Compact Guide to Grammar and Style

[Sureshlasi]

Compact Guide to Grammar and Style

A

A or An

Use an in place of a when it precedes a vowel sound, not just a vowel. That means it's "an honor" (the h is silent), but "a UFO" (because it's pronounced yoo eff oh).

Most of the confusion with a or an arises from acronyms and other abbreviations: some people think it's wrong to use an in front of an abbreviation like "MRI" because "an" can only go before vowels. Not so: the sound, not the letter, is what matters. Because you pronounce it "em ar eye," it's "an MRI."

One tricky case comes up from time to time: is it "a historic occasion" or "an historic occasion"? Some speakers favor the latter — more British than American speakers, but you'll find them in both places — using an on longish words (three or more syllables) beginning with h, where the first syllable isn't accented. They'd say, for instance, "a hístory textbook" (accent on the first syllable) but "an históric event." (Likewise "a hábit" but "an habítual offender," "a hýpothetical question" but "an hypóthesis.") Still, most guides prefer a before any h that's sounded: "a historic occasion," "a hysterical joke," "a habitual offender" — but "an honor" and "an hour" because those h's aren't sounded.





The Above, The Following

Many kinds of writing, especially in business and law, use a lot of lists, and it's common to introduce those lists with the following and to refer back to them by the above. There's nothing wrong with that, but note that you can often make a sentence clearer and punchier with simple pronouns: instead of the above topics, try these topics — the context makes your subject clear.





Absent

There's nothing wrong with absent as an adjective ("He was absent three days last week"; "Everyone recognized her comment as an insult directed at her absent coworker"). And though it's not very common these days, absent can also be a verb meaning "to keep someone away," as in Hamlet's "Absent thee from felicity awhile."

But absent as a preposition meaning "without" or "in the absence of" is jargon from the worlds of business and law: "Absent further information, we'll proceed as planned." Ick. It's been around for a while, but do we really need another two-syllable way of saying without?







Absolutely

One of the most overused clichés of our age: the pleasant little monosyllable yes seems to be disappearing in favor of the tetrasyllabic absolutely. Listen to any interview on radio or television: almost every yes, yeah, or uh-huh is fed through the speaker's pomposity amplifier, and comes out as absolutely on the other side. And it's not just in interviews. When I asked a waiter, "May I have some more water?," the answer was "Absolutely," as if the question admitted various degrees of assent. Now, there's nothing wrong with the word itself, and when you really mean that something is true without qualification, go nuts. Still, how 'bout some variety? certainly, yep, aye, just so, damn straight, sho' 'nuff, sans doute, you bet your bippy — almost anything else would be an improvement.







Acronyms

Among the less pleasant by-products of the late, unlamented twentieth century — up there with nuclear waste, thalidomide, and the legislative agenda of Newt Gingrich — is the acronym. What began as a harmless attempt to shorten long program names has turned into a mania for reducing every committee, gizmo, or plan to a would-be clever acronym. Resist the urge to create them by the dozen, especially when they don't do any useful work. It's disheartening to think about how many hours it took congressional staffers to find a clumsy phrase that would produce the acronym "USA PATRIOT Act." (The full name for the curious: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.")

By the by, some purists insist the word acronym should apply only to pronounceable combinations of letters: by this standard NASA and SCUBA are acronyms, but MRI and NFL aren't (some use the word "initialism" for these latter abbreviations). If you care to make the distinction, feel free, but the battle is probably lost, and most people will have no idea what you're talking about.

Note that acronyms are almost unheard of before the twentieth century. If ever an etymology suggests an older word comes from the initials of some phrase — posh from "port out, starboard home," for instance, or "for unlawful carnal knowledge" — the story is more than likely bogus.






Action Verbs

Action verbs, as the name reveals, express actions; contrast them with verbs of being. Think of the difference between "I study" (action verb, even if it's not the most exciting action) and "I am a student" (verb of being). It's often wise to cut down on verbs of being, replacing them (whenever possible) with action verbs; that'll make your writing punchier.

Whatever you do, though, don't confuse action verbs with the active voice, which is the opposite of the passive voice. Sentences with verbs of being (such as am, is, are, were) aren't necessarily passive sentences, even if they're often weak ones.







Adjectives and Adverbs

An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or a pronoun: it answers which one, how many, or what kind. Some examples: "the big one"; "seven books"; "a devoted student." (Most adjectives can also go in the predicate position after the verb: "This one is big; "That student is devoted.")

Adverbs, on the other hand, usually modify verbs, and answer in what manner, to what degree, when, how, how many times, and so forth. Some examples: "He ran quickly"; "I'll do it soon"; "We went twice."

Sometimes adverbs modify not verbs but adjectives or other adverbs: "She finished very quickly" (very modifies the adverb quickly, which in turn modifies the verb finished); "The work was clearly inadequate" (clearly modifies the adjective inadequate, which in turn modifies work).

The easiest way to spot adverbs is to look for the telltale -ly suffix. Be careful, though; not all adverbs end in -ly, and not all -ly words are adverbs. Soon, twice, and never, for instance, are adverbs (they tell when or how often); friendly, ugly, and northerly are adjectives (they modify nouns).

Some stylistic advice: go easy on the adjectives and adverbs. It would be foolish to cut them out altogether, but many people overuse them. Too many adjectives and adverbs tend to make your writing sound stilted or faux-poetic, and they rarely add much precision. The nouns and verbs are the words that should be doing the hard work, with adjectives and adverbs playing only a supporting role. As Strunk and White put it, "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."





Advise

"Please advise" — on its own, without, say, "Please advise me about the new rules" — is a verbal tic common among memo-writers. I find it ugly and inelegant, but I promise not to make too great a fuss as long as it's confined to business writing.





Affixes

Affix is a technical term to describe bits stuck to (affixed to) root words. In English, we use mostly prefixes (fore-, un-, pre-, anti-) and suffixes (-less, -ish, -ness, -ful). Some languages have infixes, where parts are added to the middle of a root word, but they're very rare in English outside of language games.







Aggravate

The word aggravate traditionally means "to make worse." You can, for instance, aggravate a problem, situation, or condition: "The new medicine only aggravated my indigestion." (It comes from Latin, and originally means "make heavier": the -grav- in the middle is from the same root as gravity.) The more controversial question is whether you can aggravate a person. It's common to use the word in colloquial speech as a synonym for irritate, exasperate, or annoy: "The salesman's attitude really aggravated me," for instance. It's probably wise, though, to tread carefully in more formal settings, where some people find it inappropriate.






Agreement

One of the fundamental rules of grammar is that the parts of a sentence should agree with each other. It's easier to demonstrate than to define agreement.

Agreement is usually instinctive in native English speakers. In "I has a minute," the verb has doesn't agree with the subject I. We would say "I have." In "John got their briefcase," assuming John got his own briefcase, their should be his. It's obvious.

Only rarely does it get messy. A plural noun right in front of the singular verb can throw you off. Consider "Any one of the articles are available": the verb are shouldn't agree with articles, but with the subject, one: the sentence should read, "Any one of the articles is available."

A preposition or a verb that governs two pronouns can also cause problems. In "He wanted you and I for the team," the word I should be me: he wanted you and he wanted me, so he wanted you and me. (Hypercorrection is always a danger in cases like this. Pay special attention to phrases like you and I, you and she, and so forth.)






Ain't

The paradigmatic example of "incorrect" usage. It provides a good opportunity to talk about what "incorrect" means.

A venerable bit of schoolyard wisdom advises us that "Ain't ain't in the dictionary, so ain't ain't a word." There's only one problem with this pithy apothegm: it ain't true. Any dictionary worth its salt should contain ain't — though it will probably also include some usage note pointing out that it's "nonstandard," "slang," "colloquial," or "informal."

Is ain't "a word"? Of course it is. The question is whether it's a good word, which always means an appropriate word. So how do you decide whether it's appropriate?

Ain't — like an earlier form, an't — is a contraction of are not, and is often used for am not or is not. It's been around since the eighteenth century (the OED records the first example of an't in 1706, and of ain't in 1778). That's the period that saw the birth of several of our common contractions, including don't, won't, and can't. So ain't has a long pedigree, it's a perfectly logical and consistent construction, and it's widespread.

Does that mean it's an appropriate word? — Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can use anything if it's effective in context; no in the sense that, since the nineteenth century, many people have campaigned against it as vulgar and illiterate, and many continue to believe that. You have to bear that in mind when you write and speak, and adjust your language to your audience.

In many formal contexts, ain't will mark you as poorly educated: it's unwise, for instance, to use it in a job application. On the other hand, there are times when ain't gives exactly the sort of colloquial tone you're looking for. There's all the difference in the world between "You ain't seen nothin' yet" and "You've not yet seen anything."

The moral of this story: usages aren't "correct" or "incorrect" in any abstract sense; there's no logical way to puzzle out whether something is legitimate or not. You can't simply look in "the dictionary" to figure out whether something is a word. Every word carries its history with it. As always, it's entirely a matter of writing for your audience — but if you've spent any time reading this guide, you know that already.






All of

"All of the ——" can usually be rewritten as "All the ——," "All ——," or "Every ——."





Alot

Nope: a lot, two words. (That's a lot meaning much, many, often, and so on. There's another word, the verb allot, which means "to distribute or apportion"; but the adjectival or adverbial phrase a lot is always two words.)






Also

Avoid beginning sentences with also. There's nothing illegal about it, but it tends to be inelegant. The suggestion is that your writing is just a list, and this next item is merely an afterthought. Much better is to find a logical transition from one sentence to the next.






Amount

The word amount refers only to mass nouns, not to count nouns: it's an amount of stuff but a number of things. In other words, it's wrong to refer to "the amount of students in the class" or "the amount of songs on my iPod": you mean "the number of students in the class" or "the number of songs on my iPod."





And/or

And/or is sometimes necessary in legal documents, but just clutters other writing. One word or the other will almost always do just as well.




Antecedent

A technical term in grammar for the word or phrase to which a relative pronoun refers. In a sentence like "She couldn't stand opera, which always sounded like shrieking," the relative pronoun which stands in for the word opera, so opera is the antecedent. In a sentence like "He couldn't say the word titillate without giggling, which always got him in trouble," the word which refers back not to any individual word, but to the whole preceding clause ("He couldn't say the word titillate without giggling") — the whole thing is the antecedent.







Anticipate

For traditionalists, to anticipate something is to get ready for it, or to do something in advance; this isn't the same as expect. If you expect changes, you think they'll be coming soon; if you anticipate changes, you're preparing to deal with them. William Blake certainly didn't expect Modernist poetry, but in some ways he anticipated it by doing similar things a century earlier.

The use of anticipate for expect is now so widespread that it's pointless to rail against it. Still, expect has the advantage of being shorter and more to the point. Don't give in to the business writer's love affair with the longer word.





Any Way, Shape, or Form

Blech. Not only a cliché, and therefore bad enough in its own right, but an uncommonly dumb cliché. It's usually inappropriate and much wordier than necessary. Will someone please tell me what's wrong with "in any way"?






Apostrophe

The most common way to form a possessive in English is with apostrophe and s: "a hard day's night." After a plural noun ending in s, put just an apostrophe: "two hours' work" (i.e., "the work of two hours"). If a plural doesn't end in s — children, men, people — plain old apostrophe-s: "children's," "men's," "people's." It's never "mens'" or "childrens'."

There's also the opposite case: when a singular noun ends in s. That's a little trickier. Most style guides prefer s's: James's house. Plain old s-apostrophe (as in James' house) is common in journalism, but most other publishers prefer James's. It's a matter of house style.

Note that, with the exception of the little-used one, the possessives of pronouns never get apostrophes: theirs, not their's; hers, not her's; its, not it's. See It's versus Its.

Apostrophes are sometimes used to make acronyms or other abbreviations plural (another matter of a local house style). My preference: don't use apostrophes to make abbreviations plural — not "They took their SAT's," but "They took their SATs." The only exception is when having no apostrophe might be confusing: "Two As" is ambiguous (it might be read as the word as); make it "Two A's." Never use apostrophes as single quotation marks to set off words or phrases (unless you need a quotation within a quotation).

Using an apostrophe to refer to a decade — the 1960's versus the 1960s — is another matter of house style; again, journalists tend to use the apostrophe, and most other publishers don't. I prefer to omit it: refer to the 1960s or the '60s (the apostrophe indicates that "19" has been omitted), not the 1960's or (worse) the '60's.





Apposition

Two phrases are in apposition when they're logically equivalent and in the same grammatical relation to the rest of the sentence: it's a way of explaining a word or phrase, or giving additional information about it. It's easier to see in examples than in definitions.

Consider the sentence "I spent the year in my favorite city, Detroit." It puts two phrases — "my favorite city" and "Detroit" — in apposition; the second phrase explains the first. Or "I just finished a novel by D. H. Lawrence, the least talented novelist in English" — the phrase "the least talented novelist in English" is in apposition to "D. H. Lawrence," and gives the writer's opinion of Lawrence. (It happens to be correct, by the way — you heard it here first.)

Apposition usually requires commas around the appositional phrase: "The winter of '24, the coldest on record, was followed by a warm summer." They're sometimes omitted when a proper name follows some sort of relation: "My brother Bill works in electronics," for instance. In most such cases you can safely go either way, though many writers prefer to use the commas when they're describing a unique relationship: "My husband Phil came from Pittsburgh," for example, may suggest to some readers that the writer has multiple husbands, and this is just clearing up which one, whereas "My husband, Phil, came from Pittsburgh" leaves no doubt.

Oh, yeah — don't confuse apposition with opposition. They come from the same Latin root (pono 'put'), but have nothing else to do with one another.






Articles

English has two sorts of articles: the definite article (the), and indefinite articles (a and an). They function more or less as adjectives. The usage of definite and indefinite articles is one of the hardest things for speakers of other languages to master, because it's often entirely arbitrary — why are you in town but in the village or in the city? And British and American usage sometimes differs; wounded Brits end up in hospital, while Yanks are in the hospital. Alas, I don't have any easy rules that are even a little helpful — all I can suggest is that non-native speakers pay close attention to the actual usage of articles. Sorry.



As versus Like

In formal writing, avoid using like as a conjunction. In other words, something can be like something else (there it's a preposition), but avoid "It tastes good like a cigarette should" — it should be "as a cigarette should." Quickie test: there should be no verb in the phrase right after like. Even in phrases such as "It looks like it's going to rain" or "It sounds like the motor's broken," as if is usually more appropriate than like — again, at least in formal writing.






As to Whether

Plain old whether often does all you need to do.




As Far As

You need a verb: "As far as such-and-such goes," "As far as such-and-such is concerned." Plain old "As far as such-and-such," widespread though it may be, should be frowned upon.






Aspect

Aspect is a property of verbs that's a little tricky to describe. Here's how the American Heritage Dictionary defines it:

A category of the verb denoting primarily the relation of the action to the passage of time, especially in reference to completion, duration, or repetition.
Okay — what does that mean? Whereas tense describes whether an action happened in the past, present, or future, aspect indicates whether it happened once, happens all the time without stopping, happens intermittently, or is happening now. Some languages (especially Slavic ones) indicate aspect in their verb forms; in English, we do most of it with auxiliary verbs or adverbs. Consider the differences between these:

I go to class.
I'm going to class.
I went to class.
I was going to class.
I have gone to class.
I had gone to class.
I have been going to class.
I had been going to class.
I will go to class.
I will have gone to class.



And so on. Linguists tend to use the word perfect to describe a completed action and imperfect to describe one that is (or was) incomplete; they also use progressive or continuous to indicate whether an action is ongoing. Some also have a category for whether action is habitual. And different languages handle these things differently. English doesn't have many different verb forms for these things, but we can indicate all sorts of differences with our auxiliary verbs; when that's not clear enough, an adverb can resolve ambiguities.

Think that's a mess? — just wait until time-travel is perfected, and then you'll have to worry about having been about to have already been going to class.





As Yet

Consider using yet.




Audience / Reader

The key to all good writing is understanding your audience. Every time you use language, you engage in a rhetorical activity, and your attention should always be on the effect it will have on your audience.

Think of grammar and style as analogous to, say, table manners. Grammatical "rules" have no absolute, independent existence; there is no Grammar Corps to track you down for using "whose" when "of which" is more proper, just as Miss Manners employs no shock troops to massacre people who eat their salads with fish forks. You can argue, of course, that the other fork works just as well (or even better), but both the fork and the usage are entirely arbitrary and conventional. Your job as a writer is to have certain effects on your readers, readers who are continuously judging you, consciously or unconsciously. If you want to have the greatest effect, you'll adjust your style to suit the audience, however arbitrary its expectations.

A better analogue might be clothing. A college English paper calls for the rough equivalent of the jacket and tie (ladies, you're on your own here). However useless or ridiculous the tie may be, however outdated its practical value as a garment, certain social situations demand it, and if you go into a job interview wearing a T-shirt and jeans, you only hurt yourself by arguing that the necktie has no sartorial validity. Your job is to figure out what your audience expects. Likewise, if your audience wants you to avoid ending your sentences with prepositions, no amount of argument over historical validity will help.

But just as you shouldn't go under-dressed to a job interview, you shouldn't over-dress either. A white tie and tails will make you look ridiculous at a barbecue, and a pedantic insistence on grammatical bugbears will only lessen your audience's respect for you. There are occasions when ain't is more suitable than is not, and the careful writer will take the time to discover which is the more appropriate.

Ref: The English Language: A User's Guide (Paperback)
by Jack Lynch

http://www.amazon.com/English-Langua...178971&sr=1-23

[Sureshlasi]

B

Basically

Almost always useless. Qualifiers such as basically, essentially, totally, &c. rarely add anything to a sentence; they're the written equivalent of "Um."


Behalf

Traditionalists observe a distinction between in behalf of and on behalf of. The former means "for the benefit of": you might write a letter of recommendation in behalf of a colleague, or raise money in behalf of hurricane victims. The latter means "on the part of" or "as the agent of": a lawyer acts on behalf of her client, or the producer may accept an award on behalf of the cast.




Being That

An overused and inelegant idiom, favored by those who want to sound more impressive. It probably comes from "it being the case that," maybe with some influence from "given that" and "seeing that," but it doesn't make much sense. (Being as has the same problems.) Avoid it. Use because, since, or something similarly direct.





Between You and I

Between you and I? — Between you and I? — You should be ashamed of yourself.

First, the technical explanation: between is a preposition; it should govern the "objective case." (In English, that's a concern only with the pronouns.) A preposition can't govern a pronoun in the subjective (or nominative) case, even when there are multiple pronouns after the preposition.

That explanation should be enough for the serious grammar nerds. For the rest of you, think of it this way: when you have two pronouns after a preposition, try mentally placing each one directly after the preposition. "Between you" should sound right to your ear, but "between I" jars: "between me" sounds much more natural. Since it's "between you" and it's "between me," it should be "between you and me."

Ditto other prepositions, like for, to, from, with, by, and so on. If something is for her and for me, it's "for her and me," not "for she and I"; if Akhbar gave something to him and to them, he gave it "to him and them," not "to he and they." Try putting the preposition directly before all the following pronouns, and then use the form that sounds right in each case.

The problem probably arises from hypercorrection: it sometimes seems that you and I is "more correct" than you and me. It's not — at least, it's not always. Be careful.






Block Quotations

Short quotations — say, no more than three or four lines — usually appear in the text surrounded by quotation marks, "like this." Longer direct quotations, though — and sometimes shorter quotations of poetry — should be set off as block quotations or extracts, thus:

Notice that the quotation is indented on both sides: most word processors make that easy. Notice, too, that you don't use quotation marks around a block quotation: the indention (not "indentation") is enough to indicate it's a quotation. Some house styles prefer block quotations to be single-spaced, others like them double-spaced; check to see what your readers expect.
Always be sure to include proper citations in block quotations; the usual route is to put either a footnote reference or the citation in parentheses after the closing punctuation in the quotation itself.




Bluntness

Bad writing is often wimpy writing. Don't be afraid to be blunt. Consider things like "There appear to be indications that the product heretofore referred to may be lacking substantial qualitative consummation, suggesting it may be incommensurate with the standards previously established by this department": what's wrong with "It's bad" or "It doesn't work"? Of course you should be sensitive to your reader's feelings — there's no need to be vicious or crude, and saying "It sucks" won't win you many friends — but don't go too far in the opposite direction. Call 'em as you see 'em.






But at the Beginning

Contrary to what your high school English teacher told you, there's no reason not to begin a sentence with but or and; in fact, these words often make a sentence more forceful and graceful. They are almost always better than beginning with however or additionally. Beginning with but or and does make your writing less formal; — but worse things could happen to most writing than becoming less formal.

Note, though, that if you open with but or and, you usually don't need a comma: not "But, we did it anyway"; it's enough to say "But we did it anyway." The only time you need a comma after a sentence-opening conjunction is when you want to sneak a clause right between the conjunction and the rest of the sentence: "But, as you know, we did it anyway."

C

Cannot

Always one word, even in formal contexts where you don't see many other contractions.



Can't Help But

The can't help but construction (with other forms of the verb, like cannot and could not) is a little illogical: it comes from two other constructions, can't help —ing (meaning "I can't keep myself from —ing") and can't but (meaning "I can't do anything except"). So can't help but should mean "I can't keep myself from doing anything except," which is a kind of double negative. Still, can't help but has been around for a long time (the OED traces it to 1894), and it's probably not going away, so it's not worth grousing about. I avoid it myself, preferring "can't help —ing," but there are better things to worry about.





Capable

The phrase is capable of ——ing can usually be better rendered as is able to ——, or even turned into an active verb with can





Capitalization

It's customary to capitalize:

• The first word of a sentence;

• The first word in a line of poetry;

• The major words in the title of a work;

• Proper nouns (names), including most adjectives derived from proper nouns (Spanish from Spain, Freudian from Freud);

• Personal titles when they come before a name (Mr. Smith, Ms. Jones, Dr. X, Captain Beefheart, Reverend Gary Davis, Grand Vizier Lynch);

• All (or most) letters in an abbreviation (NASA, MRI).

It's sometimes difficult to figure out what counts as a proper noun: it's customary to capitalize Renaissance and Romantic when they refer to historical periods, but not when they mean any old rebirth or something related to romance. (Even more confusing, Middle Ages is usually capitalized, but medieval isn't, even though they refer to the same thing, and one is just a Latin translation of the other. Go figure.)

It's common to capitalize President when referring to one President of the United States, but you'd refer to all the presidents (no cap) of the U.S., and the presidents of corporations don't warrant caps unless you're using president as a title. Go figure.

In some house styles, the first word of an independent clause after a colon gets a cap: "It leads us to one conclusion: Not enough rock bands use horn sections." I don't much like it, but de stilis domorum non est disputandum — there's no arguing about house styles.

By the way, DON'T USE ALL CAPITALS FOR EMPHASIS — it makes your writing look amateurish, and it's more difficult to read. (Mixed upper- and lowercase is easier to read, since the eye recognizes the overall shape of the words, with their ascenders and descenders. ALL CAPS simply appear as blocks, and readers have to slow down to figure them out.)






Cases

English has comparatively few cases — for which you should get down on your knees and thank the good Lord above.

Cases are alterations in the forms of nouns and other substantives, sometimes along with their modifiers, that show the grammatical function they play in a sentence. In other words, in some languages nouns assume different forms depending on whether they're the subject of a clause, the direct object, the indirect object, or relationships like ownership, place, motion, and so on.

In ancient Greek and modern German, nouns and pronouns can take four cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. In Latin, you have those four, plus ablative. Finnish has boatloads of cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, partitive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, essive, translative, instructive, and abessive (I'm probably missing a few). As you get further from the Indo-European languages, you get ever more exotic cases: the Kalaallisut language of Greenland, for instance, has ten cases, absolutive, ergative, equative, instrumental, locative, allative, ablative, perlative, nominative, and accusative.

When English was more heavily inflected in the Old English period, there was a considerable set of cases. Today, though, nouns take only two cases, one for the possessive (usually with apostrophe s), and one for everything else. Our pronouns are still inflected differently for the subjective and the objective cases (subjective being a term some people use for the nominative case).

It's clearest in some examples. Take the noun friend. Whether it's a subject, a direct object, or an indirect object, it stays the same; it changes only to show possession: "My friend lives nearby" (subject); "I called my friend" (direct object); "She gave my friend a call" (indirect object); "I forgot my friend's address" (possessive).

Pronouns, on the other hand, take different forms: "He lives nearby" (subject); "I called him" (direct object); "She gave him a call" (indirect object); "I forgot his address" (possessive). Here the personal pronoun he has one form when it's a subject, another when it's an object (whether direct or indirect), and yet another when it's possessive.

Native speakers almost never have any trouble with this: only rarely do they use the subjective case when the objective is called for, as in "He gave it to you and I" — where I should be me, since it's the object of the verb gave.








-Century

The rule for hyphenating compounds like twentieth century: if the phrase is used as a noun, no hyphen; if it's used as an adjective, hyphenate it. So: "It was one of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century," but "It was one of the greatest twentieth-century disasters." (Since twenty-first is already hyphenated, you refer to twenty-first-century disasters.) That's the general rule for compound phrases: hyphenate them when they're used as adjectives. "The new plan will help the middle class," but "The new plan helps middle-class workers."








Clearly, Obviously, Undoubtedly

My English professor instincts kick in — my Spidey-Sense starts tingling — whenever I see these words. Too often they're used when something is unclear and doubtful, but the author simply doesn't know how to make the point convincingly. Clumsy writers want to make an argument but don't know how to bridge some conceptual gap. Instead of painstakingly working out the logic, they simply state their conclusion with an obviously (when it's not at all obvious).

There's nothing inherently wrong with the words, but be sure you use them honestly.








Clichés

"Avoid clichés" is such common advice that it's almost a cliché itself, but no worse for that. It's stated especially clearly by Pinney:

[Clichés] offer prefabricated phrasing that may be used without effort on your part. They are thus used at the expense of both individuality and precision, since you can't say just what you mean in the mechanical response of a cliché.
George Orwell's advice is overstated for effect, but it's still good to bear it in mind: "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." If you're depending on a stock phrase, you're letting someone else do half your thinking for you.

A comprehensive catalogue of clichés is beyond me, but here's a list of the more egregious ones that get under my skin:

absolutely;
any way, shape, or form;
at the end of the day;
the blame game;
feel (for think, believe, etc.);
hot-button issue;
massive or massively;
playing the race card;
sending a message;
solution;
99% for anything just shy of complete; 110% effort.
They're not clever, they're not funny, they're not memorable, they're not convincing. They're prefab strips of language, hastily tacked together, and they do you no good.

If you must resort to clichés, though, be especially careful not to muddle them. Remember, for example, that the more widely accepted phrase is "I couldn't care less," not could: the idea is that "It would be impossible to care about this subject any less than I already do." And a U.S. Senator, trying to reassure his constituents that the budget talks were going well in spite of the apparent chaos, told reporters, "It's always darkest before the storm," rather than "before the dawn" — he thereby unintentionally suggested that things are going to get worse, not better. Pay attention to every word.

Don't, by the way, confuse these mangled clichés with mixed metaphors — though a mixed metaphor might result from a botched cliché, they're not the same thing.

Neither should you confuse clichés in general with idioms, the natural way to say something. The desire to avoid clichés shouldn't make your language oddball. Learning to tell the difference between the two is an important skill, and one you can develop only over time.







Colon

A colon marks a pause for explanation, expansion, enumeration, or elaboration. Use a colon to introduce a list: thing one, thing two, and thing three. Use it to pause and explain: this sentence makes the point. Use it to give an example: this, for instance.

There are other uses: the entry on Citation includes some tips on colons in bibliographies. Americans use it after the salutation in a formal letter: "Dear Sir:" (the British use a comma, which we Americans restrict to less formal letters). It also introduces a block quotation or a list of bullet points.

See also Semicolon (don't confuse them!) and the end of Capitalization.







Commas

A complete guide to comma usage is beyond the scope of a guide like this, but I can offer a few tips. Some amateur writers, for instance, seem to think sprinkling commas every few words is a good rule, but it makes for difficult reading. A few places commas should be avoided:

After the conjunctions and, but, and or, unless the comma sets off a phrase that can't stand alone as a sentence. It's wrong to write "But, she did get it done on time." Use the comma only if there's such a phrase, as in, "But, to be fair, she did get it done on time." See also Dependent versus Independent Clauses.

Between a month and year in a date: not November, 1990, but November 1990. The comma stops two sets of numerals from running into one another, as in November 20, 1990.

Some style guides call for omitting the comma after very short prepositional phrases at the beginning of a sentence: not "On Saturday, the office is closed," but "On Saturday the office is closed." But do use a comma after long prepositional phrases or dependent clauses: "Because the entire epic is concerned with justifying the ways of God to man, Milton must present free will in a positive light." (How many words do you need before "short" turns into "long"? — trust your judgment, and think always about clarity.)

Finally, the thorniest comma-related question, whether or not to include the serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma or Harvard comma from its inclusion in their house style guides). In most house styles, the comma is preferred before the last item in a list: "the first, second, and third chapters." Leaving it out — "the first, second and third chapters" — is a habit picked up from journalism. While it saves a teensy bit of space and effort, omitting the final comma runs the risk of suggesting the last two items (in the example above, the second and third chapters) are some sort of special pair. A famous (and perhaps apocryphal?) dedication makes the danger clear: "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

Oh, yeah — go and read the entry on Semicolons for good measure.







Comma Splice

A comma splice is probably the most widespread variety of run-on sentence: it's where two independent clauses are stuck together with just a comma. You usually need some better way to attach them to one another: use a period or a semicolon in place of the comma; use a coordinating conjunction like and or or; or use a subordinating conjunction like because or although.








Comparatives

The comparative is the form of an adjective or adverb that implies a greater degree than the "positive" (base) form of the word: not good (positive) but better (comparative); not hot (positive) but hotter (comparative); not arbitrary (positive) but more arbitrary (comparative). (The next step up is the superlative: not good or better but best; not hot or hotter but hottest; not arbitrary or more arbitrary but most arbitrary.)

As the examples suggest, there are three basic ways to form comparatives. A few are irregular: good, better, best; bad, worse, worst. These simply have to be memorized, although virtually all native speakers learn them in early childhood. (Young children might say gooder and goodest, but they pick up on the irregular forms quickly.)

Most adjectives form their comparatives with -er (sometimes doubling the final consonant, sometimes turning a final y into i): slower, bigger, happier. The superlative of these adjectives is formed with -est: slowest, biggest, happiest.

But a large class doesn't take -er; it's formed with more: not arbitrarier but more arbitrary; not exhausteder but more exhausted. (The superlatives of these adjectives is formed with most: most arbitrary, most exhausted.)

Alas, there's no good rule to tell you which class an adjective belongs to. A rough guideline is that long adjectives take more rather than -er: you'd never say condescendinger or unaccountabler. But what exactly constitutes a "long" adjective isn't clear. A good dictionary will give you the comparative and superlative form of most adjectives; if ever you're in doubt, look it up.






Conjunctions

Conjunctions — the word comes from conjoin, "put together" — are little words that connect various elements in a sentence. They come in two flavors. You're probably familiar with the coordinating conjunctions: the most common are and, but, or, and nor. Coordinating conjunctions connect two things of the same kind: two nouns ("cats and dogs"), two verbs ("kicks or screams"), two adjectives ("short and sweet"), two adverbs ("quickly but carefully"), or even two independent clauses ("Dylan writes better songs, but Britney Spears sells more records").

Another kind of conjunction, the subordinating conjunction, is a little trickier. It joins entire clauses, but one is principal, the other subordinate ("subordinate" means something like "secondary" or "under the control of"). A subordinating conjunction joins an independent clause to a dependent one, and it's the conjunction that makes the dependent clause dependent. An example will make it clearer. Take two independent clauses: "I went to the doctor" and "I feel rotten." We can glue them together with a coordinating conjunction: "I went to the doctor and I feel rotten." This is clear enough, though it doesn't really suggest the connection between the two; and just serves the same function as a period between two sentences. A subordinating conjunction, though, shows their relation: "I went to the doctor because I feel rotten" (the subordinating conjunction because shows a causal connection); "Because I went to the doctor, I feel rotten" (another causal connection, but it's the other way around now); "Although I went to the doctor, I feel rotten"; "I went to the doctor, even though I feel rotten"; and so on. A complete list of subordinating conjunctions is very long, but includes after, although, as if, because, before (but before can also be an adverb or a preposition), if, notwithstanding, since, so (in the sense of "with the result that"), that (as in "I'm surprised that you're here"), until, whenever, whereas, and why (as in "I wonder why he did that").

In formal writing, avoid using like as a conjunction — you mean as or as if. Like is fine as a preposition ("My love is like a red, red rose," "He works like a madman"), but don't use it before a clause ("She's trying like [should be as if] there's no tomorrow").





Considered as, Considered to Be

Almost always useless. "The section is considered as essential" or "The section is considered to be essential" just add extra syllables to "The section is considered essential." Even better, ask yourself whether the word considered does anything in the sentence — does it matter who is considering? "The section is essential" is best of all.






Contractions

Contractions (such as it's, they're, aren't, don't) aren't wrong, but they're less formal than the expanded forms (it is, they are, are not, do not). Whether you use them, then, depends on context — which is to say, on audience. My own inclination is to be less rather than more formal in most college-level writing, but you'll have to judge that for yourself.

Note, though, that cannot is always one word.






Count versus Mass Nouns

English nouns can be divided into two categories: count nouns take a plural; mass nouns don't.

Mass nouns are words like water, air, knowledge, music, traffic, software, and so on: you can't count them; you just consider them as a mass of stuff. (What are "two airs"? How can you count "musics"?) Count nouns, on the other hand, are words like song, book, hockey puck, mother in law, and so on: it makes sense to speak of one or several.

Some nouns can go either way. Hair, for instance, is a mass noun in "He has very little hair left," but it's a count noun in "He has only four hairs left on his head" — the difference is whether we're concerned with individual strands. Ditto fire: it can be stuff ("Fire kills thousands of people every year") or it can be things ("The department extinguished six major fires last month alone") — the difference is whether we're concerned with individual outbreaks of fire. "I like opera" means "I like the whole genre," so opera there is a mass noun; "I like Puccini's operas" means "I like specific examples of the genre," so it's a count noun. Even something like water — almost always a mass noun — can be considered a count noun if you're comparing different brands of bottled water, or if a waitress is asked to take "five waters" to table 27. (In these cases, a count noun is usually hiding: "kinds of water," "glasses of water," and so on.)

Sometimes it's not obvious whether something is a count or a mass noun. Furniture, for instance, seems to refer to discrete things, but it's still a mass noun; you can have "many pieces of furniture," but it makes no sense to talk about "many furnitures." Money is even trickier: yes, you can count money, but we still refer to an "amount of money," not a "number of moneys," so money is a mass noun. (By the way, it doesn't matter whether the plural is regular or irregular: it's one deer, two deer, but deer is still a count name, since you can have more than one of them; it doesn't matter that there's no s.)

Most of this is easy for native speakers of English, but you have to avoid a few traps. "A lot" works with both mass nouns and count nouns: "a lot of people" (count noun), "a lot of pain" (mass noun). Ditto "more": you can talk about "more trees" (count noun) or "more energy" (mass noun). But other ways of expressing extent are different with the two kinds of nouns. For instance, you describe a number of things (count nouns) but an amount of stuff (mass nouns): it's "the number of people" but "the amount of pain." And while you can talk about "more trees" (count noun) or "more energy" (mass noun), the opposite is "fewer trees" (count nouns take fewer) but "less energy" (mass nouns take less). You have the same split with many and much: it's "many trees" (count noun) but "much energy" (mass noun).






Currently

What's wrong with now? Or even leaving it out altogether and letting a present-tense verb do the trick? It is currently not available is the same as It is not available or It is not yet available.

[Sureshlasi]

D

Dangling Participle

A present participle is a verb ending in -ing, and is called dangling when the subject of the -ing verb and the subject of the sentence do not agree. An example is "Rushing to finish the paper, Bob's printer broke." Here the subject is Bob's printer, but the printer isn't doing the rushing. Better would be "While Bob was rushing to finish the paper, his printer broke." (Pay close attention to sentences beginning with When ——ing.)

One way to tell whether the participle is dangling is to put the phrase with the participle right after the subject of the sentence: "Bob's printer, rushing to finish the paper, broke" doesn't sound right.

Not all words ending in -ing are participles: in the sentence "Answering the questions in chapter four is your next assignment," the word answering functions as a noun, not a verb. (These nouns in -ing are called gerunds.)



Dash

A dash (publishers call it an "em-dash" because it's the width of the letter m) is used to mark a parenthesis — like this — or an interruption. Don't confuse it with a Hyphen, although you can use two hyphens -- like this -- for dashes in your papers. (Most word processors have a special symbol for the dash, which you can use if you like; note, though, that it's not always possible in every program, and they don't always come through in E-mail.) Whether dashes should have — spaces — around — them or not—like—this is a question of house style.)

There's nothing wrong with a few dashes here and there, but too many of them will make your writing less formal. Using them where other punctuation marks are proper is okay in informal correspondence, but out of place in most other kinds of writing.




Data

Though it's nearly a lost cause, purists prefer to keep this a plural noun: "The data are," not "the data is." The (now nearly obsolete) singular is datum.




Decimate

The word comes from a particularly gruesome practice in ancient Rome: when a legion engaged in mutiny, the rulers would execute every tenth man as a warning to the rest. Literally, then, it means to kill one out of ten. It's now commonly used for anything that wipes out a large proportion of a population. Some readers dislike the more extended sense, so use it with care.




Demagogue

I was surprised to discover that demagogue has been a verb since 1656 — I assumed it was a recent mutation. Still, it's an ugly, jargony verb, one that no one but dimwitted politicians will miss.




Dependent versus Independent Clauses

A clause is just a group of words with a subject and a verb, a part of a sentence. Some groups of words can get by on their own without any help: these are called independent. Others can't stand alone; either they don't have their own subject and verb, or they're subordinated to another part of the sentence: these are dependent. (A hint: dependent clauses often begin with words like if, whether, since, and so on; see Conjunctions.) Knowing the difference can help you figure out when to use commas.

For example: in the sentence "Since we've fallen a week behind, we'll skip the second paper," the first part — "Since we've fallen a week behind" — is dependent, because it can't be a sentence on its own. The second part — "We'll skip the second paper" — does just fine on its own; it's an independent clause. The independent clause can be a sentence without any help from the Since clause.




Diagramming Sentences

Once upon a time I knew a lot about diagramming — thank you, Mr. Gallo. Alas, it's all gone now. That's to say, I still remember the principles — the parts of speech and their relations — but I've long since forgotten all the symbols, the dotted lines, the left-leaning slashes, all that sort of thing.

There's a good site, though, by Gene Moutoux, who long taught English and foreign languages, called Sentence Diagrams: One Way of Learning English Grammar. Check it out.





Dialogue

Dialogue has been a verb for a long time; Shakespeare used it in 1607. But today its use as a verb sounds very jargony, and I encourage you to avoid it. The American Heritage Dictionary put the question to its usage panel; fully ninety-eight percent found it objectionable.




Diction

Diction means simply "word choice." English teachers probably mention it most often when there's a problem with the level of diction. The English language sports many near synonyms, groups of which may share more or less the same denotation, but which differ in connotation. And sometimes these connotations can be arranged hierarchically, from high to low. Think of warrior (high diction), soldier (middle), and dogface or grunt (low); or apparel (high), clothes (middle), and duds (low). Higher diction often involves Latinate words, and lower diction Germanic, but not always.

And it's not just a matter of high, middle, and low diction; there are many possible registers — scientific, flowery, bureaucratic, vulgar. The important thing is to be consistent: if you jump at random between levels of diction, you're likely to confuse your audience. And that's a bad thing.




Dictionaries

No writer can survive without a good dictionary. I'm fond of the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed.; it not only provides clear definitions, but refers controversial usage questions to a panel of experts who vote on whether they're acceptable. (It's also available for free on-line.) For more serious historical work, there's nothing like the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED, as it's universally known) — this twenty-volume juggernaut not only provides remarkably comprehensive definitions, but it shows how words have been used throughout their history. Anyone who writes for a living — or even a hobby — should get to know the OED.

But although dictionaries are indispensable, you have to know how to use them. Be careful not to accord to them more authority than they claim for themselves: they're works of reference put together by people, not stone tablets engraved by God. The old argument that something is "not a word" because it doesn't appear in "the" dictionary (as if there were only one dictionary), for instance, is downright silly. Any pronounceable combination of letters to which someone assigns a meaning can be called a word; the question is whether it's a good word — by which, of course, I mean an appropriate word. Many dictionaries list words like ain't or irregardless; that doesn't mean you can use them with impunity in formal writing. Pay close attention to the usage notes — "Nonstandard," "Slang," "Vulgar" — and be sure you choose the right word.

Dictionaries are also more concerned with denotations than connotations, and you're a fool if you think a dictionary entry amounts to a Get-out-of-Jail-Free card in any writing problem. Some dictionary may define gook as an Asian or queen as a gay man, but you can point to the dictionary all you like ("It's sense 3b!") without convincing anyone it's appropriate or inoffensive. Be sensitive to the associations your words carry to your audience.

Avoid, by the way, referring to "Webster's," which has no specific meaning — any dictionary can use the name. Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, is a specific company that produces well-regarded dictionaries. Besides, dictionary definitions at the beginnings of papers rarely add anything to the discussion. A favorite line from The Simpsons, where Homer wins the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence: "Webster's Dictionary defines 'excellence' as 'The quality or condition of being excellent.'" A well-chosen nugget of information from a dictionary is wonderful, especially when you're engaging in close reading, but you just waste your introduction if you use it to state the obvious.







Direct and Indirect Objects

A direct object is the thing (or person) acted on by a transitive verb. The indirect object is used most often for the recipient in verbs of giving. Examples are clearer than definitions.

"I took the paper" — the paper is the direct object, because the verb took acts on the paper; the paper is the thing that was taken. "I called her this morning" — her is the direct object, because the verb called acts on her; her is the person who was called.

"I gave him my suggestions" is a bit more complicated. Here him is an indirect object, because him isn't the thing that was given; I gave suggestions, and I gave them to him. Suggestions is the direct object, him the indirect object.





Double Negatives

In many languages, double negatives are perfectly acceptable: Spanish no sé nada, literally "I don't know nothing," means "I know nothing" or "I don't know anything." And in England, shortly before 1400, Chaucer wrote of his Knight, "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous," which is literally "There wasn't no man nowhere so virtuous" — which we'd have to render today as "There was no man anywhere so virtuous."

So even in English, double negatives were once common. In Standard Modern English, though, they're problematic. Since the seventeenth century or so, people have been applying strict logic to these double negatives, suggesting that they "cancel each other out." Take the idiomatic Spanish phrase, "I don't know nothing": logic says that if you don't know nothing, then you must know something. As a result, it's usually best to avoid double negatives in formal writing.

As to whether two negatives "make a positive," that's a little more troublesome: you need to be sure you have an audience that will recognize your meaning. Ambiguity is always a danger in writing: there are two ways to pronounce "I couldn't do nothing," one of which is an informal way of saying "I couldn't do anything," the other "I couldn't sit by and do nothing, but had to get involved." Without the clues provided by spoken emphasis, though, your readers might not know which of these meanings you want to convey. Be careful.






Due to the Fact That

Some folks object to the phrase due to when it's used prepositionally: "He stayed home due to the flu." I don't much like it myself — I find it inelegant, and avoid it in my own speech and writing — but it's so widespread that there's little point campaigning against it anymore. (Note, though, that it's due to, not do to.)

But the big, ugly phrase due to the fact that really has to go — not because of some abstract grammatical law, but because it's a stuffy, five-syllable way of saying "because." Remember, economy is a virtue.

[Sureshlasi]

E

Each

A singular noun, which requires a singular verb. Do not write "Each of the chapters have a title"; use "Each of the chapters has a title" or (better) "Each chapter has a title."




Ellipses

The ellipsis (plural ellipses) is the mark that indicates the omission of quoted material, as in "Brevity is . . . wit" (stolen shamelessly from an episode of The Simpsons). Note two things: first, most typing manuals and house styles prefer the periods to be spaced, thus:

Brevity is . . . wit.

(In electronic communication it's sometimes convenient, even necessary, to run them together, since line-wrap can be unpredictable.) Second, and more important, is the number of periods. The ellipsis itself is three periods (always); it can appear next to other punctuation, including an end-of-sentence period (resulting in four periods). Use four only when the words on either side of the ellipsis make full sentences. You should never use fewer than three or more than four periods, with only a single exception: when entire lines of poetry are omitted in a block quotation, it's a common practice to replace them with a full line of spaced periods.

One other thing. Although it's a matter of house style, note that it's usually unnecessary to have ellipses at the beginning or end of a quotation; they're essential only when something's omitted in the middle. There's no need for ". . . this . . ." when "this" will do: readers will understand you're not quoting everything the source ever said, and that there will be material before and after the quotation you give. The only time it's advisable is when the bit you're quoting isn't grammatical when it's standing on its own: "When I was a boy . . ." — that sort of thing.





Economy

A distinguishing mark of clear and forceful writing is economy of style — using no more words than necessary. Bureaucratic and academic writing likes to pad every sentence with It should continuously be remembered thats and Moreover, it has been previously indicateds. Don't: it makes for slow reading. After you write a sentence, look it over and ask whether the sense would be damaged by judicious trimming. If not, start cutting, because the shorter version is usually better. Become friendly with the "Delete Word" option on your word processor.






E.g. versus i.e.

The abbreviation e.g. is for the Latin exempli gratia, "for example." I.e., Latin id est, means "that is." They're not interchangeable. Both abbreviations should be followed by a comma.






Emphasis

There are several ways to draw attention to passages in your writing that deserve special emphasis. I'll start, though, with a few means you should avoid.

First, you should never resort to ALL CAPITALS in formal writing. Bigger Type is also out; likewise boldface. They all come across as amateurish — note how rarely you see them in published prose. Professionals know that they're counterproductive. (Here I'm talking just about the body of text: boldface, caps, and larger type are permissible in section headings and things like that.) And exclamation points have to be used very sparingly.

So what's left? — Italics (or underscore; the two are interchangeable) can draw attention to a word or a short phrase, though even this should be used with some care. Use it when you want to highlight a short passage, but don't resort to it over and over again, or it loses its effect.

The best way to draw attention to particular passages, though, is to use construct your sentences to put the important words in the most prominent places. A tip: the strongest position in a sentence is often the end, followed by the beginning. Don't waste the beginning or the end of a sentence — the most important parts — with transitional words like however, additionally, moreover, therefore, and so on. Instead of "However, the paper was finished on time" or "The paper was finished on time, however," save the beginning and end of your sentences for more important stuff like nouns and verbs. Try "The paper, however, was finished on time."

Save the end of the sentence for your most important words.

The important thing to remember is that you should use visual cues sparingly. If you ALWAYS resort to BIG, BOLD, ITALICIZED!!! words, your reader is going to stop paying attention.






Enormity

Enormity is etymologically related to enormous, but it has a more specific meaning: it's used for things that are tremendously wicked or evil, things that pass all moral bounds. You can use it to describe genocides and such, but it's not the same as enormousness or immensity. Saying things like "the enormity of the senator's victory" when you mean simply the great size is likely to confuse people (though there are some senators whose victories I consider tremendous evils).






Equally As

Don't. Something can be equally important, or it can be as important, but it can't be equally as important.




Every

Every requires a singular verb and singular pronouns. Do not write "Every one of the papers have been graded"; use "Every one of the papers has been graded" or (better) "Every paper has been graded." Ditto everyone: "Everyone must sign his or her name," not "their name."





Every Day versus Everyday

Keep 'em straight: everyday (one word) is an adjective, and means "normal, quotidian, occurring every day, not out of the ordinary." Other senses should be two words. So: an everyday event happens every day.





Exclamation Points

Go easy on them, okay? They can add a lot of emphasis to a sentence, but using too many of them looks amateurish. If you always seem to be shouting, your audience is going to stop listening. Understatement is usually more effective.






Exists

Unless you're a professional phenomenologist, you can live quite comfortably without the word exists in your vocabulary. Instead of saying "A problem exists with the system," say "There is a problem with the system" (or, maybe even better, "The system doesn't work").

F

Facet

The metaphor is often abused. Don't use a facet, the hard polished side of a gem, to stand in for the more general "aspect" unless it's really appropriate.





The Fact That

Usually unnecessary. You can often simply drop the fact and go with that alone: instead of "I'm surprised by the fact that the report is incomplete," write "I'm surprised that the report is incomplete." And don't be afraid to rewrite the sentence altogether.



Factor

A vogue word and a vague word, beloved of business types, but often with precious little meaning. There's probably a more precise word. Look for it.




Farther versus Further

Though very few people bother with the difference these days, there is a traditional distinction: farther applies to physical distance, further to metaphorical distance. You travel farther, but pursue a topic further. Don't get upset if you can't keep it straight; no one will notice.




Feel

The use of feel for words like think, believe, and argue is becoming unsettlingly common. It's a cliché, and a touchy-feely one at that, reducing all cognition to sensation and emotion. When I see sentences beginning "Wittgenstein feels that . . ." or "Socrates feels he is . . ." I start to feel queasy. Avoid it.




Fewer versus Less

They're easily confused, because they're both the opposite of more, but more has two meanings, one for a greater amount of stuff, the other for a greater number of things. Less means "not as much"; fewer means "not as many." Trust your ear: if you'd use "much," use "less"; if you'd use "many," use "fewer." You earn less money by selling fewer products; you use less oil but eat fewer fries. If you can count them, use fewer.





First, Second, Third

The jury is still out on whether to use first or firstly, second or secondly, &c. Traditional usage had first, secondly, thirdly, but this is too inconsistent for modern taste. Most guides prefer just plain old first, second, third, and so forth, without the -ly ending.




First Person

Grammarians have divided references to people into three categories, to refer to I, you, and he or she. The first person is I, me, my, we, our, and so on. The second person is you and your. The third person is he, she, they, their, his, hers, him, her, and so on. While you need to pay close attention to these when you study a foreign language, most issues of person are instinctive to native English speakers.

On a related topic: some people have been taught never to use the first person in their writing. There's something to this: your attention should be on the work you're discussing, not on yourself (unless, of course, the assignment specifically calls for a personal essay). Write about the text, not about yourself. And there's no need for endless qualifications: "I think," "I believe," "it seems to me," that sort of thing. Readers will take it for granted that the paper represents your thoughts and beliefs, so there's no need to draw attention to that fact.

Still, many people take this principle too far, and resort to the Victorian pomposity of the first-person plural ("We have argued in the previous paragraph") or bizarre contortions to turn first-person references into third-person ("The writer of this essay") when a simple "I" or "me" would be much more direct and forceful. Don't bend over backwards to avoid using the first person: there are many times when it's the best choice.




Foreign Words and Phrases

Foreign words and phrases shouldn't become a bête noire, but, ceteris paribus, English sentences should be in English. Clarity is the sine qua non of good writing, and the overuse of such words just confuses your readers — satis, superque. Remember, Allzuviel ist nicht gesund. Besides, there's nothing worse than trying to impress and getting it wrong. When it comes to foreign phrases, chi non fa, non falla. (Das versteht sich von selbst.)




Formal Writing

Many — most? — of the rules in this guide are concerned with written rather than spoken English, and, what's more, with written language of a certain degree of formality. That's to say, I'm trying to describe the kind of prose that's appropriate for a college English paper. Many no-no's in a college English paper, though, are perfectly acceptable in other contexts; don't get dogmatic on me.




Frequently

There's nothing wrong with the word, but it's often just a long and Latinate way of saying often. Don't be afraid to use the shorter, more direct word.

[Sureshlasi]

G

Generalizations

Since the beginning of time, man has wrestled with the great questions of the universe. Humans have always sought to understand their place in creation. There is no society on earth that has not attempted to reckon with the human condition.

Balderdash. Generalizations like that are sure to sink your writing, because they almost always fall into one of two classes: the obvious and the wrong.

For starters, how do you know what has happened since the beginning of time? — is your knowledge of early Australopithecus robustus family structure extensive enough to let you compare it to Etruscan social organization? Have you read Incan religious texts alongside Baha'i tracts? Unless you've taken courses in omniscience, I'm guessing the answer's no. In that case, you're saying things you simply don't know, and certainly don't know any better than your audience. So it's either obvious to everyone, or a plain old lie.

Couching vacuous ideas in portentous prose impresses nobody. Simplicity, clarity, and precision will always win over ringing generalizations: don't think everything you write has to settle the mysteries of the ages in expressions worthy of Shakespeare. In the words of one of my favoritest writers in the whole wide world, Calvin Trillin, "When a man has nothing to say, the worst thing he can do is to say it memorably".




Grammar

Grammar, strictly defined, is a comparatively narrow field: most questions native speakers have about a language deal not with grammar but with usage or style. Grammar is the more scientific aspect of the study of a language: it's made up of morphology (the forms words take, also known as accidence) and syntax (their relation to one another). Grammar gives names to the various parts of speech and their relations (see, in this guide, Adjectives and Adverbs, Antecedent, Apposition, Conjunctions, Prepositions, Imperative, First Person, Transitive and Intransitive Verbs, Direct and Indirect Objects, and Agreement), so it's useful in providing a vocabulary to discuss how language works. But if you're debating whether language should be concrete, or where to put only in a sentence, or when to use italics — strictly speaking, that's a question of usage or style rather than grammar. And some come down to nothing more than taste.

Linguists complain that the terms taught in school are inadequate for discussing the way our language really works. It's a fair cop: most of our grammatical categories are imported from Latin grammar, and often don't jibe well with English. Still, in this guide I tend to use the traditional terms, and for two reasons: first, I'm not a linguist, and am not up on the best scientific descriptions of the language; and second, few of my readers were taught the more modern system in school, which means explanations that depended on them would confuse rather than enlighten.

I should point out that this guide isn't intended to be a formal or systematic grammar, just a handy vade mecum (look it up) on effective style. I define grammatical terms only insofar as they're useful in improving usage. If you want real grammar, talk to the linguists, who know what they're talking about in a way I never will. (See Prescriptive versus Descriptive Grammars for further details.)

One more thing — for the love of Pete, please don't spell it "grammer," unless you put "Kelsey" right in front of it.







Grammar Checkers

I have no problem with spelling checkers; while they sometimes miss typos, they rarely give advice that's downright wrong. Computerized grammar checkers, on the other hand, are a mess. They not only miss most of the serious problems, they actually give wretched advice, often telling you to fix something that's not broken. And of course they have no sense of grace, which means they can only apply rules pedantically with no sense of context. I've played with many of them, and have never seen one worth the CD-ROM it's printed on.

A fun experiment is to take some great work of literature and feed it to a grammar checker, and then to see what mincemeat it makes of it. Here are some mindless tips on the first sentence.

• Consider revising. Very long sentences can be difficult to understand.

• Avoid contractions like "flow'd" in formal writing (consider "flow had").

• Avoid the use of "Man" (try "he or she").

• "One greater Man restore" has subject-verb agreement problems.

• "In the Beginning" should be "at first."

• "Or if Sion" should be "also if Sion."

Maybe someday I'll be pleasantly surprised, but for now, rely on your own knowledge when you revise and proofread.

H

Heavily

There's nothing wrong with the word, but I find it overused as an intensifier. If you're constructing a metaphor in which weight is appropriate — heavily overloaded, for instance — it's a fine word. If not, try to find a more appropriate adverb, and your sentence will probably be more vivid as a result.




Hopefully

According to traditionalists, hopefully means in a hopeful way, not I hope. You'll keep them (and me) happy by avoiding hopefully in formal writing; use I hope, we hope, I would like, or, what's often best of all, leave it out altogether. It's the paradigmatic example of a skunked term.





However

A tip to make your writing livelier: avoid starting your sentences with however. This isn't a rule, just a way to make for better emphasis.

What can you do instead? Starting a sentence with but is a little informal, but usually more forceful than starting with however. On the other hand, you can tuck the however inside the sentence: "She did, however, finish the book."

By the way, this refers only to the conjunction however, not the adverb however. "However much he tried, he could never lift it"; "However you did it, it seems to be working again" — they're copacetic.





Hypercorrection

Hypercorrection means being so concerned with getting the grammar right that you get it wrong. For instance, we have it drilled into our heads that "Me and him went to the game" is wrong; it should be "He and I went to the game." Too many people end up thinking "He and I" is therefore more proper, and use it in inappropriate places, like "A message came for he and I" — it should be "A message came for him and me." Whom is another frequent problem for hypercorrectors; they have the sense that whom is more correct than who, and use it improperly.





Hyphen

A hyphen joins the two parts of a compound word or the two elements of a range: self-conscious; pp. 95-97. (Hard-core typography nerds will point out that ranges of numbers are marked with an en-dash — pp. 95–97 — but you needn't worry about it: type a hyphen.) A compound noun used as an adjective is often hyphenated: a present-tense verb. Don't confuse a hyphen with a Dash, although you can type a dash as two hyphens.

I

Idiom

An idiom is just a way of expressing something that has been sanctified by use — often in violation of apparent logic, or at least not having an obvious logic behind it.

Some idioms can sometimes be figured out from the component words: if I say something is a dime a dozen, you can probably figure out that it means "cheap" or "common." Others are impossible to figure out logically. If you get on my nerves and I tell you to piss off, I'm asking you to go away — not to urinate from a great height; to kick the bucket has nothing to do with buckets.

Native speakers usually have little trouble with these. The trickier ones are the more subtle idioms. For instance, in English it's idiomatic to say "I'm going home," even though with every other destination you need a preposition like to or into: you go to work or into a store. People learning English often have trouble with this, saying things like "I'm going to home." Even native speakers sometimes get into trouble when they start puzzling over the logic of some phrases, and end up with something that "makes sense" in the abstract, but doesn't conform to general usage.

People learning the language often want to ask why things are this way; alas, the only answer is, "It just is, that's all."





Impact

I have to express my disgust here: impact should remain a noun; a proposal can have an impact, but cannot impact anything without degenerating into jargon. The only thing that can be impacted is a wisdom tooth.




Imperative

In grammar, an imperative is an order: instead of "You will go" — the indicative — the imperative says: "Go." Instead of "You will get the book" — the indicative — the imperative says "Get the book."

Though the word imperative is common in business writing, it's big and ugly and intimidating. Go with must or should. Instead of the jargony "It is imperative that the forms be completed on time," try "Be sure to complete the forms on time."




Imply versus Infer

A speaker implies something by hinting at it; a listener infers something from what he or she hears. Don't use them interchangeably.




Important
A tip: your thesis statement in an English paper should never contain the word important, which usually means something like "I think this is relevant, but I haven't a clue how." Some examples of bad thesis statements: "The idea of money is important in Defoe's novels," "The role of honor in the epic poems of ancient Greece is very important," or "Race and gender are very important aspects of Toni Morrison's novels" — they're all very close to meaningless. And don't think a synonym like significant will save you. Say something precise.






Infinitive

The infinitive is the form of a verb that doesn't express person, number, tense, or mood. It's the uninflected form of the verb.

In most English verbs, the present infinitive is the same as the present plural indicative: "we, you, they listen," so the infinitive is simply listen; "we you, they shake," so the infinitive is shake. The verb to be, however, is mighty irregular; the present plural indicative is are, but the infinitive is be. The infinitive is often marked with the particle to (to listen, to shake, to be), though it's not always necessary.

There's also a past infinitive, formed with have and the past participle: to have listened, to have shaken, to have been.




Inflection

Inflection is the process by which words change forms, as when you change the infinitive to be and turn it into am, is, are, were, being, been, and so on, or when you take a singular noun and make it plural. Our pronouns change form according to person, number, and case — that is, the function they play in the sentence — producing I, me, my, mine.

The "base" form of a verb is the infinitive. The base form of a noun is the singular.

Modern English isn't a very "highly inflected" language — we tack an s onto the end of the infinitive to get our third-person singular present verb; we slap ed to the end of infinitives to get most of our past tenses; we paste ing to the infinitive to get the present participle. With nouns, we add an s to most singular nouns to get the plurals, apostrophe-s for singular possessives, and s-apostrophe for plural possessives. Our adjectives and adverbs aren't inflected at all. A thousand years ago, Old English was much more highly inflected. We lost most of the inflections in the Middle English period, when word order took over their function. Plenty of languages, though, have more flexibility in word order because they show grammatical relations in their word forms. Those who've studied ancient Greek, Latin, or German will know that every noun and adjective can take dozens of forms. The list of forms an ancient Greek verb can take stretches into the hundreds. On the other hand, many of the East Asian languages are even less inflected than English: Chinese and Vietnamese have hardly any changes in word forms.





Interesting

Sentences beginning "It is interesting that" or "It is significant that" are usually as far from interesting as can be. Don't just state that something is interesting: show it.





In Terms of

Often useless padding.




Interpolation

Just as you might have to omit something from quoted material with ellipses, you sometimes have to add to a quotation to clarify it. A sentence with only a pronoun like he or she, without the context of the surrounding sentences, might baffle a reader. Or a word or phrase may need explanation — say, a passage in a foreign language.

In these cases, it's traditional to add material in [square brackets]. (Newspapers often use parentheses instead of square brackets, but they're a minority.) Provide an explanation if the author uses something your audience isn't likely to understand — "The first words of Joyce's 'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan' are Introibo ad altare dei ['I will go to the altar of God']." You might need to supply a detail not in the original quotation, especially if your reader is likely to be confused: "As Fairbanks notes, 'The death of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia [Mississippi] marked a turning point.'" You might also provide a first name: "It was [George] Eliot's most successful work." Always the question is whether the clarification will help your audience.

If you're changing a single word or a short phrase, especially a pronoun, and the word isn't especially interesting in its own right, it's okay to omit the original and replace it with the bracketed interpolation: you can change "In that year, after much deliberation, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation" to "In [1862], after much deliberation, [Lincoln] issued the Emancipation Proclamation." If you're hesitant to monkey with words in the original that may be important — and it's wise to be circumspect — just add the bracketed interpolation after the thing you're explaining: "The sixteenth president [Lincoln] abolished slavery."

You can also use brackets around part of a word to indicate necessary changes in its form. So, for instance, you might write, "In his brilliant Guide to Grammar and Style, Lynch provides sage advice on 'us[ing] brackets around part of a word.'"

Some house styles call for brackets to indicate changes of upper- and lowercase letters at the beginning of a quotation: "[L]ike this." I don't like it — it clutters a page — but I don't get to make the call, except in things I edit.

Limit square brackets to quotations of others' words. If you need to clarify something in your own prose, use parentheses (as I do here).




Irregardless

Not a word used in respectable company: somewhere between irrespective and regardless. Use one of these instead.



Issue

A terribly vague word: it always suggests to me that the writer doesn't have a clear idea of his or her meaning. Look for something more specific and more concrete.

Note: I won`t be able to continue the thread further coz paucity of time. You may explore the following link for further reading:

http://www.world-english.org/grammar.htm

Take care,

Allah Naheban,