by Cherie Tucker
Both parentheses and dashes show readers that you have interrupted the train of thought to tell them something right now. They have more drama than mere commas, but they must be handled correctly to work. Let’s take them one at a time.
Parentheses offer non-essential information that is like a whispered aside to inform the reader at that precise moment something the reader may not know.
by Cherie Tucker
If you are upset, you feel bad. If you have Novocain in your fingers and can’t tell that you are touching the keyboard, you feel badly. Many people confuse these two, so let’s clear this one up. (Brace yourself. There may be grammatical terminology.)
The verbs that describe how our other senses work, e.g., taste, smell, etc., are not as easily confused. For example, consider the sense of smell.
by Cherie Tucker
Would you write War and Peace or “War and Peace”? There is some confusion as to how to represent titles of literary works, names of ships, operas, and such in print. Some people put them all in quotation marks, but some things require italics. There is a simple way to remember when to use italics versus quotation marks. If what you are naming is a complete thing, you need italics: book titles; magazine and newspapers; television series, plays, and movies; operas and musicals; paintings and sculptures; and ships and airplanes belong in italics. (If for some reason you can’t produce italics on your computer, you may underline or use all capital letters.)
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
Most people know they should spell out the numbers between 1 and 10, but then why didn’t I just then? There are numerous rules about numbers, but here are a few that come up most often.
Yes, you should generally use words and not numerals for the numbers 10 and under. However, when the numbers need “to stand out for quick comprehension,” as it says in The Gregg Reference Manual (which all writers should own by now), use the numerals.
by Cherie Tucker
When you are writing and break into the stream of thought, you need to use punctuation to advise your readers what you are doing. Sometimes you are just giving them a little more information about a name, so you use commas: Jim, my neighbor, will be here. (You stop the sentence to tell who Jim is.) We do the same things with dates and addresses: He was born on June 4, 1919, in Pitcher, Oklahoma. (You tell which June 4 and which city named Pitcher.) We’ve talked about these before.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
We’ve talked about this one before, but it was early in the life of this magazine, so you may not have seen it, or you may be one of the willful who thought that since the language is always changing, you didn’t need to believe me. Let me repeat: all right is two words. Just like all wrong.
I bring this to you again because I’ve been reading a bestseller that is set in the early 60s. The author has a smash hit and weaves a terrific tale. But on nearly every page is the word alright.
by Cherie Tucker
When readers see the little hyphen at the end of a syllable, they memorize that syllable and look for the next part of the word it should stick onto. They know how to do that. The hyphenation situation that causes misreading occurs when writers join two or more unrelated words into a new combination that reads as a single modifier before a noun, and they forget the little hyphen. For example, take the words drive up.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” There are a few of those “close” words lurking about today that it would behoove us all to be aware of, lest they take over our fingers as we write.
One of the most often seen disparities is everyday versus every day. The first one, a single word, means ordinary or commonplace.
by Cherie Tucker
If you have only two things in a sentence, whether they are single words or phrases or clauses, you don’t need to separate them with a comma. A big dog needs no pause between bigand dog. A big, ugly, snarling dog requires the little speed bumps to separate those adjectives. There are three words describing that dog, and more than two items in a series require separation (even requiring the comma before the final and, but that was another column). When there are only two, however, the comma serves no purpose except to confound the reader.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
There are two rules concerning these words when they are used to introduce descriptive information in a sentence. First, who and whom refer to people; which and that refer to things.
He is the man who sold us the bridge.
We have your signature, which closes the deal.
These are the times that try men’s souls.
by Cherie Tucker
Someone once said, “There is not a noun that cannot be verbed.” Consider these gems from actual writings. A student in my Practical Grammar for Editors class at the UW submitted a beauty about a shaving gel for women that has been “lotionized.” A letter told a client his meeting had been “calendared” for June 15. A restaurant stated it was “menuing salmon today.”
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
If more than one person owns something, it can be tricky to show the reader just what’s what, so here are some tips.
If two or more named people own something jointly, put the apostrophe on the last name.
by Cherie Tucker
Could we talk a minute about the ellipsis marks, those three little dots that people think mean a number of things they actually don’t mean? First of all, here is how they are to be typed: three spaced periods. Only three. Not seven. Only three. With a space between each of them. Each. Of. Them.
Next, here is how they are to be used. If you are taking something out of a quotation, you indicate that you have done so by the use of those three spaced periods.
by Cherie Tucker
There has been a request to solve the mystery of when to use were versus was, so here goes. If you have a sentence that expresses a wish or begins with if and is talking about something contrary to facts, you need to use something called the subjunctive while choosing your verbs. (Don’t stop reading.)
You use were and not was when the sentence is about wishing for something that is not actual or describing something with an if clause that defies physics or is at least not probable.
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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Do you know the difference between anxious and eager? They both describe how you might feel while looking forward to something. The main difference between them is the element of fear. If you don’t want that thing to happen, you are anxious about it. If you are looking forward to it, you are eager to have it happen. Even people who aren’t aware of the distinctions between the two words can tell one from another.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
We’ve already examined the mysteries of apostrophe placement, so this is just a little reminder because we have so many holidays coming up that totally confound advertisers.
You’ll see all sorts of interesting apostrophes floating about or missing entirely as 2009 progresses, so let’s examine them one at a time.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
We have to talk about verbs, folks. Those lively words that tell the actions your characters take, like run, jump, kiss, sleep. They have magical properties that allow them with just simple changes to tell the exact time that something was done. Look at the difference, for example, between “He has run around Green Lake before” and “He had run around Green Lake before.” Subtle, but a world of difference.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
Enumerated lists that follow colons have some rules you might like to know. First, if you have a list, whether enumerated or in bullets, you must have at least two items. Every 1. must have a 2.; every A. must have a B.; every bullet must have a companion bullet. Next, the first word of every listed item must begin with a capital letter. Also, all the listed items must be in parallel construction—either all complete sentences, similar fragments, or the same parts of speech.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
Those pesky apostrophes confound so many. Should it go before or after the s, and why do you need one anyway? Well, you need the apostrophe to communicate to the reader that there is a letter missing, for one thing. It also shows ownership rather than number.
We don’t seem to have trouble with the apostrophe when it signals a contraction, such as in I’m, where the apostrophe obviously stands in for the missing a. It’s the possessive angle that trips so many up, so maybe this will help.