How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (7 page)

Be careful of the word
however
. A recent trend is to use it as a conjunction (sort of a fancier version of
but
); down that road lie commas splices, and trouble.

Comma splices are okay in rare cases, including sentences where even a semicolon would slow things down too much:

e. The Oxford Comma

In a series of three or more items, do you put a comma after the penultimate one (right before the
and
or
or
)? That’s another trick question. If you are writing for the Associated Press, the answer is no. If you are writing for the
New Yorker
or the Oxford University Press, the answer is yes. (The OUP is so well known for this protocol that it has come to be referred to as “the Oxford comma.”) If you’re writing for yourself, the key thing—as in style choices generally—is consistency: choose a style you like, and stick with it.

That said, in order to prevent ambiguity, you sometimes need to use the Oxford comma.

The OC is also called for when the items in the list are independent clauses or are long.

5.
;

My initial thought is to limit this entry to one sentence: “If you feel like using a semicolon, lie down until the urge goes away.”

That is because when my students utilize this piece of punctuation, a substantial majority of them utilize it incorrectly. Just this past semester, a student’s article for a feature writing class had this:
The Delaware Welcome Visitors Center is a sight for sore eyes; literally.
What she needed was a dash or a colon—pieces of punctuation I have already employed three times in this entry. (For the other problems in the sentence, see ”Apostrophe” and “
Literally
.”)

But while it is tempting to outlaw semicolons and just move on, that would be too easy. For one thing, there is a particular circumstance when a semicolon absolutely has to be used. This is a series of three or more items, one or more of which contain a comma. Thus:

You can see the confusion that would result if the semicolons were replaced by commas, or nothing. A semicolon is called for in only one other situation, and it really isn’t that hard to grasp. A semicolon can be used to connect two independent clauses if the clauses aren’t already linked by conjunctions (
and, but, although,
etc.).
^*
This can be quite useful if the clauses are short, and a period would create an unintended Hemingway or See-Dick-Run sound:

A colon or dash could also be employed in such sentences, but these marks imply an “and therefore” or an “and here’s what I mean” connection between the two elements. A semicolon suggests a relationship as well, but a more subtle or complicated one.

Just remember: use this piece of punctuation in a series whose elements have commas, or a sentence consisting of two complete sentences. Otherwise, step away from the semicolon.

6.
:

The colon presents two issues of correctness. The first is simple: do not use more than one of them in a sentence or you will seriously confuse the reader.

The second concerns capitalization after a colon. If what follows isn’t a complete sentence, do not capitalize (unless the first word is a proper noun).

If what follows the colon
is
a complete sentence, follow house style; if there is no house style, follow your own lights, but be consistent.

7.
“ ”

a. Doubling Down

With two exceptions, in the United States one always uses double quotation marks (“like this”) rather than the single quotes, or “inverted commas,” favored in the United Kingdom and the former and current outposts of the British Empire (‘like this’). Seems simple enough, but recently students have grown unaccountably fond of using single quotes, not so much for actual quotations
but for ironic scare quotes and one- or two-word catchphrases. (Using quotation marks for anything other than quoting what someone said or wrote, or in rendering titles of books or movies and the like, is usually a bad idea stylistically, but that’s a topic for
Part III
). So:

The two exceptions: single quotes are properly used in the United States in newspaper headlines—such as ford to city: ‘drop dead’—and in quotes within quotes:

b. Go Inside

Students and other people seem to find it irresistible these days to place periods and commas outside quotation marks. And why shouldn’t they? The stuff inside the quote marks is a unit, and thus it would appear logical to put punctuation outside it. Indeed, doing so is correct, assuming that you live in the British Isles. But in America, we never put commas or periods outside quotation
marks. And so this is an easy one to remember. Never outside, always inside.

Bear in mind that this applies only to periods and commas. We in the United States are fine with putting every
other
kind of punctuation outside of quotation marks unless the punctuation is part of the quote. Indeed, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that semicolons and colons
never
go inside quotation marks.

I am so excited to be singing Rodgers and Hart’s “Have You Met Miss Jones?”!

Bob’s favorite word is “chillax”; isn’t yours “ginormous”?

8.
( )

There are three relevant rules for parentheses themselves:

The content
inside
parentheses (TCIP) has to conform to a lot of rules, many of them relating to the relationship between the TCIP and the material that comes before it. If both are complete sentences (and remember that TCIP can be more than one sentence), follow this pattern.

If TCIP is not a complete sentence, then:

Here are some examples, all of them in the form of song titles (parenthetical song titles being a splendid and underappreciated genre). The titles are given in lowercase so as to show proper capitalization, and closing punctuation is included.

What about punctuation when the parentheses come in the middle of sentence? Simply act as though the parens were not there, and put the appropriate punctuation at the end of the close parenthesis. (This is the opposite of what you do with em-dashes. Go figure.)

C. Words

1.
THE SINGLE MOST COMMON MISTAKE IS THE MOST EASILY FIXABLE MISTAKE

Simply put, this is to clean up after yourself. Writing on computers leads to a category of sloppy error that was rare in typewriter days and probably nonexistent when people used pen on paper: forgetting to delete a word.

“Policing the area,” as it were, is an aspect of attentiveness or mindfulness, and it’s not hard to do. So do it.

2.
SPELLING

a. Homophone-phobia

Spell-check programs are great. Spell-check programs are a disaster.

Let me explain.

Back in the old days, students would frequently make spelling mistakes like
embarass
(instead of
embarrass
) or
influencial
(instead of
influential
). No more. Modern word processing programs put squiggly red lines under misspelled words or, better yet, silently correct them (as mine just tried to do with
embarass
).

The programs are not perfect, even on their own terms. My version of Microsoft Word accepts
miniscule
unsquiggled, even
though the correct spelling is
minuscule
, and
alright
even though
all right
is preferred by every authority I’m aware of. And although Word does in fact indicate that
momento
(as opposed to
memento
) is an error, many of my students apparently don’t believe it, because they go ahead and write
momento
anyway. I wonder about that, and sentences I get along the lines of:

It is actually quite rare for me to get an assignment with a word as badly misspelled as
pengellum,
but I’ll devote a minute to this example, because I feel for the student. She was reporting on Vogel’s speech, and rightly recognized that this was a good quote. There was this squirrelly
word
in it, however. She could sense it was an important word—it was what made the quote a good one, in fact—but she had no idea how to spell it. The only alternative offered by spell-check was
entellus,
which was surely wrong—and the dictionary didn’t seem to be any help, either. So she just left it. This is another example of the Blind Spot Problem (BSP), the dilemma of not knowing enough to know what you don’t know.

Even though I feel for her, and I recognize that the Blind Spot Problem is profound, I still wrote “NO NO NO” in the margin. What could she have done to avoid this fate?

Back to the far more common spelling problems. Spell-check, in many ways a wonderful innovation, has caused spelling muscles—never especially robust to begin with—to atrophy to the point that they now have the firmness of mint jelly. Even worse, it’s inspired a false sense of confidence, so that students would never even think of checking the spelling of a word in the dictionary.