Word Wise

Well, That's That

The word “that” makes lots of people k-k-k-krazy. “That” introduces a dependent clause, but only when it sounds right, which means, scarily, it’s a matter of how it sounds to you. There are no hard-and-fast rules, no absolutes. People hate that sort of thing. But it’s true. You’re more or less on your own when it comes to “that.” “You will search books on English usage in vain for any uniform, much less helpful, guidance on the subject,” wrote Theodore Bernstein, former assistant managing editor of The New York Times, in his book Watch Your Language. Or, as Dr. Seuss put it, “You have brains in your head / You have feet in your shoes / You can steer yourself in any direction you choose / You're on your own / And you know what you know / You are the guy who'll decide where to go.” That said, here are some things to consider: Don’t use “that” when a dependent clause immediately follows a form of the verb “to say,” as in “Wilhelmina said she was going to run Mode magazine.” Do use “that” when a time element follows the verb, as in “Wilhelmina said Thursday that she was going to run Mode magazine.” (“Thursday” is the time element. Without “that” the sentence could mean either that on Thursday Wilhelmina said she was going to run Mode, or on Thursday she would start to run Mode – an important difference that “that” clears up.) Do use “that” after verbs like advocate, assert, point out, and declare, as in “Henry asserted that his love for Betty was real." Do use “that” when the point of the sentence is at the end. “Justin found out the watch he bought on 57th Street and Madison Avenue wasn’t a real Rolex Cosmograph Daytona.” Is the point of the sentence that he bought a watch or that the watch he bought wasn’t a real Rolex Cosmograph Daytona? Hard to tell. Add “that,” though, and you know: “Justin found out that the watch he bought on 57th Street and Madison Avenue wasn’t a real Rolex Cosmograph Daytona.”  Now you don’t have to plod through the whole sentence to learn that the watch not being a genuine Rolex Cosmograph Daytona was the point, not that he bought a watch in the first place. AP Style says “When in doubt, include ‘that.’ Omission can hurt. Inclusion never does.” Sounds like good advice.

Note: To refresh your memory, dependent clauses are groups of words that contain a subject and verb but do not express a complete thought.

The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup

• I was searching for something on The New York Times Web site earlier this week and as so often happens I didn’t find what I was looking for but I did find something interesting I wanted to pass along (despite it being from 2004, it’s still relevant). An interview with the editor of the letters-to-the-editor page, the piece is an excellent primer about how to write letters to the editor (whether it’s to the Times or elsewhere)  and what papers look for in letters. He writes: “Your suggested length for letters is about 150 words. Why so short? (Or, as one writer put it after I cited the brevity of the Gettysburg Address, 'Why does Lincoln get 250 and the rest of us a measly 150?')…Ideally, the letters page should be a forum for a variety of voices, and that means letting a lot of readers have a turn. With our limited space, we have room for letters that make their case with a point or two, but not for full-length articles.” Read the rest of it here.

• Also in the Times, but more recently (last Sunday, Oct. 21) was this article in the Style section (if you can pull yourself away from the wedding announcements of various Yale and Vassar graduates and stories about formal dinners in the Fragonard salon at the Frick, the Style section often has lots of worthwhile things to read) headlined “Your Modifier is Dangling.” It’s about a bad habit some of us have (a-hem) of correcting the grammar of friends and family and lovers and colleagues and strangers overheard on the bus. It mentions a “grammar vigilante” group on Facebook called “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar” that has, believe it or not, 200,000 members. One great piece of advice: “Don’t point out the mistake. Instead, repeat what was just said, but with correct usage this time, and in your own sentence. Then keep talking.”

Here, There, Everywhere

There is virtually no more boring way to start a sentence than with the words “there is.” Wait, let me rephrase that. Starting a sentence with “there is” will put your readers to sleep faster than listening to Enya while downing a Grey Goose martini with an Ambien chaser. Ditto “it is.” With no antecedents, both phrases are empty vessels. Starting a sentence this way is weak, notes Patricia O’Conner, author of Woe Is I, because “there is a phantom subject, standing in for a real one.” I can write, “There is a heated discussion taking place in Cori’s office right now” or “A heated discussion is taking place in Cori’s office right now.” Either way, the subject is “heated discussion.” “There is” didn’t add anything but dead wood. I can write “It is known among Sean’s friends that he wants to go kitesurfing in Maui” or “Sean’s friends know he wants to go kitesurfing in Maui.” Either way, the subject is “Sean.” “It is” didn’t add anything but dead wood. As introductory phrases “there are” and “it is” introduce nothing but extra words into your copy (notice how much stronger and shorter the second sentence above is). “There is” and “it is” tell us nothing. They tamp down the action of the sentence by postponing it. While “there is” and “it is” can’t (and really, shouldn’t) always be avoided, the less used the better. As you  edit your work – or that of others – pay special attention to sentences that begin with these phrases. They can often be rewritten, and they should be.

The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup

Last Sunday, Gretchen Morgenson, a reporter at The New York Times, wrote an elegy, of sorts, to a man named James Walker Michaels, her former editor at Forbes, who died the week before last at age 86. As an editor Michaels was, she wrote, "irascible, exacting, fearless.” “Flaccid writing and weak thinking brought out his bark and bite,” she noted. While interesting to read the many bon mots she included of lines he scrawled atop manuscripts (“This is the kind of sentence that drives readers to stop reading'' ''If I can't stay awake editing this, how can a reader stay awake reading it? What's the point? If it has a point, maybe we can make a story of it'') what came through more than anything in her story was his commitment to giving readers something worth reading. We sometimes forget, as we’re typing away, that on the other end of the story is a reader, someone we need to interest, entertain, move to act, move to think, provoke, etc. Bore him, disrespect her, and you’ve lost an opportunity to build a relationship for yourself and for your client. 

Read the Times piece here. If it’s no longer there, try here, the International Herald Tribune, which ran it, too. Also, The Washington Post ran a terrific piece on Michaels by Allan Sloan, Fortune magazine's senior editor at large.

I Before E Except After C

Not that it comes up very often, but I know how to spell arithmetic because at some point in elementary school a teacher (it may have been Miss Heckmeyer) told us that if you took the first letter of each word in the following sentence, you’d spell arithmetic: A Rat In The House May Eat the Ice Cream. This sort of memory device is called a mnemonic (the first m is silent). Sometimes they can really come in handy (though never at cocktail parties). And sometimes they’re just fun to read. I e-mailed about 25 friends asking for the mnemonics they use. Here they are (some of these are PG-13 so if you’re easily offended – or still pre-bar mitzvah age – stop reading now). The order of taxonomy in biology: Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fresh Green Spinach (or for those of you who prefer, Kinky People Cry Out For Great Sex) (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) Spell “success”:  Take two c’s and two s’s, and you’ll have success Spell “calendar”: Daughters of the American Revolution (calenDAR) Remember the order of British hereditary titles: Does Mi'lord Ever Visit Brighton Beach? (Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Baronet) To remember the planets and their order: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza-pies (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) Spell "weird": WE are wEIrd. The difference between principle and principal is that your princiPAL is your pal. The mathematical order of operations: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction) For the bones in the wrist: Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can't Handle (Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetrum, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate, Hamate) The names of the seven hills on which ancient Rome was built: Can Queen Victoria Eat Cold Apple Pie? (Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Aventine, Palatine) The strings on a violin: Good dogs are everywhere (GDAE) The 10 Cranial Nerves: Ooh, ooh, ooh... to touch and feel a gentle virgin, so hot! (Optic, Olfactory, Oculomoter, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abducent, Facial, Auditory-vestibular, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Spinal Accessory, Hypoglossal) Spell “separate”: Remembering, there is a rat in sepaRATe. The countries of Central America south of Mexico, from north to south: Big Gorillas Eat Hotdogs Not Cold Pizza (Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama) To remember the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite: A stalagmite MIGHT grow up; a stalactite holds on TIGHT to the ceiling. Order of the signs of the zodiac: All The Great Constellations Live Very Long Since Stars Can't Alter Physics (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces) While HOMES lists the great lakes, to remember them in order of size, largest to smallest: Sergeant Major Hates Eating Onions (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario) To difference between “desert” and “dessert”: You only want to cross the desert once (it only has one "s") while you always want seconds on dessert (it has two s's) Order of geological time periods: Cows Often Sit Down Carefully. Perhaps Their Joints Creak? Persistent Early Oiling Might Prevent Painful Rheumatism. (Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Recent) The lines of the treble staff: Every Good Boy Does Fine (EGBDF) Spell “rhythm”: Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move To spell “correspondence”: There is no dance in corresponDENCE. To spell “necessary”: Not Every Cat Eats Sardines (Some Are Really Yummy) To spell “believe”: Would you beLIEve a LIE? To spell “mnemonic”: Monkey Nut Eating Means Old Nutshells In Carpet.

The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup

• On Sept. 23 Reuters ran a story about the 16,000 words that “have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.” This past Sunday, Oct. 7, The New York Times finally roused itself from its slumber and reported the same story. Later than Reuters but better later than never, I suppose (plus, the Times brought up the use of hyphens by Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and even E.E. Cummings - Shakespeare liked them, Cummings did not). The most depressing quote in the Times version: “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” said the dictionary’s editor, Angus Stevenson. “They’re not really sure what they’re for.” 

• Everyone likes to air their pet peeves – over at a blog called Words to the Wise (subtitled “A conversation on language – with a dash of editing”) professional copyeditors do exactly that. Two with which I agree: “I could care less. This phrase means the opposite of what the writer or speaker intends, which is could NOT care less” and “Extraneous words and phrases. In order to; in the process of; currently.”

You've Got a Friend

Last week I taught a writing and editing workshop to colleagues as part of my company’s in-house university. Nine young women attended. All of their daily workspaces are low-walled cubicles no more than 50 feet away from one another. Despite this daily proximity, and the opportunity that affords to share their work, brainstorm, commiserate, create compacts to proofread one another’s work, act as quality control counselors, ask questions, and a million other things, most of them didn’t even know one another. They’d seen each other in the hall or ladies room, but they’d never met. It wasn’t until we went around the room introducing ourselves that they started to quickly realize how many experiences and frustrations they share when it comes to writing. “That happens to me, too,” one said. “Oh, God, that’s exactly how I feel.” One woman said she's "the worst proofreader." Another said she thinks she's pretty good and, even better, she loves doing it. "It's satisfying," she said. They sit about 12 feet away from one another. A perfect fit, they'd never met before this day. This was interesting to me because, as the writer Toni Cade Bambara said, “it's a dismally lonely business, writing.” I think if there’s opportunity to make writing a less lonely experience writers should grab it (Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, said, “Every writer I know has trouble writing”). Introduce yourself to colleagues, make friends, and talk about your writing. Share your experiences. Read one another’s work. Offer your opinions gently and ask for the opinions of others loudly. Seek out mentors, work with the guy down the hall who everyone knows is a good writer, or with the admin who’s an eagle-eyed proofreader. If you’re lucky enough to work for a company that has an editorial services department filled with writers and editors, don’t be shy. Work with them and learn from them. Take advantage of all those people and personalities with whom you come into contact every day. Don’t make writing a lonely experience – share it with others and your writing will bloom.