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October 16 - November 5, 2022
One of the best ways to determine whether your prose is well-constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can’t be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten.
I had it drummed into my head that inclusive lists should be introduced exclusively with “such as,” and that to commence such a list with “like” suggests comparison.
No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.
As a rule you should avoid comma splicing, though exceptions can be and frequently are made when the individual sentences are reasonably short and intimately connected: “He came, he saw, he conquered” or “Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.”
A long sentence is a long sentence, it’s only a run-on sentence when it’s not punctuated in the standard fashion.
“Only” commas (except at the very ends of sentences, they travel in pairs) are used to set off nouns that are, indeed, the only one of their kind in the vicinity, as in, say, Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was born on August 1, 1843.
If what follows a colon is a full sentence, begin that full sentence with a capital letter, which signals to your reader: What’s about to commence includes a subject, a verb, the works, and should be read as such.
Do use an apostrophe to pluralize a letter.
John and Abigail Adams = the Adamses
is it a market belonging to farmers or a market made up of farmers? I say the latter, so: farmers market*27
A midsentence parenthetical aside (like this one) begins with a lowercase letter and concludes (unless it’s a question or even an exclamation!) without terminal punctuation.
(Only a freestanding parenthetical aside, like this one, begins with a capital letter and concludes with an appropriate bit of terminal punctuation inside the final parenthesis.)
Sic is Latin for “thus,” and one uses it—traditionally in italics, always in brackets—in quoted material to make it clear to your reader that a misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact you’re retaining for the sake of authenticity in said quoted material is indeed not your misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact but that of the person you’re quoting.
En dashes are also used for page references (pp. 3–21) sporting game scores (the Yankees clobbered the Mets, 14–2)*49 court decisions (the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling by a 7–2 vote)
Note as well that even if the mind may be hearing “August eleventh,” one doesn’t, in just about any context, write “August 11th.”
Except in dialogue, percentages should be expressed as numerals, though I’d urge you to use the word “percent” rather than the percentage sign—unless what you’re writing is hugely about percentages, in which case feel free to write “95%” rather than “95 percent.”
Diacritical marks—accent marks, if you prefer—are the little doodads with which many foreign-derived words are festooned, generally above letters (mostly vowels), in certain cases below them (that ç in “façade,” for instance), and in certain cases, especially in certain eastern European languages, through them.
In the United States, Random House is publishing a book. In England, Random House are publishing a book. The Brits often (not always, but often) use a plural for a collective noun.
(Proper nouns are always to be kept nation-authentic, though. One should no more refer to the U.K. Labour Party as the “Labor Party” than a Brit should refer to the bombing of “Pearl Harbour.”)
hypercorrection is not that it’s super-duper correct but that it’s trying so hard to be correct that it collapses into error.
If you’re writing of a situation that is not merely not the case but is unlikely, improbable, or just plain impossible, you can certainly reach for a “were.” If I were to win the lottery tomorrow, I’d quit my job so fast it would make your head spin.
Though it is the case that most of the “-able”s are words in their own right even if you delete the “-able” (e.g., “passable,” “manageable”) and that most of the “-ible”s are not, shorn of their “-ible,” freestanding (e.g., “tangible,” “audible”), most is not all.
Q. How do I know which words ending in o are pluralized with an s and which are pluralized with an es? A. You don’t. Look ’em up.
French makes do with hors d’oeuvre as both singular and plural.
canapés are a subset of hors d’oeuvres requiring a base of bread, toast, cracker, puff pastry, etc., topped or spread with a topping or a spread.
