Category Archives: grammar

“Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you.”

Posted on August 8, 2016 | Leave a comment

Do you like this quote by comedian Joey Adams?  It’s an example of an elegant and clever figure of speech,  the chiasmus (pronounced ki-AZ-mus).  You might not have heard the word, but you have heard other examples, such as

  •  “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” (John F. Kennedy)
  • “Do I love you because you’re beautiful? Or are you beautiful because I love you?” (Oscar Hammerstein)
  • People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”
    (Bill Clinton)

A chiasmus (also called inverted parallelism) inverses the original grammatical structure or idea in a sentence using a particular pattern.  First comes an idea or structure in two parts, such as A (Let us never negotiate) and B (out of fear).  Then comes the inversion, starting with part of B (but let us never fear) followed by part of A (to negotiate).

This inversion can be shown in a diagram as

A_B X

A chiasmus can sound formal because its structure is symmetrical.  For example, take JFK’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”  Its structure can be shown as

A B B A
your country you you your country

 

But a chiasmus can also sound informal, as by English comedian Chris Addison who said, “The right to bear arms is slightly less ridiculous than the right to arm bears.”

A B B A
bear arms arm bears

 

Using chiasmi in literature goes back thousands of years when it was popular in Greek writing and in the Bible to underscore order.  Socrates wrote, “Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.”  Shakespeare often used chiasmi, such as “Fair is foul and foul is fair” in Macbeth.

Plots can use chiasmi.  At the start of A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens has Dr. Manette curse all the members of the Darnay family; later Manette’s son-in-law, Charles Darnay, is sentenced to the guillotine because of Dr. Manette’s curse.

Chiasmi tend to slow down writing because the reader wants time to understand the logic, and then to marvel at its cleverness.  Used appropriately, chiasmi can add style to your writing.

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Posted in clarity, Figures of speech, grammar

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A writing problem even Supreme Court justices disagree on

Posted on July 14, 2016 | Leave a comment

“You tell your scouts to find a defensive catcher, a quick-footed shortstop, or a pitcher from last year’s World Champion Kansas City Royals,” wrote Supreme Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a 2016 court decision.  The problem is, does “from last year’s World Champion Kansas City Royals” apply only to the pitcher, or do the catcher and shortstop need to come from that team as well?

I’ll get to the answer in a minute.  But the real problem is a grammar one.  Should a series of ideas followed by a limiting prepositional phrase or other modifier have that phrase apply to all the items in the series or to the last item only?

Here’s another example, this one from Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.  “Imagine a friend told you that she hoped to meet ‘an actor, director, or producer involved with the new Star Wars movie.’”  Do the actor, director and producer all need to be involved with the Star Wars movie or just the producer?

The Supreme Court needed to consider this grammar problem during this past term when deciding Lockhart v. U.S.  The text of a law important to the case’s outcome stated that people convicted of a previous crime for “aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse, or abusive sexual conduct involving a minor or ward” needed to serve a mandatory 10-year sentence if convicted again.  But did “involving a minor or ward” apply to the whole series of crimes or only to the third one?

In the court decision, Justice Sotomayor’s opinion won:  the limiting prepositional phrase applied only to the last item in the series.  But a good case (no pun intended) can be made that all three items in the series are covered by the prepositional phrase.

Attorneys need to write laws clearly and precisely so that future attorneys and judges know exactly what the law means.  But the rest of us need to write clearly too.  How could the examples given above have been written to eliminate wiggle room?

  • You tell your scouts to find a defensive catcher or a quick-footed shortstop, or you tell them to find a pitcher from last years’ World Champion Kansas City Royals.
  • You tell your scouts that from last year’s World Champion Kansas City Royals they are to find a defensive catcher, a quick-footed shortstop, or a pitcher.
  • Imagine a friend told you that she hoped to meet an actor, director, or producer, and she hoped the producer was involved with the new Star Wars movie.
  • Imagine a friend told you that she hoped to meet an actor, director, or producer, any one of whom was involved with the new Star Wars movie.

For more on writing clear legal language, see an article in the July 9-10 issue of The Wall Street Journal on page A9.  “How to Write Like Antonin Scalia” discusses other textual considerations as well.

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Posted in clarity, grammar

How to be better understood on the web

Posted on April 27, 2016 | Leave a comment

Readers from the US, Pakistan, India, Australia, Georgia and Norway have visited this blog today.  I assume many of them are not native speakers of English.

How do I (and you) write for an international audience so that our writing is clear?

  • Eliminate idioms. Idioms don’t easily shift from one culture to another.  They might be taken as literal by people who have learned English as a second or third language.

Thomas Jefferson thinking about words to use in Declaration of Independence, with a modern-day child suggesting a word

  • Use a simplified vocabulary. Even if you know many synonyms, stick to common words, not rare ones.
  • Stick to standard English. Eliminate dialects or colloquiums.
  • Eliminate texting shortcuts. GTG is far from universal.
  • Keep your grammar simple. If you use complex sentences, limit yourself to one dependent clause per sentence.  Make sure pronoun antecedents are easy to figure out.  If they aren’t, repeat the nouns.
  • Use short sentences. Give yourself an upper word limit per sentence of 15 to 20 words.
  • Use American spelling.  It is the most common spelling of English words used on the web.
  • Assume your readers might not be fluent in English. Assume they might be ignorant of nuances of language that you take for granted.  Their English vocabularies might be rudimentary or restricted to one field of study.  Write accordingly.
  • Eliminate cultural bias. Pay attention to the connotations or double meanings of words.
  • Eliminate allusions.  So many references which well educated Americans use in writing are to the Bible, to Shakespeare or to pop songs.  Many readers will not understand them.
  • Use emojis.  Emojis can say in one picture what takes many words.

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Posted in clarity, complex sentence, composing text on computer, emojis, grammar, sentence structure

Do typos matter? How about grammar errors?

Posted on April 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

Suppose you are a young adult looking for someone to rent a bedroom in your house or apartment.  You receive the following email:

Hey! My name is Pat and I’m interested in sharing a house with other students who are serious abuot there schoolwork but who also know how to relax and have fun. I like to play tennis and love old school rap. If your someone who likes that kind of thing too, maybe we would mkae good housemates.

Would you rent to this person?

According to the University of Michigan, which studied how volunteers responded to such inquiries, emails containing typos and grammar errors lowered the chances of a prospective housemate. Typos had a more negative effect than grammar errors.

Moreover, researchers found that extroverts reading the emails were more likely to ignore typos and grammar mistakes when deciding whether to rent, while introverts were more likely to judge the prospective renter negatively.

So what?  How does this research affect you and me?

  • Typos can usually be found with spell-check. A writer who doesn’t bother to change typos might be judged lazy or not careful.
  • Grammar errors can be harder to detect and so might be excused. On the other hand, knowing how to spell “their” and “you’re” correctly is an elementary school skill.  Adults are expected to know these grammar skills.
  • Your response to typos and grammar errors says a lot about you. Does your skin crawl when you receive an email which contains errors from a friend?  Do you judge that person based on such errors?  Should you?

Years ago, before spell-check and even word processors, I had a job requiring me to proofread a weekly newspaper before it was printed.  One day a highly respected man in our community let me know he had found an error in the latest issue, an error I had not detected.  I could see that this man no longer held me in the same esteem as before.

You never know who will be reading your writing or what impact your writing could have on your future.  If your emails are error-free, people are not likely to notice that.  It’s expected.  But if your emails contain errors, that will be noticed.  And even though polite people might never tell you, some could hold those errors against you.

For more information on the U of M study, go to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.014988.

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How to write clearly for future generations

Posted on March 9, 2016 | Leave a comment

Among the hardest materials for students to read today are the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution (Lexile scores 1350 and 1560 respectively). Because Thomas Jefferson knew future generations would be reading his words in the Declaration of Independence, he wrote them as carefully as possible in 1776.  Even so, they are difficult to understand by his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren’s generation.

Many reasons exist for this difficulty, including sentence structure, sentence length, relative pronouns, and vocabulary. I would like to analyze the first paragraph of the Declaration to see what we can learn from words Thomas Jefferson penned 240 years ago in order to improve our writing today.

Thomas Jefferson thinking about words to use in Declaration of Independence, with a modern-day child suggesting a word

Here is the Declaration’s original first paragraph:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

To begin, this paragraph is a single, 71-word sentence. We know that the more words a sentence contains, the harder it is to understand (unless the sentence is a list). If a sentence of 30 words is pushing it, a sentence of 71 words is beyond what most people can follow. Many working memories stop after the second clause.

Secondly, this 71-word sentence contains six clauses plus infinitive phrases and prepositional phrases. Three clauses in a single sentence are sometimes two too many for clear understanding. But six?

Another difficulty is the pronoun “which.” It is used three times to introduce three dependent clauses.

But perhaps the greatest problem to modern readers is the vocabulary. Many words are familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. For example, the fourth word, “course” is a word we use all the time today (a math course, the course of a river, of course), but the meaning used in the Declaration is “progress or advancement” which is no longer its primary meaning.

When “course” is combined with “events” to form the phrases “in the course of human events,” the meaning becomes more muddled. What if Jefferson had written, “When, during human history”? Wouldn’t those words have said the same thing yet made more sense? To us, yes. But Jefferson was writing the most formal document of his life.  He chose to use formal language—formal even for the 18th century.

What if Jefferson had written something like this instead?

Sometimes a group of people need to sever their political connections with another group of people and to become an independent country. When this happens, they should explain why they are separating.

My 32 words are not nearly as elegant as Jefferson’s, but to modern ears, they are easier to understand (39 fewer words; two sentences instead of one; one simple sentence and one complex sentence with just one dependent clause; and everyday vocabulary).

Think ahead 240 years to the year 2256. Will Americans then still find my words easy to understand? How can we write diaries, letters, memoirs or war stories  which will make sense to our descendants?

  • Above all, write clearly.
  • Write short sentences.
  • Write mostly simple sentences.
  • Limit the number of dependent clauses to one per sentence.
  • Make sure pronouns have clearly identified antecedents.
  • Use everyday vocabulary.

 

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Posted in clarity, complex sentence, Declaration of Independence, grammar, paraphrasing, simple sentence, vocabulary building