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word “STET”—that’s Latin, I learned, for “let it stand,” a.k.a. “keep your hands to yourself”—would
If you can append “by zombies” to the end of a sentence (or, yes, “by the clown”), you’ve indeed written a sentence in the passive voice.
But here’s an idea: Let’s say you’re writing a novel in which the characters shimmy easily between English and, say, Spanish. Consider not setting the Spanish (or what-have-you) in italics. Use of italics emphasizes foreignness. If you mean to suggest easy fluency, use of roman normalizes your text.
On the other hand, if you’re writing a novel about, say, an isolated young Englishwoman living in Paris who is confounded by the customs, the people, and the language, it would certainly make good sense to set all the bits of French she encounters, in narration or dialogue, in the requisite italics. You want that French to feel, every time, strange.
In British books you’ll often see feckless little namby-pamby freestanding excuses for dashes – something like this – where we interrupt ourselves—definitively—with real dashes. Ours are better.
Why has a grammar book never been this much fun before?
