How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (10 page)

BOOK: How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem
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a. End a Sentence with a Preposition

Who are you going to the movies with?
(But see
III.C.7
.)

b. Use
Who
Instead of
Whom
in the Objective Case

Who are you going to the movies with?

The exception is immediately following a preposition:
To whom should I send the customer-satisfaction survey?

c. Use Objective Rather than Subjective Pronouns in Comparisons, Following the Verb
to Be
, and in First-Person Plural

They have a bigger house than us.
(Alternatively:
than we do.
)

Hello, it’s me.

We are all at the mercy of Mother Nature. But especially us astronomers.

d. Judiciously Split Infinitives

To avoid damaging the wall, you
carefully
have to carefully hold the picture hook and hammer it in.

e. (And Similarly) Break up a Compound Verb with an Adverb

He has frequently woken up
frequently
in the morning with no idea where he spent the night.

f. Use
Like
(I)

This little word, depending on the way it’s used, can be alternately sanitized, skunked, and still wrong. (And that’s not even getting into the way young people famously use it in conversation, as a filler [“I’m, like, tired”] or indicator of attribution [“He was like, ‘Why aren’t you going to the concert?’”]. Even young people know enough not to use it this way in formal writing.)

It wasn’t necessarily always the case, but it’s now okay to use
like:

As a synonym for
such as.

We read authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald.

To introduce a clause where a verb is omitted.

He takes to engineering like a duck [takes] to water.

He speaks French like a native [does].

It has never been wrong or even suspect to use
like
in a sentence like:

Like Paris, Rome has an almost unlimited number of world-class restaurants.

However, some people are gun-shy about
like
and engage in the hoity toity lingo that’s called “hypercorrection.”

[
In common with Paris, Rome has an almost unlimited number of world-class restaurants.
]

Actually,
in common with
is called for in only one situation: sentences like
Bill and Paul have lot in common.

g. Use a Plural Verb with a Collective Noun

A number of objections
comes
come to mind.

In the above sentence, the plural
come
is better than the singular
comes,
even though (singular)
number
is ostensibly the subject of the sentence. That’s because the emphasis is on
objections.
By the
same logic, if the emphasis is on the singular collective, the singular verb is preferable:

Just one battalion of soldiers
were
was sent to the front.

A bucket of worms
were
was on top of the bench.

He was one of the employees who
was
were given an award at the ceremony.

Often, it could go either way, as in this pair:

  1. A scrum of applicants was hovering outside the office door by 7
    a.m.
  2. A scrum of applicants were hovering outside the office door by 7
    a.m.

Which do you prefer? I would go with 2.

2.
SKUNKED

As with words, certain grammatical constructions are considered okay by some or most authorities but retain an offensive odor for many readers (and, crucially, teachers and editors), and should be avoided. This shouldn’t present a problem, since they’re usually not difficult to replace with the correct form.

a. First-Person First

[
I and Matt will be collecting tickets for the concert.
]

Matt and I will be collecting tickets for the concert.

b. Like (II)

Some have argued that the 1950s ad slogan “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” started the modern prescriptivist movement. In any case, things have gotten to the point where using
like
instead of
as, as if,
or
as though
is widely accepted. But it still could get you in hot water in certain quarters.

[
He looked like he really wanted to jump into the pool.
]

He looked as though he really wanted to jump into the pool.

[
Like the professor said, this material will be covered on the exam.
]

As the professor said, this material will be covered on the exam.

c. Possessive Before a Gerund

This one is on the cusp and may get a clean bill of health before the decade is out. But for now it’s a skunker.

[
I don’t like you talking about the senator in that tone.
]

I don’t like your talking about the senator in that tone.

d. Past Tense

The word
snuck
did not appear in print before 1887, at least according to
The Oxford English Dictionary.
Traditionally, the past tense of
to sneak
had always been
sneaked.
Then
snuck
sneaked in, presumably because
sneaked
is hard to speak. By now,
The Random House Dictionary
deems it “a standard variant past tense and past participle” of
sneak
. In Google Fight,
snuck
beats
sneaked
by a nearly two-to-one margin.

That means, for all intents and purposes, that it’s okay. The same goes for
hung
and
dove,
which have respectively joined
hanged
and
dived
as accepted. Not so with these other relatively recent verb forms, in which the traditional participle is more and more commonly used as the past tense. They are all still skunked.

He
drunk
drank
the water.

The fish
layed laid
lay
on the counter, filleted and ready to broil.

(That is past tense of the verb
lie,
which is often confused with the verb
lay. Lie
is intransitive—you, or fish, do it all by yourself.
Lay
is transitive, meaning that you do it to something, like carpet or your burdens; it’s often followed by
down. I
lay
laid the files on my desk.
)

Honey, I
shrunk
shrank
the kids.

In a fit of pique, he
sunk
sank
the toy boat.

The Basie Band really
swung
swang.

e.
Ly-
Less Adverbs

A common move in spoken English is streamlining adverbs.

[
This was a real nice clambake.
]

[
Think different.
]

[
He didn’t do so bad.
]

[
That car sure drives smooth.
]

I bracketed those sentences with a heavy heart because they have such a nice, casual sound to them. Hey: I even called this book
How to Not Write Bad
! Unfortunately, this sort of thing is still skunked in writing meant for anything more formal than a blog post. The first, second, and third examples are easily changed:

This was a really nice clambake.
(Apologies to Oscar Hammerstein.)

Think differently.
(Apologies to Steve Jobs.)

He didn’t do so badly.

However, the third runs into a problem that’s illuminated by a famous bit of dialogue from the movie
Airplane:

RUMACK:
Can you fly this plane, and land it?

STRIKER:
Surely you can’t be serious.

RUMACK:
I am serious…and don’t call me Shirley.

Surely
is a hard word to pull off. Moreover, as in the bracketed example, the adverbial
sure
is sometimes used to mean something slightly different from
surely
. Here, the best tack might be seeking out another word altogether.

That car certainly [
or
definitely,
or
really] drives smoothly.

There are some exceptions. When a verb indicates a state of being—that is, if it could theoretically be replaced by the verb
to be
—it should be followed by the non -
ly,
or adjective, form.

You look beautiful. I feel good. I feel great. I feel bad. I feel fine. I feel pretty. The dinner tasted wonderful.

[
I feel badly
] and [
the dinner tasted wonderfully
] are hypercorrection.

An apparent exception to
this
is the word
well,
especially in negative sentences. (It’s only an apparent exception because in this context,
well
is an adjective, as in
well-baby clinic.
) So we say,
He didn’t feel well, so he stayed home from work.

f. Only, the Lonely

For a little word,
only
creates a heap of difficulties. For a century or more, it was a sticklers’ article of faith that this adverb had to be placed directly in front of the word it was modifying, or else all sorts of ambiguous hell would break loose. Thus, the sticklers would have had you write:

I have eyes only for you.

Only God knows what I’d be without you.

I want to be with only you.

Music fans of a certain advanced age will recognize these as mangled and ruined versions of the titles of some classic pop songs: “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “God Only Knows (What I’d Be Without You),” and “I Only Want to Be with You.”

Here’s the thing. In pop songs and in speech, please feel free to put
only
in any position that feels right and seems to make sense. In formal or public writing, however, the sticklers’ rule about placement still applies. (Barely.)

He
only
has only one more course to take before graduation.

Germany’s economy
only
grew by only 1 percent last year.

I’m
only
asking only for a little respect.

g. Assorted Grammatically Skunked Expressions

[
He couldn’t help but be impressed.
]

He couldn’t help being impressed.

[
It’s not that big of a deal.
]

It’s not that big a deal.

BOOK: How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem
10.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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