How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (5 page)

And that brings us to the next topic.

b. Possessed

The basic form of possessive apostrophes is
blank’s thingamajig
, where both words are nouns and
thingamajig
belongs to or is associated with
blank.
Another way to look at it is that an apostrophe is called for if you can change the wording to
the thingamajig of blank.
This is incredibly common in speaking, writing, and singing, as exemplified in the songs “Mickey’s Monkey,” “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” and “John Brown’s Body.”

The basic form is easy enough. It can get a little trickier when you’re indicating a possessive of a noun ending with the letter
s.
Here’s a two-step way to deal with it. (1) An apostrophe always follows the
s.
(2) If the word is a singular, or a proper name, you put another
s
after the apostrophe. If not, you do not.

However (and this is step 3), if the word is a plural, most style guides have you leave out the second
s,
on the theory, I guess, that it’s not pronounced.

That example brings two further guidelines to mind. First, the plural of
Jones
is indeed
Joneses.
Most
s-
ending common and proper nouns follow an add -
es
form; the most common exception is
series,
the plural of which is
series.
Second, if you want to put a sign outside your house—a questionable idea to begin with—inscribe the plural of your name followed by an apostrophe, that is,
The Yagodas
’; “house” or “place” is understood. An apostrophe-less
The Yagodas
just makes it seem like a verb is missing. And
The Yagoda’s
makes no sense, except in reference to the domicile of a person who refers to himself as “The Yagoda.”

A final apostrophe issue is where (if anywhere) it’s placed in formulations like
Farmers Market, Boys Club
, and
Stockholders Meeting
.

I confess that I find this a toughie. What helps clear it up for me is pretending that the first word in the phrase is
men
—or
women
or
children
or any plural that doesn’t end in
s.
You would never write
men room, men department,
or
men club,
and you obviously shouldn’t write
mens room, mens department
, etc. (because there is no such word as
mens
). Instead, the correct forms would be
men’s room, men’s department
, and
men’s club.
It works out that almost always the apostrophe should follow the
s
. And the above examples should be
Farmers’ Market, Boys’ Club, and Stockholders’ Meeting.
In fact, in phrases like this, the apostrophe should almost always follow the
s.
(The exception, such as
farmer’s tan, Mother’s Day
, or, speaking of songs, “
It’s a Man’s World
,” comes where the reference is to the prototypical singular farmer, mom, or man.)

c. This Should Not Be Necessary, but…

Do not write
your
(possessive of
you
) instead of
you’re
(contraction of
you are
) or
it’s
(contraction of
it is
) instead of
its
(possessive of
it
), or vice versa. If you do, it looks very bad and you will be mocked. Spell-check will not help you out. You just need to be mindful.

d. An Incredibly Geeky Point

In typewriter days, the keyboard provided a single vertical mark to indicate apostrophe, opening single quote, and closing single quote. But in a published text, these are not the same. The apostrophe and the closing single quote are the same and look like this: ’. The opening single quote looks like this: ‘.

This was no problem back then: if a typewritten (or handwritten) text was going to be published, typesetters would take care of sorting out the apostrophes and single quotes. The trouble came with the arrival of word processing programs. Computer keyboards also have a single key for those three symbols, but the programs offer print-style fonts and think they are smart enough to figure out which symbol you want in a particular situation. That’s not always the case, however. Consider the following sentence, which I let Microsoft Word have its way with:

There should be an apostrophe before
n
and
60s
, to indicate stuff that is left out, the same way the apostrophe works in contractions like
can’t
or
I’m
. Instead, there is an opening single quote.
I admitted this was a geeky point, and the fact is that 99 percent of people, or more, won’t notice the problem. But to me it counts as bad writing. If you agree and want to correct the error, there are various workarounds. The one I use is to trick the program by typing a second apostrophe after the incorrect one:

Then if you delete the incorrect one, you will be left with true apostrophes:

2.
-

Hyphenation can cause vexation. It certainly did in one of my students, who handed in an article containing this sentence:

At three points in the sentence, he had to make one of three choices: separate words, hyphenated phrase, or one word. He made a wrong choice every time.
Rundown
and
upcoming
may have been separate or hyphenated at one time in the history of the English language (that’s generally the way phrases evolve over time—
base ball
to
base-ball
to
baseball
), but now they’re one word. How are you supposed to know that? Well, the more you read, the more you get a feel for it. But leaving that aside, there’s a simple answer:
LOOK THEM UP IN THE DICTIONARY! Do the same for words formed with prefixes like
un, self, ex, all, de, non
, and
re.

That sounds a little easier than it is and brings up a conundrum I think of as the Blind Spot Problem. It derives from the notion of the vehicular blind spot—the idea that, while driving, you cannot see some areas of the road through your rearview or side mirrors or by looking due left or due right, and thus you have to turn around to see if it’s okay to change lanes, a risky move at high speeds.

If you are puzzled or unsure about a particular issue of spelling, punctuation, or grammar (a known unknown), there is help to be had in various kinds of online and print resources. But what if you aren’t aware that you aren’t aware of how it’s supposed to be done? That’s the Blind Spot Problem (BSP for short). Where it presents the biggest problem, nowadays, is the general issue of word separation. There seems to be a widespread desire to take compound words that have been recognized as such for decades, sometimes centuries, and take them apart again. I have read countless assignments with such phrases as:

So how do you defeat the blind spot and
realize
that you don’t know? My best answer is the equivalent of craning your neck in a car. (Fortunately, this is totally safe at your desk or in the library.) That is, teach yourself that there is a category of unknowns having to do with the question of one word, two words, or a hyphenation. Learn to recognize the situations where the question arises, and that the trend of the English language over time is toward one-word compounds. If you have to make a choice—let’s say you want to refer to an
underground, under-ground
, or
under ground
bunker—and if you are anything less than 100 percent certain which one it should be, look it up, in a dictionary or on a reliable Web site.

The first couple of dozen times, your neck will probably feel pretty sore from all that virtual craning. But after time you’ll get a sense of the way the rules work, and you can cruise along

Speaking of the rules, let’s get back to my student who referred to a
shark cage diving experience
. He couldn’t have looked that up, since the dictionary doesn’t have an entry for it, but he shouldn’t have had to.
Shark cage diving
is a compound adjective—that is, a phrase, made up of two or more words, that modifies a noun—and compound adjectives before a noun (
experience
) get hyphenated:

There are three notable situations where a compound adjective is
not
hyphenated. The first is when the modifying phrase consists of all adjectives or an adverb followed by an adjective. For example,
A standard yellow school bus is a remarkably attractive vehicle.
Second, you don’t hyphenate proper nouns or extremely familiar two-word phrases. Thus,
Our high school graduation was held in the Yankee Stadium parking lot.
(One exception to this is the quaintly named institution The New-York Historical Society, a classic test for copyeditors.) And finally, the hyphens are usually dispensed with when the compound phrase stands alone—that is, does not precede a noun:

Finally, please note that it’s never correct to put space before a hyphen (except in very rare cases, like a reference to “the suffix
–less
”) It’s correct to put space
after
a hyphen in only one situation, of which this is an example:

3.
—

A dash—sometimes known as an “em-dash”—is created when you type two hyphens in a row. (Your word processing program, as if by magic, will make them into one solid line.) Do not put a space before or after the dash.

Don’t put any other punctuation before or after a dash, even if doing so seems to make sense. This was customary in the nineteenth century and before. It is not now.

Finally, limit your dashes. The maximum is one per sentence (if you’re using it as a colon substitute) or two (if you’re using them in place of parentheses.). Beyond that lies confusion.

4.
,

a. Identification Crisis

Commas yield the most errors of any category of punctuation, and their use in identification yields the highest percentage of comma errors. When a poor or mindless writer is at the keyboard, you can be pretty certain he or she will get this wrong. Getting it right is a matter of studying the rules, some mindful focus, and practicing hearing-with-your-mind’s-ear writing. Anyway, if you can master this entry, you will have taken several big and important steps in the right direction.

Take a look at this sentence:

It’s very common to put a comma after
movie
and
friend
—and sometimes after
Grit
—in examples such as this. But doing so is wrong—unless
True Grit
is the only movie in the world and Bill is the speaker’s only friend.

The first is definitely not the case, and you can be fairly confident the second isn’t, either. Therefore, the correct form is:

If that seems funky or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence.

You need a comma after
movie
because
True Grit
and only
True Grit
is the brothers’ latest film, and after
Bill
because he and only he is the speaker’s oldest friend. (For why you need one after
Grit
, see the next entry.)