Grammar Police: Our Duty is to Serve...Not to Serve Time

As regular readers of Professorial Musings will have noted, I'm appalled by the terrible typos, problematic punctuation, and grammatical gaffes that appear in ads, business documents, and on public signs. A colleague and friend of mine sent me a link today to an April 7, 2008, article on Gimundo titled "Man Drives Cross-Country, Correcting Typos." Apparently, 28-year-old college graduate Jeff Deck is touring America, correcting grammar as he goes.

He's my kind of guy. (Just a little young.)

He's doing what I've always dreamed of doing--correcting public grammar goofs so people don't mistakenly think that the mistake is the reality. While I admire his enthusiasm for the project, though, lessons learned in childhood conflict with my desire to make public people's mistakes:

1. Don't deface other's people's property. My siblings and I were taught to treat other people's property with respect. Clearly, marking up people's signs--especially in a permanent way--is defacing property. It's quite possibly even punishable as a misdemeanor or felony, depending upon the value of what is defaced.
   
   
   
2. Don't point out when other people are being stupid. This is a hard lesson for me to adhere to sometimes, and I'll admit that this blog occasionally pokes at people who haven't proofread very well. But to physically mark up a sign so that everyone can see the mistake, well, that's equivalent to posting a neon sign that says Stupid Works Here. And frankly, it isn't stupidity that causes people to make grammatical and other mistakes; it's usually simple ignorance of the rules. Why not find a positive way to instruct people instead of making people look stupid for not knowing or understanding the rules? Even people who work with language every day make mistakes and need to look up the occasional rule.
   

I will admit to having thought about correcting signs or offering unsolicited lectures about grammar. For example, it's difficult for me to walk through the vendor area at a craft fair and not stop to explain why the wood-burned house plaques should read The Smiths instead of The Smith's. Instinct cries out These errors must be corrected! Save our children from improper apostrophe usage! But I avoid that dark side and simply refrain from buying an improperly apostrophe-d plaque.

I did, however, relapse about a week ago. My roommate and I were dining in a local Mexican restaurant where I noticed that the whiteboard near the front counter announced the evening's Special's. As we walked up to the counter to pay our separate bills, I made my roommate go first in order to distract the employee at the register while I snuffed out the apostrophe.

At least I didn't deface their property, and removing the offending apostrophe only made them look smarter.

Dare I Try Their Services?

In my composition classes, I talk with my students about professional presentation: how they present themselves on the page will cause the reader to perceive them in a certain way. If their essays don't follow the conventional format or are chock full of sentence-level errors, the writers lose credibility with the reader.

I wish someone would talk with advertisers about this issue. I can't recall where I saw this advertisement recently--it may have been in Facebook. Read carefully and guess what went wrong:

Over Thirty Singles: It's not hard to meet people, it's hard to meet the right type. Our screening process will works. Let us find you someone special.

Ads like this one make me cringe. I don't even have to be reading them; the errors act like magnets, drawing my eyes to the text despite my best efforts to avoid the ads. Were you able to spot the errors?

First, the reader must struggle to decide whether Over Thirty Singles is a boast that more than 30 single people are available for dating through this service or whether the ad is attempting to gain the attention of an audience whose age is higher than 30. Since having more than 30 people available for dating isn't much of a boast, I'm going to guess that the company means the latter, in which case a hyphen is needed to show that Over-Thirty is a compound adjective that describes Singles. Adding the hyphen--Over-Thirty Singles--reduces the confusion.

Second, the comma splice in the first sentence is troubling. I know that advertisers often play hard-and-fast with punctuation rules since space is money in the industry, but honestly, what would it have hurt to convert the improper comma to a proper semicolon? A comma splice occurs when a comma is improperly used to join two complete ideas that could stand alone as sentences. In this case, the ideas on each side of the comma could stand alone: "It's not hard to meet people" and "It's hard to meet the right type." But commas don't complete ideas. To fix the comma splice, a period could be used to make two complete sentences, a comma with a conjunction could be used ("It's not hard to meet people, but it's hard to meet the right type"), or a semi-colon could be used ("It's not hard to meet people; it's hard to meet the right type"). I advocate for a semi-colon in this instance, since semi-colons are used to join two complete ideas that are related--and these two sentences are related. So people, why can't the advertiser just replace the comma with a semi-colon?

Finally, the penultimate sentence states "Our screening process will works," clearly adding an s unnecessarily to work. Which leads the reader to wonder whether the screening process truly will work, given the fact that the advertiser's error-screening process apparently doesn't.

Have you come across any ads recently that make you cringe? Please share them!

One Space after Closing Punctuation. Period.

Today I get to put on my "picky English teacher" hat. To adapt a Seinfeld phrase, this is a blog entry about...nothing. Just dead air after punctuation marks.

I am always amazed when I am working on formatting issues with my students and I mention to them that they should have just one space after a period, not two. Alas, the consternation! The heavy sighs, the panicked looks, the livid faces! Generally, someone will say, "But my other English teacher said we should have TWO spaces after a period."

I'm always tempted to say, "But is your other English teacher giving you a grade for this class?"

Instead, though, I work to smooth over ruffled feathers. You see, people really don't like change, and students like change least of all. And when you start messing with their spaces after punctuation, well, you have a potential mutiny on your hands. Yes, they're right. The rule USED to be two spaces after a colon, a period, and other closing punctuation marks. However, now it's one space.

Why only one space? The publishing industry is partly to blame. In publishing, space is money, and an extra space after each closing punctuation mark is wasted space--and therefore, wasted money.

Additionally, PCs have to take part of the blame. Remember the old Courier font? Well, each letter of the Courier font takes up the same amount of space--for example, an i and an m would each take up the same amount of space--so we needed two spaces after the period in order to be better able to recognize where one sentence stopped and the next began. Now, however, we have proportional-spacing fonts, which means that each letter takes up only the amount of space it needs--an i takes up less space than an m, and therefore one space after a period is sufficient.

Bill Walsh, copy chief at The Washington Post's National Desk, discusses the spacing issue in the first chapter of his book The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English:

Are you still putting two spaces after periods, exclamation points, question marks and colons? You shouldn't be. Some places are still clinging to this typewriter convention, no doubt, but as a standard operating procedure it went out with the IBM Selectric. (3)

If you're a student, however, you're perhaps more interested in what your particular citation format handbook has to say. Here is a rundown of a few of the more commonly used citation styles:

APA Style, from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 15th ed. (2001), p. 290

5.11 Spacing and Punctuation
Space once after all punctuation as follows:

• after commas, colons, and semicolons;
• after punctuation marks at the ends of sentences;
• after periods that separate parts of a reference citation; and
• after the periods of the initials in personal names (e.g., J. R. Zhang).
  

Exception: Do not space after internal periods in abbreviations (e.g., a.m., i.e., U.S.) or around colons in ratios.

CMS Style, from The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (2003), p. 61

2.12 Line spacing and word spacing.
A single character space, not two spaces, should be left after periods at the ends of sentences (both in manuscript and in final, published form) and after colons.

Turabian Style, from A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed., p. 375

A.1.3 Spacing and Indentation
Put only one space, not two, following the terminal punctuation of a sentence.

MLA Style, from MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed. (2003), pp. 93-94

3.2.12 Spacing after Concluding Punctuation Marks
Publications in the United States today usually have the same spacing after a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point as between words on the same line. Since word processors make available the same fonts used by typesetters for printed works, many writers, influenced by the look of typeset publications, now leave only one space after a concluding punctuation mark. In addition, most publisher's guidelines for preparing a manuscript on disk ask professional authors to type only the spaces that are to appear in print. [. . . ] [I]nternal punctuation marks, such as a colon, a comma, and a semicolon, should always be followed by one space.

I deal with MLA format last because although the other formats require one space after closing punctuation, MLA is a little, well, forgiving:

As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor requests that you do otherwise. (94)

And I say, come now, MLA! What gives?

I suspect that the Modern Language Association is catering to the traditionalists who can't break the habit (or simply aren't willing to) of typing two spaces after a period; therefore, the MLA Handbook offers them a one-sentence license to forgo industry and academic standards. Is it any wonder my students complain that their other English teacher did things differently?

Bottom line: One space after closing punctuation. Period.

To Boldly Split What No One Has Split Before...

Space: The final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its continuing mission:
To explore strange, new worlds,
To seek out new life and new civilizations,
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
--Captain James T. Kirk

I confess--I'm a Star Trek fan. I have attended small-venue conventions and met cast members from all the Star Trek series except Enterprise. But you don't want to hear those stories. You want to hear what Star Trek has to do with language.

Well, it's all about the split infinitive. In my previous blog, Grammar "Policies" Masquerading as "Rules," I indicated that avoiding split infinitives is what I would consider a grammar policy, not a hard-and-fast rule. And the Star Trek prologue noted above doesn't just split an infinitive--it does so boldly.

An infinitive, simply put, is the to form of a verb: to run, to spit, to go, to laugh...you get the picture. When an infinitive is split, an adverb is inserted between the to and the verb--in our Star Trek example, to boldly go is a split infinitive, with the adverb boldly inserted between the two halves of the verb to and go.

The problem is that the grammar we have such a love/hate relationship with derives from Latin, which was once thought to be THE language. Our grammarians thus tried to organize the structure of English to replicate the elegance of Latin.

But Latin does not have infinitives in the way we think of them, and therefore it was impossible to split them! Since Latin had no split infinitives, our grammarians decided that English shouldn't have them, either. As a result, avoiding split infinitives has been considered a rule by grammar purists; however, good reasons exist for using split infinitives. Don't get me wrong--I don't advocate splitting infinitives just for the sake of splitting them or splitting them unthinkingly. You should have a purpose for splitting them. Know the grammar policy before you bend it!

Acceptable reasons for splitting infinitives include

• Emphasizing how something is done. When an infinitive is split, the emphasis rests on the word doing the splitting. In to boldly go, boldly receives the emphasis--since it is an interruptive force in the verb--but isn't that the point of the phrase? It isn't enough to go where no man has gone before--one should do it boldly!
  
  
• Avoiding confusion. Sometimes, not splitting an infinitive leads to misplaced modifiers or other confusing problems. For example, "Joe decided to quickly move for a vote," where quickly splits the infinitive to move, means that Joe moved for the vote quickly after making the decision to do so. If we were to avoid splitting the infinitive and move the adverb quickly to a different place in the sentence, the meaning of the sentence changes. For instance, "Joe quickly decided to move for a vote" means that he made the decision quickly, but not that the motion for the vote was quick. Why avoid splitting an infinitive only to end up with a sentence that doesn't say what you mean?

One caveat: if your English instructor or your company style manual indicates that splitting infinitives should be avoided at all costs, it's smart to follow their guidance. But at least you can take secret delight in knowing that splitting infinitives is sometimes acceptable. And we can thank Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, for showing us how to boldly split them!

Grammar Policies Masquerading as Rules

As a college English professor, I find that many students come to the classroom full of grammar "rules" that they have been admonished to live by. Clearly traumatized by the blood-red ink on their essays and by indecipherable abbreviations such as awk scribbled in said pen blood, these students are greatly surprised when I tell them that it's okay to, say, split an infinitive. This surprise is quickly followed by wide-eyed panic as students leap to the conclusion that either their tight-bunned English schoolmarms of yesteryear lied to them or that my summer sausage has completely fallen off my cracker.

I suppose I see English teachers residing on a continuum: At one extreme are what I call the grammar purists (instructors who are unforgiving of broken--or even slightly bent--grammar "rules," no matter how nonsensical or archaic); at the other extreme, grammar organicists (instructors who see grammar as a language structure that changes and develops as society changes the language). In other words, a purist would scarcely survive being in a room where someone says, "It just ain't right," whereas an organicist wouldn't even blink an eye at the contraction that has been in the language since the early 1700s. A language purist would experience a massive coronary if her child said, "And I went, 'you're so lame,'" whereas an organicist would understand that went is youth-speak for said.

I see myself as a sort of grammar moderate, falling between the two extremes, probably because I recognize that since our grammar is essentially a language structure imposed upon English from Latin, it doesn't always work as well as it should. In fact, if one adheres strictly to grammar rules, we would all be walking around saying things like "A grammar handbook is something without which one cannot be." Come again? Adhering strictly to grammar rules often leads to difficult-to-interpret sentences, awkward phrasing, and unlovely language. I recognize that sometimes it is better to bend the grammar "rules" (or at times, break them) in order to achieve clarity, special emphasis, or just be able to hold a normal conversation with an audience without seeming overly formal. Additionally, language is organic--it changes over time--and therefore the grammar rules we once lived with may be a bit outdated.

So, by now you are probably wondering why I've been writing "rules" in quotation marks. I've done that because many purists will teach students grammar "rules" when what they are really teaching them are grammar policies--or rather, policies of style--designed to create clarity and help students avoid more serious grammatical problems.

For example, one grammar policy that is often promoted as a "rule" is that one shouldn't begin a sentence with the words and or but. And yet, one can begin a sentence with and or but that is grammatically correct--as I have done in this sentence. But English teachers have a reason for instituting this policy: following this policy prevents students from writing certain kinds of fragmented sentences, such as

Outside, it was raining. And snowing.

The second sentence isn't really a sentence at all--it's a sentence fragment, and should be combined with the first sentence:

Outside, it was raining and snowing.

Because instructors teach such policies as "rules," students avoid committing these grammatical sins, only to find in college that some of their instructors (although not all) encourage them to break the rules. It doesn't mean their previous English instructors were bad, or wrong, or even out to get them; rather, it was a way to ensure that the students stopped committing grammatical suicide.

Here are a few grammar policies that my students have faunched over:

• Never begin a sentence with and or but.
• Never split an infinitive.
• Never dangle your participles.

Do any of these sound familiar to you? Have you been taught certain grammar "rules," only to find out later that they were actually policies? Share your story! Or, if you have a grammar question, feel free to post that, too. You never know--I might actually do a complete post about it!

Blog Entry

Pretty catchy title for a blog entry, don't you think? Or are any of you actually reading this blog?

It's nearly time for my Composition 2 students to write their first essay. We've gone through the introduction to the course, the online orientation, an introduction to academic thinking and reading, and now they're watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, the first of several sources of varying opinions about global warming. Their first assignment is what we call a summary/strong response essay--students are charged with writing an essay that summarizes the main arguments of the documentary and then responds to them, agreeing with some points and disagreeing with others, taking into account both the subject matter (what Al Gore presents about global warming) and also the rhetorical concerns (the persuasive strategies used, the purpose, the audience, the format of the material, and so forth).

I'm dreading these first essays.

Oh, not for the reasons you think. These students have made it through Composition 1, so presumably they can write reasonably well. It's not that I'm expecting dreadful essays (although I occasionally get them). It's also not the grading load--60+ drafts to look over. Rather, I'm dreading the beginnings.

My students seem to think that titles are disposable, unimportant. So despite my mention to them already that titles should engage the reader and imply or reveal something about the essay's main idea, I will get titles like "Blog Entry," stating the obvious:

• "My Essay"
• "Essay 1"
• "Summary/Strong Response Essay"

Only slightly better are the essays titled "A Response to An Inconvenient Truth." At least that title tells the reader what the essay is about in vague terms.

I ask my students this question: If you were looking at the table of contents of a magazine and saw an article titled "My Article," would you read it? I usually have one or two students raise their hands (I suspect these are the students who think cereal box prose is High Literature or they are just being smart alecs), but the rest of the class just sit with Cheshire grins on their faces. I then launch into my soapbox about titles.

And guess how they generally fix the problem? By eliminating the title altogether. What's an English professor to do?

Once we get past the title, it's time to deal with the atrocious introductions. I'm not sure where students learned how to write introductions, because I know that no conscientious high school English teacher would give a student a passing essay grade with some of the introductions I receive. Here's a representative sample of what my students submit to me:

1. The Long-Term-Memory Beginning. All too common, the Long-Term-Memory Beginning is so named because it sounds a lot like the stories your 93-year-old grandfather tells: "When I was just a kid..." or "When I was born...." My students aren't far enough removed from their childhoods to use these starts, so instead they turn to a Jungian "collective unconscious" beginning:

• "Since the beginning of time, man has had to deal with Mother Nature." (Really? I don't recall, even drawing upon the collective unconscious, humanity being around at the beginning of time.)
  
• "Since the time of Adam and Eve..." (The church-going students prefer this take.)
• "Since the time of the cave man..." (Well, at least we are in humankind time.)

Such starts are not only obvious and inaccurate, but they're also not the least bit interesting for the reader.

2. The Webster's Dictionary Definition. Ah, the joys of the dictionary! And how my eager students love to share definitions with the reader at the beginning of their essays! Now, sharing such definitions is even easier since many print dictionaries have an online presence. Students don't even have to leave their computers to whip up a Webster's Online Dictionary beginning:

• "Webster's Online Dictionary defines 'global warming' as 'The progressive gradual rise of the earth's surface temperature thought to be caused by the greenhouse effect and responsible for changes in global climate patterns. An increase in the near surface temperature of the Earth. Global warming has occurred in the distant past as the result of natural influences, but the term is most often used to refer to the warming predicted to occur as a result of increased emissions of greenhouse gases. See climate change, greenhouse effect, enhanced greenhouse effect, radiative forcing' ("global warming," s.v. "weather")."
  

Stunning piece of prose, isn't it? Doesn't it call to you, sing through your veins, make you want to leap joyously into the essay, putting aside your plans to watch Big Brother or read those Kashi Go Lean cereal boxes? Dictionary definitions have a time and place, and often need to be in the introduction in order to help readers understand the issue under discussion. But please, not in the first sentence! Additionally, rephrasing the definition in terms the reader can easily understand would help considerably.

So, readers, are you still with me? Did anyone even read this blog given the title? If you're still out there, leave me a comment--what kind of beginnings grip you? What advice for beginning an essay would you offer up to my students? We use this blog in our classroom, so they'll be reading your responses.

But I suppose if none of you respond, that tells them something, too--boring titles don't work.

Brotherly Love

From time to time, I'll post a creative writing bit I've done. This vignette first appeared in the Decatur Herald & Review's Prairie Talk column in a slightly different form on March 14, 1995, and is dedicated today to my brother Steve, who is shipping off to Iraq this month to serve our country.

Brothers are wonderful and special creatures. I had only sisters until I was six, when my father remarried. My two new brothers introduced me to a breathless, inventive world. But what would we have in common? How would we play together? Surely my brothers would not be interested in playing dolls or jacks.

Soon, with help from my younger brother, Steve, I found myself racing cars down the hallway and swinging through our neighbor’s weeping willow trees. Because we were both avid fans of The Wild, Wild West, we practiced our kicks and karate chops together on my life-sized dancing doll. I was disappointed when the doll, one of my favorites, started to fall apart.

Our martial arts skills were soon put to the test. As we played along the sidewalk of our cul-de-sac one day, Steve spied Pat, a teenage neighbor boy, smoking in the vacant lot two doors down. Impressed by the Smokey the Bear advertisements regularly shown on television at the time, my brother threatened to call ol' Smokey if Pat didn’t put out the cigarette. Unfortunately,the smoking teen did not take the threat lightly; he rewarded my brother's altruism and environmental concern by stuffing him in the neighbor's trash can. Pat and friends jeered at Steve as they forced down the lid.

My brother was a little guy since he had spent the last few years homebound, battling rheumatic fever. He didn’t have the strength to fight off three high school kids, but he put up one heck of a fight. I stood by, helpless, while Steve flailed around in the can, thumping and bumping, to no avail. Finally, inspiration struck me. “Steve,” I yelled, “Remember The Wild, Wild West!” Seconds after that battle cry, my brother rallied, kicking the lid with all of his meager might. The lid flew off the can, startling the high school kids.

Of course, before my brother could escape, the teenagers had the lid back in place and were sitting on top. I had no choice but to scurry home to fetch my parents. They marched to the neighbor’s house, rescued my brother, lectured the boys, and escorted us home. For days afterward, my brother and I spoke proudly of his amazing feat (and his amazing feet). Later, I decided that the damaged doll was a worthwhile sacrifice; perhaps a sister could offer a brother something, after all.

Steve, remember The Wild, Wild West! Serve well and be safe. Love, Kris