The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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“Daddy, can I ask you a question?” the response was “You just did, but you may ask me another.”
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In formal style we see a slight preference for using may for permission.
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Since most prose neither grants nor requests permission, the distinction is usually moot, and the two words may (or can) be used more or less interchangeably.
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The problem with dangling modifiers is that their subjects are inherently ambiguous and sometimes a sentence will inadvertently attract a reader to the wrong choice.
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As a baboon who grew up wild in the jungle, I realized that Wiki had special nutritional needs.
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Most verbs that take subjectless complements, such as try in Alice tried to calm down, are governed by an ironclad rule that forces the overt subject to be identical to the missing subject.
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But with modifiers there is no such rule. The missing subject of a modifier is identified with the protagonist whose point of view we are assuming as we read the sentence, which is often, but need not always be, the grammatical subject of the main clause.
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fused participles (possessives with gerunds).
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Do you have a problem with the sentence She approved of Sheila taking the job? Do you insist that it should be She approved of Sheila’s taking the job, in which the gerund (taking) has a subject (Sheila’s) that is marked with genitive case?
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if-then.
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Something is slightly off in these sentences, but what?
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The first is that English has two kinds of conditional constructions:13
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If you leave now, you will get there on time. [an open conditional] If you left now, you would get there on time. [a remote conditional]
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like, as, such as.
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To start with, the fact that like is a preposition, which typically takes a noun phrase complement, does not mean that it may not take a clausal complement as well.
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possessive antecedents.
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But the rule against possessive (more accurately, genitive) antecedents is a figment of the purists’ misunderstanding.
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preposition at the end of a sentence.
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There is nothing, repeat nothing, wrong with Who are you looking at? or The better to see you with or We are such stuff as dreams are made on or It’s you she’s thinking of.
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The pseudo-rule was invented by John Dryden based on a silly analogy with Latin (where the equivalent to a preposition is attached to the noun and cannot be separated from it)
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Pied-piping is also a good choice when a stranded preposition would get lost in a hubbub of little grammatical words, such as One of the beliefs which we can be highly confident in is that other people are conscious. The sentence is easier to parse when the role of the preposition is settled before we get to that busy crossroads: One of the beliefs in which we can be highly confident is that other people are conscious.
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predicative nominative.
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If you do, you are the victim of a schoolmarm rule that insists that a pronoun serving as the complement of be must be in nominative case (I, he, she, we, they) rather than accusative case (me, him, her, us, them).
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The rule is a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with semantics.
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(The accusative case is the default in English, and it can be used anywhere except in the subject of a tensed verb; thus we have hit me, give me a hand, with me, Who, me?, What, me get a tattoo?, and Molly will be giving the first lecture, me the second.)
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sequence of tenses and other perspective shifts.
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A common error in student writing is to shift the tense from a main clause to a subordinate one even when they refer to the same time period.17
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They belong to a family of “inappropriate shifts” in which the writer fails to stay put at a single vantage point but vanishes from one and pops up at another.
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The reader can get vertigo when the writer flip-flops within a sentence between persons (first, second, and third), voices (active and passive), or types of discourse (a direct quotation of the speaker’s exact words, usually set off with quotation marks, versus an indirect report of the gist, usually set off with that):
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It’s better to understand a few principles that govern time, tense, and discourse
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The first is to remember that past tense is not the same thing as past time.
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We now see that the past tense has a third meaning in English: a backshifted event in a sequence of tenses.
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The second principle is that backshifting is not mandatory,
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The vivid, nonbackshifted sequence feels more natural when the state being spoken about is not just true at the time that the speaker was speaking but true for all time,
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A third principle is that indirect discourse is not always introduced with an expression like he said that or she thought that; sometimes it is implicit in the context.
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The final key to using sequences of tenses should be familiar from our discussion of if and then.
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shall and will.
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With everyone else—the Scots, Irish, Americans, and Canadians (other than those with traditional English schooling)—the rule about shall and will never applied.
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split infinitives.
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Most mythical usage rules are merely harmless.
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During the 2009 presidential inauguration, Chief Justice John Roberts, a famous stickler for grammar, could not bring himself to have Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.” Abandoning his strict constructionism, Roberts unilaterally amended the Constitution and had Obama “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.”
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The very terms “split infinitive” and “split verb” are based on a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split a verb because it consists of a single word, such as amare, “to love.”
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Indeed, the spot in front of the main verb is often the most natural resting place for an adverb.
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When the adverbial modifier is long and heavy, or when it contains the most important information in a sentence, it should be moved to the end,
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subjunctive mood and irrealis were.
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There is no distinctive subjunctive form in English; the construction just uses the unmarked form of the verb, such as live, come, and be.
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Rather, the two belong to different moods: whether he be rich or poor is subjunctive; If I were a rich man is irrealis (“not real”).
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In English it exists only in the form were, where it conveys factual remoteness: an irrealis proposition is not just hypothetical (the speaker does not know whether it is true or false) but counterfactual (the speaker believes it’s false).
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The obvious difference is the level of formality: irrealis I wish I were younger is fancier than past-tense I wish I was younger.
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than and as.