by Cherie Tucker
Can you see what’s wrong with this sentence: They celebrated with expensive champagne because of the team winning the championship? If you went to parochial school and had the nuns, you know that you must always use the possessive with the gerund, but if you went to public school or were born after the Beatles’ 1968 hit, “Hey, Jude,” you may not even know what we’re talking about.
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The first and last words of a title or a headline are capitalized. You know that. So is the first word after a dash or a colon. In between falls the shadow.
The articles, a, an, and the, are the easy ones. Unless they appear as the first word in your title, they are not capitalized. So it would be “The Three Bears” but “The Princess and the Pea.”
by Cherie Tucker
We all still remember those little mnemonic devices like “i before e except after c” that helped us over some of the tricky spots in our language. One I was never taught in grade school that would have helped immensely I learned only recently from a fifth-grader: FANBOYS. For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So. This trick for remembering conjunctions, those words that join things, will help you when you ask yourself, do I need a comma here?
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There are times when you must not use a comma to separate words that need to be together. When you are writing about only two things, you don’t separate them from each other with a comma. You wouldn’t write that you liked dogs, and cats. Nor would you say you stopped, and looked. It’s easy to see how those commas are in the wrong place, just as it would be with I, love you. Sometimes it isn’t so obvious, however. One of the most unwanted commas comes before the and (or other conjunction) that joins two verbs that share the same subject.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
There are times when you must not use a comma to separate words that need to be together. When you are writing about only two things, you don’t separate them from each other with a comma. You wouldn’t write that you liked dogs, and cats. Nor would you say you stopped, and looked. It’s easy to see how those commas are in the wrong place, just as it would be with I, love you. Sometimes it isn’t so obvious, however. One of the most unwanted commas comes before the and (or other conjunction) that joins two verbs that share the same subject.
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These two verbs cause way too much trouble. Here’s how they work:
LIE describes something at rest. You cannot do this word to anything.
LAY describes the action of putting something down You do this to something.
Here are the tenses, present, past, and the past and present participles that require a helper verb:
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I just spent a couple of weeks working with some very smart college students who begin every sentence with me or her or him, as in “Me and Kelley already did that.” So just in case you are guilty of this felonious speech pattern, here is a pronoun review.
A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun (the name of something) when you don’t want to repeat the noun endlessly. (Jim will drive his own car when he gets off work. rather than Jim will drive Jim’s own car when Jim gets off work.) Unlike nouns, however, which don’t change depending on how they are used in sentences, pronouns change all the time.
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Let’s do a brief review, because we still seem to be having trouble with our verb tenses. Here’s a little song to help you with those tricky past participles that require helper verbs (called auxiliary verbs by the nuns). Sing it lustily to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”:
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Ours is a fluid language, and the flood of technological upgrades is speeding changes even faster. Rules that used to be unquestioned are now reduced to mere suggestions. In the world of capitalization, things have become quite challenging. Of course beginning sentences with capitals remains unchanged, as well as referring to yourself with a capital I. There are some new twists, however, in situations that might confuse you.
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Writers know that in dialogue, you start a new paragraph for each new speaker, and that a long-winded speaker who insists on talking in more than one paragraph doesn’t get an end quote until he’s finished.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes, really. And that’s not all. After she said that, she turned and spat at him. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. And the things they said to each other in front of that that poor child. It was dreadful. I rose to leave, but they insisted I remain.
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We used to use the apostrophe plus an s to pluralize things, such as the 1920’s. Now, however, with our continuously evolving language, in many instances the apostrophe is omitted, and we simply add the s. I’m sure you’ll still see it done both ways, because we did it the apostrophe way for years. You will find apostrophes in older printed material, and people who were trained to include them will still automatically add one. Here are are some guidelines to tell you when to leave it out or put it in.
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There are many regional differences in the way we pronounce certain words or use certain expressions. For whatever historical reasons, Seattle people stand in line and drink pop, but New Yorkers wait on line and drink sodas. They are both right and important things for writers to know. There are also charming mispronunciations or malapropisms our children or friends might use with impunity, such as that of a dear friend of mine who always got “flustrated” or another friend from Italy who would say, “Now, don’t mis me understand.”
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Our language unfortunately does not have a plural pronoun that includes both males and females. This lack has caused many headaches for writers in these politically correct times. It used to be correct to say, “Each of our customers will receive his statement on the third Wednesday of the month.” However, the old rule that used only the masculine pronoun, he, him, his, for everything has been tossed out.
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Oh, pronouns. They’ve confounded the best of us lately. And it’s not just the who/whom problem anymore. Is it me or I? She or her? And how can you tell? And what’s a pronoun anyway?
A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun (the name of something) when you don’t want to repeat the noun endlessly. (Jim will drive his own car when he gets off work. rather than Jim will drive Jim’s own car when Jim gets off work.) Unlike nouns, however, which don’t change depending on how they are used in sentences, pronouns change all the time.
by Cherie Tucker
In case someone asks you to play Mad Libs, we’d better review the eight parts of speech. Remember, words can act as many different parts of speech. The designation depends on the function a word plays in a sentence. You can watch a play, or play ball, or have a play day. So get out your memories from sixth grade:
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Many people spend countless hours over a lifetime rewriting sentences to avoid having to use lie or lay, because they are never sure which is right. Let’s clear it up.
Lie is verb that describes inaction. It is a body a rest, inert, not moving, and incapable of doing anything to anything else.
Lay is an action verb. You could substitute place (same la spelling), because both do something to something else. The confusion between these two words often comes when we get into the past tense.
by Cherie Tucker
If you give your protagonist an unusual name, say Chingachgook, Spell check will flag it. It does so, not because that name is spelled wrong, but because it’s not in Spell check’s memory bank. Most of the time, you can easily see if you have actually misspelled something or if the machine just doesn’t have that word in its dictionary (or hasn’t read The Last of the Mohicans). With the grammar checker, however, it’s not as easy to tell.
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In Sheridan’s play The Rivals, there is the delightful Mrs. Malaprop, who hilariously uses the not-quite-right words to express herself and lent her name to that mix-up. My favorite is “He is the very pine-apple of politeness!” (for pinnacle, in case you didn’t get it). The innocently used wrong word causes the reader to cringe and breaks the spell you are trying to cast with your writing. Here are a few to be aware of and some tips for remembering which is which:
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By now we all should know that subjects must agree with their verbs in number—singular with singular; plural with plural. It’s fairly easy if you have only one subject doing something. It’s those pesky compounds that cause the trouble.
If the compound subjects (that means two or more) are joined by and, the subject becomes plural and requires a plural verb.
by Cherie Tucker
People always ask me for the name of a good reference book. The very best one for information on the basics and ease of use is The Gregg Reference Manual by the late William A. Sabin. Lots of people say they have Strunk & White’s Elements of Style or the Chicago Manual of Style, and those are both excellent. However, they are style manuals, and that word presumes that the reader has some knowledge of the basics. If grammar and usage are your things, then those kinds of books will serve you well.
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