Category Archives: grammar rules for writers

Tips about how to avoid grammatical mistakes, use punctuation, and write clear sentences

June 26, 2016 · 8:40 am

Are You Botching Your Dialogue?

This post from Kristen Lamb’s blog gives some good basic guidelines for using and punctuating dialogue. These principles can be surprisingly hard to master, so a good primer is always helpful. The one I see most often is the use of an action as if it were a dialogue tag. To add to Kristen’s list, I’d say, “Watch out for that darn Autocorrect in Word. If you have it turned on and you accidentally type a period instead of a comma after the dialogue, Autocorrect automatically capitalizes the next letter, so you end up with two punctuation gaffes, not one.
Thanks, Kristen!

Kristen Lamb's Blog

Screen Shot 2016-06-24 at 10.43.36 AM

Today we are going to talk about dialogue. Everyone thinks they are great at it, and many would be wrong. Dialogue really is a lot tricker than it might seem.

Great dialogue is one of the most vital components of fiction. Dialogue is responsible for not only conveying the plot, but it also helps us understand the characters and get to know them, love them, hate them, whatever.

Dialogue is powerful for revealing character. This is as true in life as it is on the page. If people didn’t judge us based on how we speak, then business professionals wouldn’t bother with Toastmasters, speaking coaches or vocabulary builders.

I’d imagine few people who’d hire a brain surgeon who spoke like a rap musician and conversely, it would be tough to enjoy rap music made by an artist who spoke like the curator of an art museum.

Our word choices are…

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May 27, 2016 · 12:14 pm

8 Common Creative Writing Mistakes | Writing Forward

I’ve responded to this post with the thoughts and comments below. Share your own additions!

I agree on these issues! It’s amazing how many cuts I can find when I know I have to. And the result is almost always an improvement.

I especially have to catch redundancy. It’s a good tool for drafting, since you can try out six different ways of capturing a setting or an emotion. But then come back and pick the best one of the six!
A few points:

Additional “filler” (or “filter”) words are “**She heard** the wind whistling through the trees” vs. “The wind whistled through the trees,” and “**She saw,**” which works similarly. These are so hard to catch.

RE spell-check: Instead of turning off spell-check, turn off “autocorrect” functions. You will be notified of typos, but the computer will not try to guess what you really intended. I’ve seen some pretty crazy computer-supplied corrections!

Also, grammar-checkers are notoriously poor substitutes for your own knowledge. The one on my Word program misidentifies fragments and rails against all kinds of style choices that work beautifully to establish voice.

Finally, do give “older” books a chance, even if you know that these days, you don’t dare write in an older style. The Victorians, for example, lived in a slower age, but they wrote some of the most gripping fiction you’ll ever read.

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April 21, 2016 · 11:24 am

An Oldie but Goodie: 10 Things Writers Don’t Tell People

I think my non-writer friends probably don’t know these truths! Do yours? From Aliventures. (And I love her little riff on that/which at the beginning of this post. I’ve had some fun with the that/which distinction myself!)

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April 16, 2016 · 10:47 am

“That” or “Which”? What Would You Choose?

Buble quote speech on cloud space for text

A New Yorker editor writing in the Times Literary Supplement debates a grammar textbook writer! Loads of fun. I personally think the “which” in the sentence under scrutiny should be “that.” It clearly refers to the “sourness” and “relentlessness,” and yes, these are appositives, and yes, the point following “which” is essential to the meaning of the sentence. Do you agree?

Aren’t words a hoot?

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April 1, 2016 · 11:13 am

Parallelism in Writing for Voice and Style!

Bleu curve One of the hardest writing strategies to teach effectively is “parallel structure.” Yet it’s incredibly useful in all kinds of writing, argumentative and expository as well as literary.

In my last post, I used an example from a terrific education site on grammar to illustrate how sentences could be packed with detail using “absolutes.” This example powerfully illustrates, as well, how parallel structure works.

“Down the long concourse they came unsteadily, Enid favouring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time.”
(Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001)

What makes this an example of parallelism?

orange curve glipped Each descriptive phrase (in this case absolutes, which consist of a noun and its modifiers) precisely mirrors the grammatical form of the one that came before, with all the phrases ultimately connected to each other by an “coordinating conjunction,” in this case, “and.”

favouring

paddling

slapping

carrying

concentrating

measuring

In this example there’s also a parallelism of meaning: the first two phrases compare Enid’s and Alfred’s physical actions

favouring her damaged hip

paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet

But the heart of the parallel structure lies in the perfect repetition of the main verb forms.

green curve

Here’s another example, using participles (“-ing” forms) and nouns to create two parallel scaffolds:

“Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine.”
(Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm. Harper & Row, 1977)

Note the grammatical precision of the noun set: not just nouns preceded by “the” and adjectives but also each followed with a three-word prepositional phrase:

the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater

the green leaves of jewelweed by my side

the ragged red trunk of a pine

orange curve In literary writing, the use of parallelism, like the use of absolutes, can help you flow into your details so that they seem to be rhythmic extensions of your original clause, much like water flowing down a stream. In expository or argumentative writing, careful attention to parallelism can keep readers on track as you move through related ideas.

Here’s an example from one of my recent summaries on my other blog, College Composition Weekly (where I summarize recent research on the teaching of college writing). I’m presenting Steve Lamos’s argument in the March 2016 College English that job security for writing teachers not on the tenure track will remain elusive if the negative attitudes of college administrators and other powerful stakeholders are not addressed:

Although emotional labor is devalued across most educational contexts, Lamos writes, within more prestigious research universities it is especially “subject to a kind of gendered dismissal” based on a sense that it involves work that women find “inherently satisfying” and thus not in need of other compensation and that, by its nature, consists more of “pandering to difference” rather than enforcing academic standards (366).*

Whimsical road Depositphotos_17645691_s-2015

Use parallelism to eliminate tangles in your writing!

This sentence appears in the context of an academic discussion and is part of a “summary,” so it requires me to incorporate fairly complex information in a taut space. Parallelism holds the two points of this sentence together through the repetition of “that”:

on a sense

that it involves

and

that, by its nature, [it] consists

Readers of dense texts like this can benefit from knowing that as long as the long clauses are introduced by a repeated word and structure (“that + verb” in this case), they’re still in the same sentence, progressing through related points.

Writers surrender the power of parallelism when they forget that the last element of a list should echo the previous elements:

The lecture was accessible, helpful, and it gave me lots of good information.

He came in dripping sweat, panting for breath, and he was trembling with exhaustion.

Why not:

The lecture was accessible, helpful, and informative.

He came in dripping sweat, panting for breath, and trembling with exhaustion.

In both cases, parallelism has allowed you to cut empty words (in the second case, you could even cut “and”).

So for fiction and essay writers (as well as poets!), parallelism is a tool for adding detail, creating rhythm, and connecting ideas. For writers in other contexts, it can serve as a logical, connective tool.

*Bonus: many constructions other than lists joined with “and” benefit from—and usually actually require—parallelism. Here, the “more of/rather than” construction is cemented through the mirroring verbs “pandering”/”enforcing.” Other constructions requiring parallelism include “neither/nor”; “not only/but also”; and “both/and.” green curve flipped

Do you have favorite examples of parallelism as a literary device, from your own or others’ writing? Share!

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February 28, 2016 · 11:42 am

Commas Control Emphasis. Here’s How!

I have been thinking about the inordinate power of commas. Comma 1 I intuitively understood this power from my own writing, but I credit Martha Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar with making concrete what my instinctive ear told me: how such a simple little mark can help communicate precisely what we want readers to hear.

Grammar books and various grammar web sites, of course, lay down the kinds of apparently sacrosanct rules that drive real writers crazy. “You must, must, must put a comma there because the rules say so.”

Comma 2 On the one hand, not necessarily. On the other, it’s important to understand how certain principles governing things like punctuation have consequences for writing. I’ve worked hard not to be the natural Grammar Curmudgeon I am, one who smacks other people’s writing around for rule-breaking, but by golly, punctuation is a tool!

We’ve all seen those fun exercises where simply moving a few little marks around completely changes meaning. A simple example is “Woman without her man is nothing,” which, with just a few tweaks, comes to mean its opposite. (Can you do it? Give it a try!)

But punctuation also controls rhythm and emphasis, and commas are tough little drill sergeants, lining up every word in its place.

Take emphasis. Read this sentence aloud:

There is in fact a reason for what happened.

Comma 3 Now, in my view, whether or not we should set off the “interrupter” (“in fact”) with commas, as the grammar books instruct, is a judgment call. Leaving out the commas is fine. But when you add them, something happens. Listen:

There is, in fact, a reason for what happened.

To my ear, and Kolln substantiates this, the commas change the intonation and emphasis. In the first sentence, without the commas, I hear

There is in fact a REASON for what happened.

In the second sentence, the commas do what Kolln and my ear say they do, shifting the emphasis onto the words before the commas. So the sentence now reads

There IS, in FACT, a reason for what happened.

The meaning hasn’t particularly changed, but the way we hear it has. We shift our attention to the “facticity” of the claim. We get a beat on the FACT of this utterance.

Comma 4

But that’s not all that happens. The commas break up the flow of the sentence in ways that reinforce meter. In this case, it’s our old favorite, iambic pentameter, the most ubiquitous meter for English speakers (Shakespeare’s meter). And that change not only asks us to hit “is” and “fact” with extra emphasis, but also taps “REAson.” So that the sentence reads,

There IS, in FACT, a REAson for what happened.

Comma 5 And as a bonus:

In addition to illustrating one of the functions of commas—to reposition emphasis—these examples also illustrate how breaking one of those apparently sacrosanct rules we all hear again and again can actually give you an additional tool to control emphasis. How many times has someone told you to strike out “there is” and “there are” every time they crop up? But if you try to get rid of the “there is’ in this sentence, the emphasis on “reason” that persists through all three versions withers. Compare

I can tell you a reason for what happened.
The facts reveal a reason for what happened.

Nothing wrong with these sentences. But their message—that what seemed random or accidental is actually the result of some cause that the speaker is about to explain—is flatter, more subtle. That’s fine. But if you want to be assertive, if you want to firmly refute the idea that the event is random, accidental, then “There IS, in FACT, a REAson” is your go-to choice. Comma 6

And there is, in fact, a reason why.

Both the “there is/are” and “it is” force emphasis on the words that immediately follow them.

There is NO POINT in not liking asparagus.
It is TRUE that I liked asparagus when I was a child.
It is SAD that I don’t like asparagus now.

This effect holds for the contraction forms of these constructions —”it’s” and “there’s”—as well.

The bottom line: Punctuation and sentence structure choices give you more control over how readers “hear” what you write. Don’t ignore the rules; just recognize how understanding the flexibility they offer can leverage the power of your writing. Don’t want to emphasize ‘FACT”? Leave the commas out. Want to hit hard on “REAson”? Hang on to that much-maligned “There is.”

Buble quote speech on cloud space for text

Do you have examples of how commas and sentence structure control emphasis in your own writing? Decisions you’ve made about how to re-organize sentences to take advantage of this little power tool?

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Tagged as "It is", "there is/there are", commas, creative writng, ebooks publishing and selling, learning to write, Self-publishing, tips for writers, writing, Writing strategies

February 21, 2016 · 1:12 pm

Is the Hypercorrectness Troll Gobbling Up Your Grammar?

Writer with questions I remember one of the humorist Dave Barry’s satirical “Ask Mr. Language Person” columns years ago, in which the all-too-sure-of-himself Mr. Language Person opined that “‘me’ is always incorrect.” Barry was referring indirectly to an example of the phenomenon of “hypercorrectness,” which I’d argue leads to almost as many grammar slips as does its opposite, carelessness. I say “almost as many” because these slips are so common!

In a nutshell, a writer slips into hypercorrectness when he or she isn’t gut-sure about what is correct and inoculates him- or herself by making a grammatical choice that sounds just a teeny bit “fancy” and thus “must” be what an educated writer ought to opt for.

As with all grammar choices, whether or not a hypercorrectness slip will hurt you with that editor or agent you hope to impress, or whether it will get your prose chewed up in red in your business report, depends on whether or not your particular audience knows the difference or, for that matter, cares. I’ve seen so many kinds of errors, including just plain careless ones, in so many “erudite” places that I know it can be a toss-up whether your slip costs you an acceptance or gets ignored.

But I argue that knowledge is the power to choose with confidence. The “correct” choice sounds funny to you, so you’d rather go with the “incorrect” one because it feels more natural? Go for it. But it’s really nice to make that choice because you know what you’re doing and why you want it that way.

Free runners sport concept illustration

The single most ubiquitous hypercorrectness error, as Barry recognized, may be the prejudice against poor little “me.” And the single most common example of that prejudice is “between you and I.”

What? That’s wrong? Well, if you’re a purist, yes—for the same reason it’s wrong to write “the zombies were chasing George and I.”

Why? Because, in both cases, the pronouns are “objects” and should be in the “objective case”: that is, “me.”

There’s really a simple test. Strip out or move the proper name or problematic pronoun and see what you have:

Between I and you
The zombies were chasing I

See? Explosive set

Case two: Sometimes what sounds natural is better. E. g., the who/whom conundrum

I’ve suggested in a prior post that if choosing between these two options leaves you sweating, go with “who.” The situations in which “who” won’t work for almost all readers are rare: say, when you’re inverting the sentence or inserting the pronoun behind an actual preposition:

To whom are you speaking?
This is the person for whom I was waiting.

If you are writing Downton Abbey fan fiction, okay, you’ll have to master these forms. But in most cases

Who are you talking to?
That’s who I was waiting for.

will pass muster with almost everyone, even if they are technically incorrect. But as I wrote in my earlier post, the correct forms,

Whom are you talking to?
That’s whom I was waiting for.

Sad Editing! can actually sound more jarring in many contexts than the errors.

But the troll of hypercorrectness comes charging out from under the bridge when a writer gets paranoid and decides that “whom” sounds like what a smart person would say. Then we end up with

He didn’t say whom would be going to lunch.
Don’t give money to whomever asks for it.

cartoonguns

In both cases, the correct choice—and the more unobtrusive choice regardless of what’s correct—is “who.” (For those who enjoy these kinds of things, the rule is that the case of the pronoun is governed by its role in its own clause, not the clause in which it’s embedded.) You can actually apply the same test as for the “I/me” choice: you wouldn’t write, ” He didn’t say her would be going to lunch.” It’s clear you need the subject case.

Case 3:

I came across this usage (though not this exact sentence) in a self-published book just the other day:

Our worries lied in the way he was behaving.

Obviously, I can’t know what prompted the writer to make this choice. But I suspect it’s another instance of hypercorrectness, based on the Mr.-Language-Person-type precept that, in this case, “‘lay’ is always incorrect.” We’ve heard and heard and heard that people don’t “lay,” chickens do. So it must follow that anywhere our uneducated ears order us to say “lay,” we must really need “lie.”

Uh, no.

Confused business man, short term memory loss

There’s really no test or easy fix for this one. If you aren’t sure but really want to be, you have to look it up. I will say that the use of “lay” as in “I’m going to lay out in the sun for a while” has become so universal that many an otherwise persnickety person will read right past “lay” in this usage. They’ll probably read past “we laid out in the sun yesterday” (yes, “lay” is the correct past tense of “lie”). But I suspect that most readers would hiccup at “We lied out in the sun yesterday.”

Moral? Sometimes it’s better to be technically wrong than hypercorrect. If you really want to be correct, don’t guess. When in doubt, find out!

Magic book

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February 10, 2016 · 5:03 pm

Terrific Post on Style for Writers!

Chuck Wendig responds to a reader who finds sentence fragments troublesome (they make writing “unreadable,” in the commenter’s view). If you haven’t met Chuck yet, you’re in for a ride, though you’d best leave your Sunday-go-to-meetin’ expectations at home. I envy his verbal energy!

Explosive set

What I love about this post is that it celebrates the incredible flexibility of language, all the ways that writers can whip it up and lay it down and make it their own (in the great tradition of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland!). Wendig illustrates the power of the dreaded fragment with examples from some of the greatest of writers. He reminds us that rules are the groundwork but imagination and a writer’s ear are the scaffolding that builds palaces on those placid rules.

My own caveat is that when I was teaching, so many of my students had a tough time recognizing things like fragments. Especially fragments! The lack of some kind of internal sense of what “a sentence” is may not have handicapped those with the drive and verve to become creative writers; imagination and ear may have been enough.

But I argue (and Wendig cautions) that it’s vital to learn such “basics” of language because if you don’t, you can’t make choices. You can’t switch your verbal code to fit it to different contexts, for example, to a business setting where a lively fragment-sequined style will simply be out of place. You probably can’t write that query letter we all sweat over. At least you can’t write it with confidence that you can decide when to explode on the page and when to hold back.

So many of my students hoped to be great novelists. I couldn’t help worrying that without the ability to choose the linguistic strategies they needed in a given context, they would be handicapped if the whole great-novelist thing didn’t come off. As it so often doesn’t . . . at least not as fast as we’d like it to.

Do you agree with Wendig? What is your fragment strategy? Do you have a favorite “fragment passage” to pass on?

Novel!

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Tagged as creative writng, Editors, learning to write, sentence fragments, teaching writing, writing, writing novels, Writing strategies

January 28, 2016 · 10:52 am

8 Words to Seek & Destroy in Your Writing

A great reminder post1 So important to double-check these words to make sure they actually do work in our sentences before letting them stand. I echo Orwell’s advice, though, especially about the various forms of the verb “to be” (was, is, am, are, etc.). I always ask myself whether I can find a strong action verb rather than a being verb when I’m tempted to fall back on one. Yet I’ve also seen sentences where writers twisted themselves into knots trying to avoid “to be.” Once in a while, the shortest distance between two points is a nice little linking verb!