7 Grammar Rules You Must Never Break
Read Time:7 Minute, 14 Second
Watch out for those dangling modifiers and avoid those nasty semicolons wherever possible. These are just two simple grammar rules, with much more to come.
As an editor I have to be most watchful for those pesky grammar rules, so imagine my delight when I came across this little gem by of The Week, originally published on March 14, 2013:
I recently wrote an article for TheWeek.com about bogus grammar “rules” that aren’t worth your time. However, there are still plenty of legitimate rules that you should be aware of. Not following them doesn’t make you a bad person or even (necessarily) a bad writer. I’m sure that all of them were broken at one point or another by Henry James, Henry Adams, or some other major author named Henry. Moreover, grammar is one of the least pressing problems when it comes to the poor state of writing today. In my new book, How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them, things like wordiness, poor word choice, awkwardness, and bad spelling — which have nothing to do with grammar — take up the bulk of my attention.
Nevertheless, anyone who wants to write in a public setting has to be aware of grammar. (And I’m concerned with writing here; talking is a whole different ballgame.) If you make these errors, you’re likely to be judged harshly by an editor you want to publish your work; an executive who, you hope, will be impressed enough by your cover letter to hire you; or a reader you want to be persuaded by your argument. In each case, there’s a pretty easy workaround, so better safe than sorry.
1. The subjunctive
This one is pretty simple. When you’re writing about a non-true situation — usually following the word if or the verb wish — the verb to be is rendered as were.
So:
* If I was were a rich man.
* I wish I was were an Oscar Mayer wiener.
* If Hillary Clinton was were president, things would be a whole lot different.
If you are using if for other purposes (hypothetical situations, questions), you don’t use the subjunctive.
* The reporter asked him if he were was happy.
* If an intruder were was here last night, he would have left footprints, so let’s look at the ground outside.
2. Bad parallelism
This issue comes up most often in lists, for example: My friend made salsa, guacamole, and brought chips. If you start out by having made cover the first two items, it has to cover subsequent ones as well. To fix, you usually have to do just a little rewriting. Thus, My friend made salsa and guacamole and brought chips to go with them.
3. Verb problems
There are a few persistent troublemakers you should be aware of.
* I’m tired, so I need to go lay lie down.
* The fish laid lay on the counter, fileted and ready to broil.
* Honey, I shrunk shrank the kids.
* In a fit of pique, he sunk sank the toy boat.
* He seen saw it coming.
(The last three are examples of verbs where people sometimes switch the past and participle forms. Thus, it would be correct to write: I have shrunk the kids; He had sunk the boat; and He had seen it coming.)
4. Pronoun problems
Let’s take a look at three little words. Not “I love you,” but me, myself and I. Grammatically, they can be called object, reflexive, and subject. As long as they’re by themselves, object and subject don’t give anyone problems. That is, no one who’s an adult native English speaker would say Me walked to the bus stop or He gave the book to I. For some reason, though, things can get tricky when a pronoun is paired with a noun. We all know people who say things like Me and Fred had lunch together yesterday, instead of Fred and I… Heck, most of us have said it ourselves; for some reason, it comes trippingly off the tongue. We also (most of us) know not to use it in a piece of writing meant to be published. Word to the wise: Don’t use it in a job interview, either.
There’s a similar attraction to using the subject instead of object. Even Bill Clinton did this back in 1992 when he asked voters to give Al Gore and I [instead of me] a chance to bring America back. Or you might say, Thanks for inviting my wife and I, or between you and I… Some linguists and grammarians have mounted vigorous and interesting defenses of this usage. However, it’s still generally considered wrong and should be avoided.
A word that’s recently become quite popular is myself — maybe because it seems like a compromise between I and me. But sentences like Myself and my friends went to the mall or They gave special awards to Bill and myself don’t wash. Change the first to My friends and I… and the second to Bill and me.
5. The ‘dangling’ conversation
In a class, I once assigned students to “review” a consumer product. One student chose a bra sold by Victoria’s Secret. She wrote:
Sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performed well…. Though slightly pricey, your breasts will thank you.
The two sentences are both guilty of dangling modifiers because (excuse me if I’m stating the obvious), the bra did not sit in a class or dance at the bar, and “your breasts” are not slightly pricey.
Danglers are inexplicably attractive, and even good writers commit this error a lot… in their first drafts. Here’s a strategy for smoking these bad boys out in revision. First, recognize sentences that have this structure: MODIFIER-COMMA-SUBJECT-VERB. Then change the order to: SUBJECT-COMMA-MODIFIER-COMMA-VERB. If the result makes sense, you’re good to go. If not, you have a dangler. So in the first sentence above, the rejiggered sentence would be:
The bra, sitting in a class or dancing at a bar, performed well.
Nuh-uh. The solution here, as it often is, is just to add a couple of words: Whether you’re sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performs well.
6. The semicolon
I sometimes say that when you feel like using a semicolon, lay lie down till the urge goes away. But if you just can’t resist, remember that there are really only two proper uses for this piece of punctuation. One is to separate two complete clauses (a construction with a subject and verb that could stand on its own as a sentence). I knocked on the door; no one answered. The second is to separate list items that themselves contain punctuation. Thus, The band played Boise, Idaho; Schenectady, New York; and Columbus, Ohio.
Do not use a semicolon in place of a colon, for example, There is only one piece of punctuation that gives Yagoda nightmares; the semicolon.
7. Words
As I noted in my previous article, the meaning of words inevitably and perennially change. And you can get in trouble when you use a meaning that has not yet been widely accepted. Sometimes it’s fairly easy to figure out where a word stands in this process. It’s become more common to use nonplussed to mean not bothered, or unfazed, but that is more or less the opposite of the traditional meaning, and it’s still too early to use it that way when you’re writing for publication. (As is spelling unfazed as unphased.) On the other hand, no one thinks anymore that astonish means “turn to stone,” and it would be ridiculous to object to anyone who does so. But there are a lot of words and expressions in the middle. Here’s one man’s list of a few meanings that aren’t quite ready for prime time:
* Don’t use begs the question. Instead use raises the question.
* Don’t use phenomena or criteria as singular. Instead use phenomenon or criterion.
* Don’t use cliché as an adjective. Instead use clichéd.
* Don’t use comprised of. Instead use composed of/made up of.
* Don’t use less for count nouns such people or miles. Instead use fewer.
* Don’t use penultimate (unless you mean second to last). Instead use ultimate.
* Don’t use lead as past tense of to lead. Instead use led.
I hesitate to state what should be obvious, but sometimes the obvious must be stated. So here goes: Do not use it’s, you’re or who’s when you mean its, your or whose. Or vice versa!
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Forgive my ignorance, but what’s wrong with “begs the question”. You did not explain.
One would have to ask Mr. Yagoda for the answer Laurie, but I like “begs the question” and will continue to use it 🙂
“Begging the question” refers to a specific type of logical fallacy also known as petitio principii, which is Latin logician speak for “assuming the original point”. It occurs when a proposition which requires proof is assumed without proof. It is a form of circular reasoning.
What it means to beg (as opposed to raise) the question is to assume the very point your argument is intended to prove: “Humans’ primarily communicate by speech because vocalizing is their chief means of sharing information.” – this statement begs the question because speech and vocalizing are the same thing (as are communicating and sharing information), and the question of why speech is primary is left unaddressed.
If a right-winger says, “Same-sex marriage is wrong because marriage is a bond between a man and a woman.”, the wingnut is begging the question by assuming that marriage only exists between a man and a woman, which is exactly what same-sex marriage challenges.
The problem is that most people use the phrase “beg the question” when what they really mean is “raise the question”. For example, to say “The government shutdown cost the nation jobs, money and risked our financial reputation, which begs the question, ‘Why did the teabaggers do it?'” is wrong, because it doesn’t beg the question (because there are no circular assumptions involved) but it does raise the question “why”.
And that is why using “begs the question” when you mean “raises the question” is wrong, and anyone who does so should be called out and berated for it.
Anyone who studies linguistics learns full well the the import of this distinction, because there are so many assumptions that people make about language that petitio principii is an easy mistake to make. And if you want proof that the previous sentence id not begging the question by assuming the number of assumptions, go read Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages by Guy Deutscher. It takes a whole book to explain it.
Very interesting indeed E.A.. I will now use “raise” instead of “beg.” Thanks man.
After reading this post and comments, I immediately thought of Albert Einstein, who said many sharp and witty things including:
If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough.
Having said that I am about to boldly go were no woman has gone before.
Ha!! Even Star Trek reference. Well good for you Jennings. Much enjoyed 🙂
English is a very difficult language to master, that’s why the best English speakers in the world are usually educated Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or hard-working Germans, the lazy Germans struggle with the ”w”, such marvelous diction and grammatically spot-on. It’s a fact that learning a foreign language helps one understand one’s own. Most people in the English speaking world come across as congenital idiots because they only speak one language.
The notion that one language is easier or harder to master is a fallacy. I quote linguist Guy Deutscher:
‒ Guy Deutscher, Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Different Languages, page 108.
I was finally defeated in my efforts to learn Finnish by its fifteen noun cases; German, Old English, Old Norse and Gothic were nowhere near as hard. I find Hebrew and Arabic difficult to comprehend because of the verb declension system, and since I am somewhat tone deaf, languages which use tones such as Chinese and Vietnamese are beyond me altogether. Romance languages aren’t all that difficult for English speakers, but I just don’t care for them much. But to say that English is any more difficult to master than any other language is not correct. How would you deal with a language that has six genders (Polish) or 10 (Ganda) or 18 (Swahili)? How about a language with more numbers than just singular and plural (Slovenian, Tahitian or Serbian)? Or a language in which the word order is Verb, Subject, Object (Irish Gaelic)? I’d say you would find them rather difficult to master.
Let me expand on why I said English is a difficult language to master. It is difficult for the majority of people who speak English as their native tongue. They wrap themselves in their particular brogue and all other languages, or even different accents, can go to hell.
On the other hand, to quote another linguist, Noam Chomsky constructed a grammatically correct sentence “green ideas sleep furiously” which only makes sense if you are on acid.
None of your points has anything to do with the supposed difficulty of English. All languages (or at least those with more than a handful of speakers) have dialects and accents. All those languages have perceived standards as to which dialect is “best” and all languages have speakers whose performance falls far short of the perceived ideal.
Chomsky’s famous sentence* is something you are misinterpreting. He gave that as an example of a sentence that is gramatically correct but makes no sense semantically. It does, however, perfectly illustrate Chomsky’s point that syntax and semantics are only loosely related – and from that point of view, it makes perfect sense, especially to a linguist. You don’t have to take drugs, but it does help to take classes in semantics and advanced syntax. It is also possible to construct equivalent seemingly nonsensical sentences in every single language that now exists or ever existed.
*The sentence, which is actually, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, became known to the world in Chomsky’s groundbreaking 1957 book Syntactic Structures (which was required reading for all linguistics majors). Here is the entire passage:
Chomsky was more interested in the notion that neither sentence had ever been spoken before, and that the mind of the hearer could make grammatical sense of (1) but not (2). (It’s interesting to note, though, that if you translated those statements into Turkish, (2) would make more sense to a Turkish speaker than (1)).
The game of Exquisite Corpse, first known in 1925, made use of similar nonsense sentences (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”) and was first played in France, in French. It’s also the basis for the game of Mad Libs.
Seems like I’ve bought a knife to gun-fight Mr. Blair, please excuse me while I disappear for eight years and get a couple of Doctorates from two world-renowned universities and come back armed with more arguments than you could shake a stick at.
I speak several languages, and found German to be the most difficult to master. I had a much easier time with French and Italian. I won’t mention Latin 🙂
I used to think that when a person says “waiting on” and means “waiting for”, they are wrong. Examples: A waiter waits on someone in the restaurant. A woman waits for her child. But now it seems to be ubiquitous. You hear “waiting on” ALL the time – songs, the President, advertising, Joe Public, teevee interviewers and commentators…….
Is it really still wrong to substitute “waiting on” for “waiting for”?
I believe you omitted what should have been the 7th word in your treatise. “As an editor I have to (BE) most watchful
Proofread.
LOL! Yep. Also left the “e” off of the word “come” in the paragraph after the picture. I thought a little snark was in order and wanted to see who the keen eyed editors were 🙂
Hey there,
Are you still working on your site?
I’ve encountered 14 writing errors.
Best regards,
Charles
Thanks Charles. I’m looking for an editor. Interested?
Thank you! Bookmarked.
” “your breasts” are not slightly pricey. ”
True, they can be damn expensive in fact and your insurance won’t cover any of it.
But, awesome post and just impactfies me because like the way people right is so bad it’s like just awesome. Like they could just care less about grammar like they think its a mute point or something and like that thing about cliches is just awesome like I avoid that stuff like the plague.
The word “data” is plural. Unless you’re talking about a Star Trek character, the singular is “datum”.