, that is, would write:
[It would be great if you could come to the concert with I.]
Yet many, many people have problems when there are two or more elements in the noun phrase, especially when one of the elements is a pronoun indicating the speaker or writer.
[Between you and I, that project is a disaster.]
[The teacher gave the assignment to she and I.]
Between you and me, that project is a disaster.
The teacher gave the assignment to her and me.
Some authorities, notably Steven Pinker of Harvard, have argued in favor of the subjective case in this situation, thus provoking the wrath of traditionalists. The argument is that (drawing from the above examples) my wife and I, you and I, and she and I are better viewed as self-contained units than as a combination of pronouns. And, as units, they can be either object or subject. It’s the same (Pinker would contend) as a title like The King and I. And no one would write, I won two tickets to see The King and Me.
I have to admit I see the logic in the argument. But it doesn’t matter. Long and at this point unbreakable custom dictates that you must write my wife and me, you and me, and her and me in these cases.
g. Whomever
This word has only slightly higher grammatical standing than ain’t, but it’s used by millions more people. It yields 11.7 million hits on Google and more than 1,000 on Google News, which consists of articles written in the last month or so by professional and semiprofessional writers. The most recent (posted just two hours ago as I write) came from the Web site of New York City’s Fox News affiliate:
[Meat Loaf has a bone to pick with whomever started the rumor that he passed out at a balloon festival in New Jersey this past weekend.]
Like an overwhelming majority of the examples on Google News (and in my students’ work), whomever is incorrect here. You can see why the writer made the mistake—with is a preposition, and prepositions are traditionally followed by the objective case. But whomever started the rumor, etc. is a unit—a noun phrase, to be exact—so the correct word to kick it off is whoever.
Whomever has gotten so popular that people have started to use it even when there’s not a preposition to be found in the immediate area. A subject heading on a gamers’ bulletin board reads: “ATTN: Whomever owns zombieland server.” No excuse for that.
As you proceed on life’s journey, you may be tempted to use whomever. Resist the temptation, except in two relatively rare cases.
1. It’s the last word in the sentence and is immediately followed by a verb other than to be or by a preposition. I’ll go with whomever.
2. It’s a true object. The doctors will treat whomever the sick boy coughed on.
Looking at the awkwardness of those two sentences, I’m going to amend my rule, as follows:
Never use whomever.
h. Fragments of My Imagination
Sentence fragments (SFs) are a weird mistake. For one thing, virtually every professional writer uses them. Including me. Including me, of course, is a SF. It’s defined as a collection of words that’s treated as a sentence (that is, the first letter is capitalized and a period, question mark, or exclamation point comes at the end) but, because it doesn’t contain both subject and verb, doesn’t have the grammatical standing of a sentence.
Despite their popularity and usefulness, SFs earn some serious wrath in virtually every writing handbook on my shelf. The trouble is the examples these books give. Almost none of them are recognizable as anything that comes across my desk or appears on my computer screen. For example, The Little, Brown Handbook gives this as an instance of what not to do:
With the links, users can move to other Web sites. That they want to consult.
In twenty years of teaching, I’ve never had something like that handed in to me. There are a dozen or more examples in the chapter, and the only one that rings slightly true is this:
Uncle Marlon drew out his tales. And embellished them.
The thing is, I don’t particularly mind the Uncle Marlon SF. Which leads me to a possibly useful generalization. (I hope you noticed that the previous sentence was a SF.) Sentence fragments can be acceptable and effective, in all but the most formal writing, if they come following a deliberate pause for effect. And if they’re used sparingly! (I can’t stop.) Reading aloud is especially important here. If you do, you’ll find that sometimes the pause is for humor (that talkative Marlon), sometimes for drama, sometimes for irony, and sometimes merely for emphasis.
So.
All that being said, an ill-conceived SF can be a really bad mistake. I do occasionally get them handed in to me. For example:
[Of the students surveyed only 138 knew it was advised by the CDC to be tested for HIV annually when engaged in risky behavior. Classified as having multiple partners, unprotected relations, or regular work in risky medical fields].
Of the students surveyed, only 138 knew the CDC advises annual HIV tests for people who engage in “risky behavior,” defined as having multiple partners or unprotected sexual relations, or working in risky medical fields.
If an SF is pointed out on a piece of your writing by a teacher, supervisor, or writer, I would advise you to eschew fragments for six months, during which time you’ll likely come to a better understanding of what a sentence is and isn’t. At that point, you can start playing around with SFs again. End of advice. And end of Part II.
* Sticklers will put a comma after the but in that sentence. See the next footnote.
* That’s not to say that sound is never a factor in comma use. In many situations, a comma is optional, and the rhythm of the sentence is an important factor in deciding whether to use one. For example, if a sentence-opening conjunction is followed by a parenthetical phrase, you may (but aren’t required to) use a comma after the conjunction. But, as far as vacations go, my whole family prefers the beach. In this case, it makes sense to choose based on whether you hear a pause after But.
* If you’re going for an old-fashioned, Henry James kind of thing, you can use a semicolon before an and, but, yet, or for.
Congress voted to fund twenty-seven pork-barrel projects this term; but the president had other things in mind.
* I haven’t been able to find a source to back me up on this, but I have always maintained that less should be used when the quantity is one, as in the song lyric “One less bell to answer.” I also insist that supermarket signs reading “Five items or less” are correct, since the phrase than that is understood at the end.