Writing Tips
for clarity and concisenessArchive for March, 2008
Popular Foreign Language Terms
I came across this sentence while reading last night:
La Día de los Muertos is the day when families hold reunions at the cemetery.
If you know Spanish at all, you probably know that there’s an error in this reference to the well-known Spanish holy day, the Day of the Dead.
Día is irregular in Spanish; though it ends in “a” it takes “el” not “la.” The correct form is El Día de los Muertos, and often, simply Día de los Muertos.
When you use words that are foreign to you, take special care to get them right.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Appositive
The Chicago Manual of Style defines an appositive as follows:
[An appositive is] a noun that immediately follows another noun or noun phrase in order to define or further identify it {George Washington, our first president, was born in Virginia}.
The sentence below illustrates the strange results that occur when an appositive is in the wrong place:
John appeared before Christina, a slender, bearded man with horn-rimmed glasses.
The appositive is “a slender, bearded man with horn-rimmed glasses.” Because of its placement, this sentence tells us that Christina is a slender, bearded man with horn-rimmed glasses.
To fix it, move the appositive:
John, a slender, bearded man with horn-rimmed glasses, appeared before Christina.
Question? Comment?
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Winner of Puncuation Contest
The winner of the punctuation contest is Rachel Boehm. Congratulations, Rachel!
Here’s the original sentence:
The days were too short, and, strangely, tomorrow, with its news reports, new bits of information, new insights, tomorrow seemed unreachable until all at once it had been there and was yesterday.
Here is Rachel’s corrected version:
The days were too short. Tomorrow, with its news reports–new bits of information, new insights–tomorrow seemed unreachable until all at once it had been there and was yesterday.
This is a good use of dashes. Notice, too, that Rachel made the original sentence even more manageable by breaking it into two; she also deleted two words: and and strangely.
The only thing that I would debate is the location of the dashes. In the original, news reports, new bits of information, new insights, have equal weight and are independent of each other. Rachel’s placement of dashes assumes that new insights and new bits of information flow only from news reports.
Since humans also gain insights and bits of information through reflection, conversation, direct experience, and in other ways, I’d preserve the original independence by placing the dashes in a different location. Also, because removing and and strangely changes the meaning, I’d leave them in. But I would delete the second occurrence of tomorrow:
The days were too short, and strangely, tomorrow–with its news reports, new bits of information, new insights–seemed unreachable, until all at once it had been there, and was yesterday.
Note that I also added two commas, to slow the pace of the sentence.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Hint for Punctuation Contest
I haven’t received any responses to the current punctuation contest yet, so here is a hint: Use two dashes to set off a parenthetical remark, as shown in the sentence below:
Farmer Blackie threw back his head and laughed–I had forgotten that the eggs were in my pocket, and smashed them all when I sat down–and turned the pickup truck toward town.
To save you the time of looking it up, here’s the punctuation contest sentence, which is in dire need of a set of dashes:
The days were too short, and, strangely, tomorrow with its news reports, new bits of information, new insights, tomorrow seemed unreachable until all at once it had been there and was yesterday.
There’s extra credit for a tiny deletion.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Punctuation Contest
Another contest. This time, I invite you to make the following sentence more clear by adding some punctuation and deleting one word.
The days were too short, and, strangely, tomorrow with its news reports, new bits of information, new insights, tomorrow seemed unreachable until all at once it had been there and was yesterday.
As always, I’ll publish the winner’s name in this blog.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Winner Grammar Contest #2
Danielo, a self-described pathological contrarian, cycling snob, aspiring entertainer, anarchist, classical cynic, and jackass, is the winner of Grammar Contest #2. Congratulations, Danielo!
The challenge was to find the problem with the following sentence:
A beautiful high-pressure day of frosty crystalline air, blue skies, and brilliant sunshine.
Danielo wrote, “I would say that it lacks a predicate clause.”
That’s right. A sentence contains a subject (a noun or pronoun, with or without adjectives) and a predicate (a verb, with or without an object and/or adverbs). The example above is simply a long and elaborate clause consisting primarily of nouns (day, air, skies, sunshine) and adjectives (beautiful, high-pressure, frosty, crystalline, blue, brilliant). It doesn’t qualify as a sentence because there is no predicate, no verb, no action. This beautiful clause just sits there.
To fix it, treat the clause as a subject by adding a predicate to the end:
A beautiful high-pressure day of frosty crystalline air, blue skies, and brilliant sunshine greeted her the next morning.
Another option is to attach a subject and predicate to the beginning of the clause:
It was a beautiful high-pressure day of frosty crystalline air, blue skies, and brilliant sunshine.
Comments?
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Emphasis Extremis
This morning, a crow strutted to the sliding glass door at the back of my place, looked in, cawed several times, then flew away. He/she has done this every morning for the past couple months.
Since I have caught crows in the act of dropping peanut shells in the birdbath, I know that someone has been offering them peanuts. Apparently, my daily visitor makes the rounds every day, demanding more peanuts from other humans in his neighborhood.
But I enjoy looking beyond the obvious, and turned to the Medicine Cards for a different perspective on Crow’s daily appearances. Here’s an excerpt:
Since Crow is the keeper of sacred law, Crow can bend the laws of the physical universe and “shape shift.” … This art includes doubling, or being in two places at one time consciously: taking on another physical form, and becoming the “fly on the wall” to observe what is happening far away.
As the entry continues, we get the following:
The law which states that “all things are born of women” is signified by Crow…Different formulas for salvation are demanded by each “true faith.”…You must “caw” the shots as you see them…As you learn to allow your personal integrity to be your guide…Your personal will can then emerge…
This view of crow intrigues me, fascinates me. But my eyes and mind stumble over the many scare quotes and italics, and at the end of the reading, I feel exhausted and irritated.
If you want to emphasize certain words, go right ahead. That’s a legitimate use for italics. But if you overdo it, you risk losing the emphasis and annoying the reader.
In the same way, create a scare quote by placing a word or words in quotation marks. But use scare quotes sparingly. Otherwise, you dilute the power of your writing and annoy readers.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
“Scare Quote”
Quotation marks sometimes alert readers that the writer is using a word or words in a special or unusual way. The nickname for this usage is “scare quote.”
In the sentence below, the words in quotation marks comprise a scare quote:
Tuesday’s all-night debate was another clear opportunity to end the war, yet Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it a “publicity stunt.”
At first glance, it seemed to me that this scare quote wasn’t necessary because there’s nothing unusual about the term publicity stunt. On the other hand, as Amy Einsohn writes in The Copyeditor’s Handbook, “…Double quotations marks may also be used to indicate that a word or phrase is being used ironically.”
In that case, the author of the sample sentence above used the scare quote appropriately: to convey his/her view that labeling an all-night debate to end the war as a publicity stunt is absurd.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Grammar Contest #2
It’s already Wednesday, time for Grammar Contest #2.
What’s wrong with the following sentence?
A beautiful high-pressure day of frosty crystalline air, blue skies, and brilliant sunshine.
As before, if you are the first person to send the correct answer, I’ll publish your name and other information you would like readers to know about you.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
p.s.
Some unfinished business. Chiropractor Mitch Davis of Lauren, South Carolina, who won last week’s grammar contest, says that there are over 100 distinct chiropractic techniques, and that the Gonstead Technique is one of the finest.
Grammar Contest Winner(s)
Mitch Davis, a chiropractor, is the official winner of last week’s grammar contest. A close runner-up is Lyn in the Union of South Africa, who also had the correct answer but sent it in a few hours later than Mitch did.
The challenge was to find the problem with the sentence below:
Dr. Gonstead was a pioneer in the chiropractic profession, developing equipment and a method of analysis that used more than one criteria to verify the precise location of vertebral subluxation.
Mitch wrote, “Gonstead did not use one criterion, but several criteria.”
Lyn put it this way: “I think the word ‘criteria’ should be ‘criterion.’”
Correct. The problem is that the sample sentence modifies the plural “criteria” with the adjective “one,” mixing singular and plural. Here are two ways to make it right:
Dr. Gonstead was a pioneer in the chiropractic profession, developing equipment and a method of analysis that used more than one criterion to verify the precise location of vertebral subluxation.
Dr. Gonstead was a pioneer in the chiropractic profession, developing equipment and a method of analysis that used several criteria to verify the precise location of vertebral subluxation.
Cheers,
Tara Treasurefield
Treasurefield Communications
