7 ms·
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
- mhb 17y ago"Do not explain too much."
- diN0bot 17y agowhat i've always wondered is how to handle apostrophes, parentheses and punctuation. it's not what is Right, it's what will look right to the audience. i love "hello world." ?? i love programs (especially hello world). ??
- RevRal 17y agoIf you're serious, which is likely since the internet is worldwide, I have some advice that can help you get started. Also, I'm going to believe that your lack of capitals is a conscious choice. A method of saving time... over time. Besides apostrophes, commas, and question marks, I have always considered special punctuation as a kind of cheat. If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought. One exercise I have employed, when organizing my writing, has been to write without punctuation and in lines, every thought on a new line. Like a poem. Punctuation is essentially there to separate these thoughts, so you can start by adding the periods, then arranging your thoughts into a paragraph. Use of special punctuation, in my opinion, is mostly a means of controlling rhythm. And the ability to ease into the rhythm of writing is largely dependent on a reader's, or writer's, familiarity with the language. So, I would focus on periods and commas first, until you have a good familiarity with the language. That is my advice to you.
- etfb 17y ago"If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought." Thank you. You've just fixed my writing style. I owe you a large drink. (No, seriously. I use semi-colons, colons and em-dashes -- pretentious and pedantic though they be; fun though it be to be better educated than my audience -- entirely too often: see? With the above quotation in my arsenal, I shall cease forthwith. Consider me indebted to you for any clarity I may thus gain.)
- gjm11 17y agoSome time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, and adopted a rule that every time I notice myself writing parentheses I stop and consider (1) whether I can just delete them or replace them with commas and (2) whether I can get rid of them in some other way. I find that maybe 90% of the time this leads to an improvement. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the same applies to other relatively unusual kinds of punctuation. Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought". Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-).
- nfnaaron 17y ago"Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, ... (1) ... (2) ..." When I try to eliminate parentheses and similar parentheticals, I write separate sentences if possible.
- gjm11 17y agoHo ho. Entirely different sort of parentheses, of course. But yes, the sentence might have been improved by splitting it up so that it didn't need numbering. [EDITED after looking again at what I wrote before, to add:] Or just by removing the numbers.
- nfnaaron 17y agoOh ... Sorry, but I was absolutely not critiquing your sentence. I specifically was not objecting to your use of parenthesized numbering. I was trying to jump off from your solution to reducing parentheses, to say how I handle the same problem. In an informal setting like this, I see no problem at all with casual or bumpy grammar. My apologies, I should have included the text of your points in the quote.
- RevRal 17y agoRemark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought" Which is fitting, since I consider the use of special punctuation a cheat. I don't hold myself above cheating all the time, and I did cheat. It helps to save time, since a single paragraph can be refined endlessly. You have to have flexible standards.
- DannoHung 17y agoAw, but I love the semicolon; it let's you do CRAZY things!
- boredguy8 17y agoMany standard rules for punctuation are actually merely the outcome of a need for movable type printing presses to save money and are incoherent in 2009. For instance, standard punctuation would have me write: Please append the extension ".txt." For clarity, I'd re-write: Please append the extension ".txt" to the file. Much of this comes from the notion that punctuation resides insides the quote marks. But the rule comes from a practice fueled by function: the period and comma were the two most breakable tiles for printers, and having them inside another tile meant they were far less likely to break. I increasingly find myself quoting text exactly, and I place punctuation not in the original outside the quotation. But I also use "they" as a first person singular gender-neutral pronoun: I don't know the author of that article, but they certainly did a good job. I guess I'm a grammatical progressive.
- jacobolus 17y agoMore reasonably: if you were typesetting something carefully, you’d stack the ” close to directly above the . and you’d use a separate typeface or color to set a precise computer string such as `.txt`. In plain text communications, I tend to avoid situations where a string like « ".txt". » might come up, because it’s confusing no matter which side of the quotation marks the period ends up on, and instead use some punctuation like «.txt» or `.txt` to make clear that this is a technical word whose precise character arrangement matters, especially since the " character is itself often meaningful in such strings.
- kqr2 17y agoThe author of this essay is also the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language http://www.cambridge.org/uk/linguistics/cgel/ http://www.cambridge.org/uk/linguistics/cgel/ Unfortunately, the author doesn't recommend a good alternative to Strunk & White's Elements of Style.
- houseabsolute 17y agoI think the last paragraph of the article demonstrates that he believes such a thing does not exist.
- kqr2 17y agoIt is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules. He says that grammar can't be reduced to a bunch of trivial rules, but that doesn't mean there can't be a good alternative to Strunk & White for teaching grammar to students.
- gjm11 17y agoElsewhere (on the excellent "Language Log" blog) he recommends two books: for grammar/usage, the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage; for style, Joseph Williams's "Style: toward clarity and grace". The first recommendation I ever saw for Williams's book, FWIW, was from Richard Gabriel (founder of Lucid Inc., author of the paper commonly but misleadingly known as "worse is better" and of "Patterns of Software", and these days concentrating on poetry rather than software).
- elblanco 17y agoI think it's more that none of the commonly or widely accepted guides to grammar offer advice that is correct.
- nat 17y agoHe's written articles pretty similar to this before, and I think in the last one, he did mention the the Cambridge Grammar. Half the comments were people jumping down his throat for having a conflict of interest.
- RevRal 17y agoSome advice in S&W really confused me; like, on the word prestigious: "just because it's in the dictionary doesn't mean you should use it." Oh, okay. What? There are a lot of words in the dictionary. Is the advice that the word is used too much? If so, not very clear.
- kw_ 17y agoI haven't read S&W, but I have three main reasons for avoiding that word: 1) If it's really prestigious, I shouldn't have to mention that fact. 2) If I want you to think it's prestigious, I should show, not tell. It was given 3 michelin stars and won best film at cannes, or whatever the case may be. 3) It's possible that many from the target markets in Asia/Europe/etc won't know what it means anyway. As such, I try not to use complex language unless it's crucial to the message. edit: not to mention, prestige is subjective. Some people think a glowing writeup in a particular publication is prestigious. Others think it's noise. It's hard to claim either group is wrong.
- pbz 17y agoAs far as #3 I would argue that you can't know what word a foreigner might find difficult. If you're coming from a Romance language, for example, words that may sound "fancy" or could be considered difficult by natives are actually easier because of their common Latin root.
- pushingbits 17y agoPrevious discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557618 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557618
- bdr 17y agoI recommend reading it anyway. It may not be the authority on grammar, but it can teach you a lot about (surprise!) style.
- selven 17y agoOne grammar question that I don't know the answer to. When you have a statement using "than" (eg. A cow is bigger than an ant) using pronouns, what case is the word after "than" supposed to go into. Is it always: I am bigger than him. I see him better than her. He does it better than me. Or is it: I am bigger than he. I see him better than her He does it better than I The first one is way more common colloquially, but I see the second one used in some formal styles. And it makes more sense too - it resolves the ambiguity between "I see him better than her" [I see him better than she does] and "I see him better than her" [he is more visible to me than she is].
- parenthesis 17y agoI think the latter is `correct' because it is: I am bigger than he [is]. I see him better than she [does]. I see him better than [I see] her. He does it better than I [do].
- teilo 17y agoThe word "than" is not a preposition. It is a conjunction after which a verb and sometimes a subject are commonly omitted, but understood, because they are the same verb or subject as in the preceding sentence. Therefore all you really need to do is understand that the portion of the sentence following "than" is itself a sentence. Just supply the missing words, and the correct case will shine forth. "I run faster than he." is really: "I run faster than he runs." and not: "I run faster than him runs." Therefore "he" is correct.
- elblanco 17y agoIn language, the "correct" case is the more common case for a given variant of the language. The class "English" is composed of the aggregate sum of many variants of the class (dialects, accents, etc.). Languages change, what was "correct" a century ago may no longer be correct today. This means the writer has to understand the variant of the language the reader is using, and target that. If your target audience prefers one over the other, that's the "correct" one. There is no such animal as "correct English" since the definition of "correct English" is set merely by the most culturally powerful subgroup of users of some variant of the language.
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- andrewcooke 17y agois it just me, or is the author of that article trying too hard? there's the conspicuously correct use of a semicolon; long but perfectly structured sentence with many subclauses (followed by a short sentence for contrast); etc. i agree with the author's general comments (although I haven't read "that book"), and i am sure there's nothing incorrect in what he's written. but it's not a comfortable, relaxed piece of writing, is it? (edit: rereading that i realised i never made my point. which is that this happens a lot. it seems to be very hard for people to write well about grammar - they always end up writing something that feels "overworked".)
- Afton 17y agoThis is because if you make the slightest deviation from 'correct grammar' in a piece about grammar, you'll be attacked mercilessly. Every word, every m-dash, requires an unshakable argument for its correctness in that context. Pity really, but as long as it's cheap and easy to attack anything with a whiff of hypocrisy...
- Semiapies 17y agoWell, when you're making that sort of accusation of hypocrisy, you're best off trying to avoid it.
- BearOfNH 17y agoGood article but he digs too deep. I would be happier if students just learned to use "should have", not "should of", and related constructs. This seems prevalent even among the college-educated these days. Does a programmer's spelling and grammar correlate with the quality of his[/her] code?
- stcredzero 17y agoI've found that it doesn't correlate with their analytical ability or ability to architect a clean system. But it does affect the readability of their code.
- DannoHung 17y agoI would imagine that vocabulary would have a greater effect than their spelling or grammar.
- stcredzero 17y agoIt's more general English Language writing ability. This tends to be correlated with spelling and grammar.
- grellas 17y agoThe author's obsession with panning S&W reminds me of crazy Joe Davolla in an old Seinfeld episode ("Jerry, I've got a hair on my lip and you put it there" or something to that effect). For me, S&W was helpful in some ways but also led me to feel that I was in a straight-jacket as I tried years ago to follow its prescriptions. It is good to be simple, direct, brief, and clear. But simple, short, and active can become simplistic, monotonic, and rigidly unnatural. A bad writer may ignore good-writing rules, but an equally bad one will apply them one-dimensionally in arty or mechanical fashion. A good writer will do neither. Thus, while ill use of passive voice can lead to stylistic pomposity, a categorical exclusion of passive voice can lead to a staccato and unnatural style. The same can be said of any arbitrary attempt to use exclusively short words or sentences. Attempting to follow S&W without thought can lead a writer into this trap. In my view, the best was to master English grammar is to master a highly stylized (inflected) language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" rules that govern English. Anyone who does this will have a much greater grasp of technical points of grammar than one gets through memorizing a few prescriptive rules such as those found in S&W. Once the deeper technical points are well-understood, one can "let them go" in developing a natural writing style that nonetheless reflects a high degree of excellence for having the technical mastery underlie it. This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep principles of mathematics. With the deeper technical understanding, your work will be far more robust than otherwise. All this is another way of saying that, to achieve excellence in grammar as in anything else, there is no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance. If S&W has one primary fault, it lies in stating or implying (incorrectly) that mastery of a few rules can provide a good shortcut to this goal.
- jacobolus 17y ago> The best was to master English grammar is to master a highly inflected language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" rules that govern English. I agree with everything you said until you got to here. There are reasons to learn Latin, and it will certainly help for writing English, but putting the time in to master Latin is hardly the “best” way to master English grammar, which differs from Latin grammar in as many ways as it agrees. My guess is that learning to read 3 or 4 other languages moderately fluently, or just putting that time into careful analytic reading and writing in English would be just as useful. (Of course, without evidence, both of our comments here are speculative. I’d like to see some comparative studies – though to do them properly would be difficult, so I’m not sure any have been done that would really settle the matter.) Personally, I think grammar is one of those subjects whose formal study should be delayed as long as possible, assuming that students are spending time reading and writing and carefully analyzing rhetoric and logic of what they read and hear. The emphasis on tools over content, in language just as much as in mathematics, has the potential to devalue creativity and engagement, and lends itself to the kind of rote instruction that leaves humans bored out of their skulls. > This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep principles of mathematics. Weak analogy. The particularities of Latin grammar are not of the same kind as the “deep principles of mathematics.” Maybe studying syntax in a linguistics course or two could be compared, but I still think it’s a stretch. > no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance. With the rest of this paragraph out of the way, you’re right again with this final statement, though it’s a bit of a platitude.
- elblanco 17y agoI've long thought that this book was a subtle attempt at humor.
- jeromec 17y agoIf we're asking questions here... If a group was going into a restaurant, but saw it was dirty would it be "they changed their mind" or "they changed their minds"?
- assemble 17y agoIt would be: they changed their minds. Why? "they" refers to the group members, because "they" is a plural pronoun. "It changed its mind" would be how you could write the first phrase. In this phrase, "it", a singular pronoun, would refer to the group.
- jeromec 17y agoGot it, thanks. What about if it read "but everybody changed their mind" or would it be minds?
- nihilocrat 17y agoIt would still be "minds", because "everybody" is referring to a plural subject. You can say "everyone put on their jackets" but not "everyone put on their jacket". The latter makes sense if the listener dismisses the absurd possibility that everyone is fitting into one jacket, but it's not correct.
- assemble 17y agoWhile 'everyone' sounds like it refers to a plural subject, it technically is singular. Therefore, "Everyone put on their jacket." is correct. This is another one where I would rewrite the whole thing to make it sounds better: They all put on their jackets.
- assemble 17y agoTechnically, everybody takes a singular verb. Try replacing it with "every single body" or "every person". The main ambiquity in the phrase is that 'their' isn't -technically- correct as a gender neutral third person possessive pronoun, despite its common usage in that form. (Say -that- five times fast!) If you replace 'their' with 'his or her', the agreement makes much more sense: Everybody changed his or her mind. Personally, I would just rewrite it completely: They all changed their minds. English is fun!
- cletus 17y agoBoy, that post sure could've used some headings or something to liven up what is otherwise a monotonous, self-indulgent rant. One thing one has to remember with grammar is that people can't even agree on whether it's prescriptive or descriptive. It still bugs the hell out of me when (North) Americans say "Will you write me?" WRONG WRONG WRONG, at least in a prescriptive sense. In actual English it is "Will you write TO me?". Note the difference: - Will you write me a letter? (indirect then direct object) - Will you write a letter to me (direct then indirect; uses the preposition "to"); - Will you write a letter to me? (indirect object only) Only Americans (and possibly Canadians) do it. The point is than in a purely prescriptive sense, that's wrong and most people tend to argue that what they use is correct. Language and grammar evolves giving far more credence to the descriptive view. But I digress...