The lesser seven - The life-changing magic of tidying up (your prose) - The stuff in the front

Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

The lesser seven
The life-changing magic of tidying up (your prose)
The stuff in the front

I’m sure there are many more secondary nonrules than these seven, but these are the ones I’m most often asked about (or challenged on), so:

1. Contractions Aren’t Allowed in Formal Writing.

This may be a fine rule to observe if you want to sound as if you learned English on your native Mars, but there’s not a goshdarn thing wrong with “don’t,” “can’t,” “wouldn’t,” and all the rest of them that people naturally use, and without them many a piece of writing would turn out stilted and wooden. The likes of “I’d’ve” and “should’ve” may be too loosey-goosey outside casual prose, but generally speaking: Contractions are why we invented the apostrophe, so make good use of both.

Speaking of “should’ve”:

If you want to convey the particular sound of a particular character’s speech—and I warn you, I will have more to say later about the dangers of phonetic dialogue—please use “should’ve,” “could’ve,” “would’ve,” and so forth. Don’t try to get creative with “shoulduv,” “coulduv,” “woulduv,” or some other made-up spelling. They sound precisely the same as the regular spelling, so use the regular spelling and no one will yell at you and we’ll all be a lot happier.

2. The Passive Voice Is to Be Avoided.

A sentence written in the passive voice is one whose subject would, in a sentence constructed in the active voice, be its object. That is:

Active Voice: The clown terrified us.

Passive Voice: We were terrified by the clown.

In a sentence written in the passive voice, the thing that is acted upon is frontloaded, and the thing doing the acting comes at the end. In either case, we can easily agree that clowns are terrifying.

Often, in a sentence constructed in the passive voice, the actor is omitted entirely. Sometimes this is done in an attempt to call attention to a problem without laying blame (“The refrigerator door was left open”) and sometimes, in weasel-like fashion, to avoid taking responsibility: “Mistakes were made,” for instance.

Here’s a nifty trick that comes in handy when you’re assessing your own writing:

If you can add “by zombies” to the end of a sentence (or, yes, “by the clown”), you’ve written a sentence in the passive voice.

All this said, there’s nothing wrong with sentences constructed in the passive voice—you’re simply choosing where you want to put the sentence’s emphasis—and I see nothing objectionable in, say,

The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out.

since the point of interest is the cleanness of the house and not the identity of the cleaner.

But many a sentence can be improved by putting its true protagonist at the beginning, so that’s something to be considered.*6

3. Sentence Fragments. They’re Bad.

I give you one of my favorite novel openers of all time, that of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

A, Isn’t that great? Don’t you want to run off and read the whole novel now? Do it! I’ll wait here for three months. B, Please count that excerpt’s complete sentences, and let me know when you get beyond zero.*7

You may not be Charles Dickens, but a well-wielded sentence fragment (or, as here, a whole bunch of them) can be a delightful thing. It’s another example of the conscious choices you make in writing—it’s one thing to artfully create a scene and an atmosphere with your fragments; it’s another entirely to lazily punctuate unrelated thoughts. Wield your fragments with a purpose, and mindfully. Otherwise they can end up sounding like asthma.

4. A Person Must Be a “Who.”

I don’t know why violation of this nonrule flips some people out, but it does, and they can get loudly cranky about it.

So just as loudly: A person can be a “that.”

The guy who wrote “You’re the One That I Want” from Grease knew precisely what he was doing. The one that I want, the teachers that attended the conference, the whoevers that whatevered.

A thing, by the way, can also be a “who,” as in “an idea whose time has come,” because you certainly don’t want to be writing “an idea the time of which has come,” or worse. (Though worse might not exist.)

5. “None” Is Singular.

If you can find fault with the sentence “None of us are going to the party,” you have an ear better attuned to the English language than mine.

“None” can certainly be used singularly, if that which is to be emphasized is a collection of discrete individuals: “None of the suspects, it seems, is guilty of the crime.” But if you mean to emphasize the feelings, or actions, or inactions, of a group as a group, go ahead and use the plural: “None of them are guilty.”

6. “Whether” Must Never Be Accompanied by “Or Not.”

In many sentences, particularly those in which the word “whether” is being used as a straight-up “if,” no “or not” is called for.

Not only do I not care what you think, I don’t care whether you think.

But see as well:

Whether or not you like movie musicals, I’m sure you’ll love Pitch Perfect.

Try deleting the “or not” from that sentence and see what happens.

That’s the whole thing: If you can delete the “or not” from a “whether or not” and your sentence continues to make sense, then go ahead and delete it. If not, don’t.

7. Never Introduce a List with “Like.”

“Great writers of the twenty-first century like Louis Sachar, Rebecca Stead, and Lois Lowry…”

Screech of brakes as a squad car of grammar police pulls that burgeoning sentence to the side of the road and demands that “like” be replaced with “such as.”

I confess to some guilt here, as I had it drummed into my head that inclusive lists should be introduced exclusively with “such as,” and that to start such a list with “like” suggests comparison. By that logic, in the example above, Sachar, Stead, and Lowry may be like great twenty-first-century writers but are not themselves great twenty-first-century writers.

But who could possibly read such a sentence and think such a thing?

And that’s often the problem, isn’t it? In writing and in so many things: that we accept things we’re taught without thinking about them at all.

This particular nonrule, I eventually learned and you may be pleased to note, sprung up*8 only as recently as the mid-twentieth century, and it has little foundation in anything other than personal preference.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with the slightly more grand-sounding “such as.” But feel free to like “like.”

SKIP NOTES

*1  “Actually” has been a weakness of mine my entire life, speaking and writing, and I realized that it was contagious the first time I heard my two-year-old nephew declare, “Actually, I like peas.”

*2  Oh, yes indeed. I’ll meet you in Chapter 7: Pet Peeves.

*3   I’m always on my guard for monotonous repetition, whether it’s of a pet word—all writers have pet words—or a pet sentence construction. Two sentences in a single paragraph beginning with the same introductory term, especially “But,” are usually one sentence too many.

*4   I admit that it’s not entirely fair of me to present two isolated sentences and make a ruling about them. When you read, you’re listening to the text not only sentence by sentence but also paragraph by paragraph and page by page, for a larger sense of sweep and rhythm, a lot like the way you listen to a song for its beat and how it makes you feel, not just for those two lines in the refrain that don’t mean anything.

*5  Later and wisely rewritten to “To boldly go where no one has gone before.”

*6  By zombies.

*7  You could argue that the second half of the bit beginning “As much mud” constitutes a complete and freestanding sentence. I’m not in the mood to make that argument, but you feel free.

*8  Hold on there, People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. “Sprung” rather than “sprang” is perfectly correct. Look it up.