FAQs on Style

By PHILIP B. CORBETT
Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style.


Many topics come up repeatedly in reader comments and e-mail messages to After Deadline. Unfortunately I’m not able to offer a direct response to each comment (truth be told, After Deadline is a sideline for me). But one thoughtful reader suggested that I compile answers for some of the most common questions.

Here’s a start in that effort. I’ll add other topics as they come up, and I’ll link to this item from each week’s column so readers can find it easily.

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Is Data Singular or Plural?
Yes.
The Times’s stylebook allows “data” with either a plural or a singular verb.

Here’s the entry:
data is acceptable as a singular term for information: The data was persuasive. In its traditional sense, meaning a collection of facts and figures, the noun can still be plural: They tabulate the data, which arrive from bookstores nationwide. (In this sense, the singular is datum, a word both stilted and deservedly obscure.)

And here’s an earlier After Deadline discussion of this point, along with some other disputed points of usage.

Where’s the Comma?
Many readers complain about what they view as a missing comma in a sentence like this: He bought apples, pears and bananas.

Style guides for book and academic publishing generally would insist on another comma after “pears,” the so-called serial comma. But news writing has traditionally omitted the serial comma — perhaps seeking a more rapid feeling in the prose, or perhaps to save time and effort in the old days of manual typesetting.

We do use the additional comma in cases where a sentence would be awkward or confusing without it: Choices for breakfast included oatmeal, muffins, and bacon and eggs.

Why Nascar, Not NASCAR?
Auto racing fans chafe at our rules on acronyms.

Here they are, from our stylebook:
acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the first letter (or letters) of each word in a series: NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organization; radar from radio detection and ranging. (Unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym.)

When an acronym serves as a proper name and exceeds four letters, capitalize only the first letter: Unesco; Unicef.

We limit the uppercasing to four letters because longer strings of capitals are distracting and tend to jump off the page.

One of Those Things
To my surprise, many readers insist that I’m wrong to call for a plural verb in sentences like this: He is one of those teachers who refuse to allow laptops in class.
I don’t necessarily expect to win over the doubters, but I’m not budging. Here’s a more detailed explanation from a previous post.

Who’s a Dr.?
Our continued use of courtesy titles — increasingly rare in the news media — prompts many questions. Rules on the use of “Dr.” in particular can lead to confusion, for readers and unfortunately sometimes for our writers.

Here’s our stylebook entry:
Dr. should be used in all references for physicians and dentists whose practice is their primary current occupation, or who work in a closely related field, like medical writing, research or pharmaceutical manufacturing: Dr. Alex E. Baranek; Dr. Baranek; the doctor. (Those who practice only incidentally, or not at all, should be called Mr., Ms., Miss or Mrs.)

Anyone else with an earned doctorate, like a Ph.D. degree, may request the title, but only if it is germane to the holder’s primary current occupation (academic, for example, or laboratory research). For a Ph.D., the title should appear only in second and later references. The holder of a Ph.D. or equivalent degree may also choose not to use the title.

Do not use the title for someone whose doctorate is honorary.

Stodgy Traditionalist or Permissive Panderer?
I take no sides in the philosophical debate between descriptivists and prescriptivists on usage questions. As I explained in this post last year, I’m just a newspaper editor. My goal is lucid prose that is polished and literate without being stuffy.

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In a Word
This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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DETROIT — The Transportation Department said Monday it would seek a $16.4 million fine against Toyota, the largest allowed, because the company had failed to promptly notify the government about potential problems with accelerator pedals.

Don’t omit “that” after a time element in a construction like this.

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Rescuers [in China] knocked on and shouted into the pipe, and they sent down glucose, a phone, pen, paper and letters of encouragement inside a plastic bottle.
“Dear fellow workers, the Party Central Committee, the State Council and the whole nation have been concerned for your safety,” one began. It ended: “Hold onto the last.”

This is presumably a translation; it should be grammatically correct. Make it "Hold on to the last" — "on" is an adverb that goes with "hold."

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[Online caption] A harp seal pup lays on the ice in 2008 near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

"Lies," of course. Or if we want past tense, make it "lay."

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The characters, including the inevitably valiant warriors who aide Perseus during his computer-assisted adventures, are as predictable as the action scenes, which is what some companies want when they manufacture global products of this type.

Make it “aid,” not “aide.”

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But it does not appear that the foundation has addressed how Ms. Harris, going forward, would keep her roles from overlapping.

A colleague notes that this phrase is usually redundant. We should avoid it, going forward, in the future. (Also, I see no reason for “would”; make it “will keep.”)

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Sheila Stainback, a city housing authority spokeswoman, said Morrisania Air Rights was thusly named because it was built above Metro-North train tracks, but she was not immediately sure about the “why.”

“Thus” is an adverb; thus, there is no call to add “ly.” In any case, “so named” would probably be better here.

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Weak Rules on Toxins and Safety
Nobody can be sure, though. The science is not far enough along, partly because our regulation of toxins is so limp.

As we noted here not long ago, “toxin,” properly used, refers to a plant or animal poison. In this column, we meant “toxic chemicals” or something like that.

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M. Sunil Kumar was a 25-year-old reporter at a local newspaper in the provincial town of Warangal. His older brother Anil had dropped out of high school to run the family’s mutton shop when their father died so that Sunil could go to college.

Watch where you put that clause. The father, of course, did not die so that Sunil could go to college.

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Yesterday, Decoder came across a rare site in the wilds of Manhattan: A happy publishing executive.

Even for a blog post, this was a little too Web-oriented; make it “sight.”

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While speaking to television writers in January, Mr. Sutherland said of the torture sequences: “It’s a television show. We’re not telling you to try this at home.”
He also refuted claims of a political slant to “24.” “One of the things that I was always so unbelievably proud of our show is that you could have it being discussed by former President Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh at the same time, both using it and citing it to justify their points of view,” he said. “That, to me, was incredibly balanced.”

In careful usage, “refute” means to prove something false, not merely to offer a counterargument. Here, we needed something like “rebut,” “reject” or “deny.”

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After Deadline examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times. It is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual.

Link to the article

The Chatty Effect

By PHILIP B. CORBETT
Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style.

As I’ve often noted, we strive for vivid and lively writing in straight news as well as in features. But in most cases, slang or colloquial words aren’t the best approach. Those expressions can seem out of place in news stories, undercutting the serious and literate tone we seek.
A few recent examples:

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Wounded survivors were rushed to local hospitals, with several people reported in critical condition. Mr. Pillai confirmed that at least one of the dead was a foreigner, of unconfirmed nationality. The eatery, called German Bakery, is near the Osho Ashram, a high-end yoga and meditation retreat that caters to visitors from around the world.

The informal and somewhat dated “eatery” seemed out of place in a straight story about a deadly bombing in India; “high-end” is also colloquial.

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Mr. McCain now sharply criticizes the bailout bill he voted for, pivoted from his earlier position that the Guantánamo Bay detention facility should be closed, offered only a muted response to the Supreme Court’s decision undoing campaign finance laws and backed down from statements that gays in the military would be O.K. by him if the military brass were on board.

No call for the colloquial expression in this political story.

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In 2005, she [Reshma Saujani, a New York congressional candidate] helped start an investment fund for a company partly owned by Hassan Nemazee, a Democratic fund-raiser who was charged with bank fraud last year. Ms. Saujani said she left before the alleged crimes. She went to another fund started by the Carlyle Group, before it was hammered by credit-default swaps. Then she shifted to Fortress Investment Partners, which cratered in the market meltdown.

We often resort to colloquialisms like “hammered” to try to add punch to financial or other potentially dry topics. The use of “crater” as a verb is a particular favorite. Let’s resist.

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The report treads lightly on the hot-button question of whether innate differences between the sexes account for the paucity of women at the highest levels of science and math.

“Hot-button” is colloquial — or “informal,” as our preferred newsroom dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, calls it. And with more than 60 uses in The Times in the past year, it’s something of a cliché as well.

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Dying to be the first on your block (or the first in America) to get a new 3-D TV? Sears and Amazon.com are taking orders for two Samsung 3-D-ready LCD TVs …

While the TVs require active-shutter glasses to see 3-D (when 3-D television becomes available — it isn’t yet), neither model, at least now, bundles glasses with the TV. So expect to shell out at least $50 more when you need the 3-D specs.

This was a blog post, where a more informal or conversation style may be acceptable. Still, “shell out” and especially “specs” seemed both forced and dated.

In a Word
This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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Preservationists like Mr. Berman said they were troubled by N.Y.U.’s handling of the historic Provincetown Playhouse theater on MacDougal Street, which the university is turning into a research center for its law school. While the building’s facade was preserved, part of a wall was demolished; N.Y.U. said it was structurally unsound.
In addition, some are concerned about the university’s plans to build a fourth tower at the Silver Towers complex on Bleecker Street, which was designed by I. M. Pei, opened in 1966 and landmarked in 2008.

The street in Greenwich Village is spelled Macdougal. And we should resist the jargony use of “landmark” as a verb.

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Ostensibly the memoir of an acclaimed cartoonist, “Backing Into Forward” is a portrait of a certain kind of New York during a specific era: the cultural and political foment of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Most dictionaries confine “foment” to use as a verb. Perhaps we meant “ferment”?

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The result is the darkly devastating fictional film, “Galerianki,” or Mall Girls, which premiered in Poland in the autumn and has provoked a national debate about moral decadence in this conservative, predominantly Catholic country, 20 years after the fall of Communism.

The Times’s stylebook recommends avoiding this use as a verb.

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Because of copyright law, she could not publish the letters — from taxicab drivers to the widow of Medgar Evers to Langston Hughes — without permission from the writers or their heirs. So she enlisted the help of genealogists and others to find them.

The syntax runs off track, making this read momentarily as if it referred to letters sent by taxi drivers to Medgar Evers’s widow.

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The protagonists in that novel and several that followed were young men like himself, raised in small rural townships and disdaining authority, especially teachers, who Mr. Han sometimes likens to prostitutes.

That relative pronoun problem again; make it “whom.”

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Further, the exploits of professional players like King Kelly and Cap Anson had caused the creation of national songs like “Slide, Kelly, Slide” in 1889 and Ernest Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat,” which was performed widely in theaters beginning that August. Even Mark Twain referenced baseball in his 1889 work “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Avoid this jargony use of “reference” as a verb.

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Ms. Grunwald writes clean, attractive prose that is its own reward, at least during Henry’s babyhood, which is the most authentically inviting part of this novel. Schematic later sections, especially those (like the one about Henry at prep school) feel too much like stepping stones to subsequent chapters.

This phrase does not work within the parentheses. Lose them, and add a comma after school.

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Trial Remains Elusive in an Assemblyman’s Two-Year-Old Drunken-Driving Case
Prosecutors offered a plea deal — a $300 fine, a 90-day license suspension and enrollment in a drunk-driving program — but Mr. Powell refused.

Which is it? The stylebook prefers “drunken driving” (or “drunken-driving” as a modifier).

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About 85 percent of bacterial ear infections clear up on their own. But when that does not work, and symptoms are still present after a couple days, an antibiotic is usually in order.

Make it “a couple of days.”

Link to the article

A Bit About ‘That’

By PHILIP B. CORBETT
Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style.

My colleague Ken Paul notes that we often stumble in deciding whether to use or omit the conjunction “that” after a verb like “said.”
Here’s the relevant entry in The Times’s stylebook:

that (conj.). After a verb like said, disclosed or announced, it is often possible to omit that for conciseness: He said he felt peaked. But if the words after said or any other verb can be mistaken for its direct object, the reader may be momentarily led down a false trail, and that must be retained: The mayor disclosed that her plan for the rhubarb festival would cost $3 million.

When a time element follows the verb, that is always needed to make quickly clear whether the time element applies to the material before or after it: The governor announced yesterday that he would organize a knackwurst fiesta.

Often a sentence with two parallel clauses requires the expression and that in the second part; in such a case, keep that in the first part also, for balance: The mayor said that she might run again and that if she did, her brother would be her campaign manager.

Some recent cases that tripped us up:

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Her lawyer says she remembers nothing of the shootings and that he plans to have her evaluated by psychiatrists.

This violates the final admonition in the stylebook entry. To keep the clauses parallel, make the first part read “says that she remembers …”

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Rai Sue Sussman, Specialist Hutchinson’s lawyer in San Francisco, said the soldier was prepared to deploy and that they would have rebutted those accusations at trial.

Here, too, make it “said that the soldier was prepared …,” to be parallel with the second clause.

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Professor Paxton said he understood why people would take offense, but that if we want to understand history, remembering Pétain’s fall from glory to infamy is more worthwhile than effacing his name.

Same idea here, with “but that” in the second clause. Make the first part read “said that he understood …” (Also, sequence-of-tense rules would favor “if we wanted to understand history, remembering Pétain’s fall from glory to infamy was more worthwhile …”)

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The White House afterward issued a memorandum announcing the policy would be changed.

A different problem here. The reader is briefly led astray, taking “the policy” as the direct object of “announcing.” Make it “announcing that the policy would be changed.”

In a Word
This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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If a company was able to pitch offers to people who say they are at a particular spot, it would “allow for the sharpening of mobile advertising,” said Anne Lapkin, an analyst at the research firm Gartner.

Subjunctive; make it “were.”

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But the honeybee’s bad rap — and the days of urban beekeepers being outlaws — may soon be over.

Given the tone of the piece, the slang “rap” may have been permissible (though the expression is pretty tired). But it would have been easy to avoid the “fused participle” problem with a tweak like, “the days of urban beekeepers as outlaws.”

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Part of the New Jersey Turnpike was closed for two hours on Saturday afternoon as the authorities made sure an overpass under construction near Mansfield could withstand the winds, and flooding forced the closure of Belt Parkway in Brooklyn for part of the evening.

Our stylebook prefers “closing” to the more stilted “closure.”

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At war’s end, the cabbie won’t take money from the Marine returning home from the Pacific.

Per the stylebook, make it “cabby.”

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Mr. Cumberland looked punch drunk as he was given his card. “I hardly know what this case is about any more,” he said.

As an adverb, make “anymore” one word. Also, “punch-drunk” takes a hyphen, according to the dictionary.

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Worse, for the Mets, his mother is from Jamaica, Queens, and before being drafted by the Braves his favorite team was the Yankees.

Dangler. He, not his favorite team, was drafted by the Braves.

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Geyer Kosinski, who manages Ms. Jolie, and a spokesperson for Columbia Pictures both declined to comment.

Our style is spokesman or spokeswoman, not spokesperson.

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New York’s placement among the finalists had been anything but certain, even though Mr. Duncan has frequently praised New York City’s school improvement efforts under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. But the competition barred states with laws that prohibit the use of student achievement data to evaluate teachers, and New York has a law that seemed to fit that criteria. But the state argued that the law banned the use of such data only in making teacher tenure decisions.

It seems that we wanted the singular “criterion.” Also, the back-and-forth effect of starting consecutive sentences with “but” is distracting.

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They’re going through the motions. They’ve stuffed the legislation with gimmicks and dodges designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but don’t genuinely control runaway spending.

These two elements should have been grammatically parallel.

Link to the article

Bright Passages

By PHILIP B. CORBETT
Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style.

Occasionally I put the carping aside to take note of some of the fine writing that appears in our pages, both print and Web. Here’s another small sampling of sparkling prose from recent editions.

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Cigarette taxes may not be the world’s sexiest topic, but David Kirkpatrick’s sharp lead paragraph kept me reading (National, 3/6):

There is a relatively short list of people who like mail-order cigarettes: teenagers, adults evading sales taxes and the Seneca Nation of Indians of western New York, which dominates the national market.

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One of many lucid and memorable passages in Anne Barnard’s front-page story about Haitian refugees (New York, 3/6):

From the outside, the neat middle-class houses of southeast Queens look the same as ever. But inside, dozens of households are vibrating with relief, worry and claustrophobia as Haitians take refuge with relatives in the United States. These scenes are being repeated from the most familiar Haitian destinations, like Miami, to cities like Chicago, St. Louis and Boston, where one family welcomed 12 Haitian relatives.

These families are alive, and their reunions are joyous. But they show up without plans, with few possessions and fewer winter coats. Many lack permission to work.

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A typically bright image from Andy Newman (New York, 2/19):

The bridge [the Kosciuszko Bridge], the hyphen in the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, connecting the two boroughs as it soars 128 feet above the oily murk of Newtown Creek, is perhaps the city’s most notorious span, hated and feared by drivers and synonymous in traffic reports with bottlenecks, stop-and-go and general delay.

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A striking lead for a book review by Dwight Garner (Arts, 3/5):

Kay Ryan’s poems are as slim as runway models, so tiny you could almost tweet them. Their compact refinement, though, does not suggest ease or chic. Her voice is quizzical and impertinent, funny in uncomfortable ways, scuffed by failure and loss. Her mastery, like Emily Dickinson’s, has some awkwardness in it, some essential gawkiness that draws you close.

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A series of irresistible touches in Margalit Fox’s obit of Fred Morrison, inventor of the Frisbee:

Walter Fredrick Morrison, who at 17 sent the lid of a popcorn tin skimming through the air of a California backyard and as an adult remade the lid in plastic, in the process inventing the simple, elegant flying disc known today as the Frisbee, died Tuesday at his home in Monroe, Utah. He was 90. …
Beloved of man and dog, the Frisbee has for more than half a century been the signature product of Wham-O, a toy and sporting-goods manufacturer based in Emeryville, Calif. …

In 1937, Fred attended a picnic held by the family of his girlfriend, Lucile Nay, known as Lu. Before long, the fateful popcorn lid was thrown. The young couple soon discovered that Fred’s mother’s metal pie tins were far more durable. Mrs. Morrison’s reaction is not recorded.

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A bright phrase in a serious piece by Nicholas Kulish on Germany and the euro; remember, we don’t have to confine lively writing to feature pieces (Foreign, 2/11):

The apprehension in Germany runs much deeper than a single crisis. It comes in the same week that Germany gave up its most cherished title, world export champion, to China, heightening fears of a declining stature and importance globally.

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Eric Dash found a lively way to start yet another story about bankers’ pay (Business, 2/11):

The list of the biggest earners in finance usually reads like a Who’s Who of Wall Street. But these days, it reads more like a Who’s That?

In a Word
All right, back to the carping. Here’s this week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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Yet for Afghanistan, the solution was to negotiate with the Taliban leadership, he [Colonel Imam, a Pakistani with ties to the Taliban] said. Mullah Omar wants peace and is capable of compromise, he said.
He was also the only leader who could keep Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan or in abeyance, including Osama bin Laden, he said. Mullah Omar’s popular support was such that Mr. bin Laden would have to listen, he said.

Besides the choppiness of the attributions, we muddled the rules on sequence of tenses. It’s clear from the context that Colonel Imam made each of these assertions in the present tense. Since the “he said” attributions follow the attributed material, set off with commas, the past-tense “said” should not affect the tense of the other verbs. Make it “the solution is to negotiate,” etc.

The second sentence of the first paragraph has it right, with “wants” and “is” remaining present tense.

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The United States is one of the few nations that do not publicly finance its Olympic athletes.

Someone got the memo pointing out that a plural verb is correct in this relative-clause construction; so far, so good. But then the possessive pronoun has to be plural, too. Make it “that do not publicly finance their Olympic athletes.”

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CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — The Marines in a recent “cultural awareness” class scribbled careful notes as the instructor coached them on do’s and don’ts when talking to villagers in Afghanistan: Don’t start by firing off questions, do break the ice by playing with the children, don’t let your interpreter hijack the conversation.

As The Times’s stylebook says, it should be “dos and don’ts.” (There’s an apostrophe in “don’ts” because it’s a contraction; none is needed in “dos.”)

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But a grass-roots effort among some gun rights advocates is shifting attention to a different goal: exercising the right to carry unconcealed weapons in the 38 or more states that have so-called open-carry laws allowing guns to be carried in public view with little or no restrictions.

The plural “restrictions” works with “no,” but not with “little.”

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Changing times create more ethical trip wires — would the assault case bedeviling Mr. Paterson have surfaced or had the same throw weight three decades ago before women’s issues became as much a part of the conversation?

In our preferred dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th Edition), “tripwire” is one word and “throw-weight” (the payload capacity of an ICBM) takes a hyphen.

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When first we met our contenders for the golden boy, they included veterans (Clint Eastwood, with the sports drama biopic “Invictus”), modern heir apparents (Jason Reitman, “Up in the Air”) and upstarts (Lee Daniels, “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”).

Make it “heirs apparent.”

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New York ski buffs not content with the 30 inches of snow that has fallen on the city made a pilgrimage to Hunter Mountain, where seven feet of white stuff fell.

Trite. Avoid it, along with “Ol’ Man Winter,” “dumped” and similar tired phrases uttered by TV weather people.

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Still, judging by the perfectly clipped hedges that envelope the manicured mansions, residents may be doing with less, but not much less.

“Envelop,” of course.

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[Caption] A former neo-Nazi skinhead, Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew, at a Warsaw synagogue. At the age of 22, Pawel’s maternal grandparents had been found on a register of Warsaw Jews.

They weren’t 22; he was. Better: “When Pawel was 22, his maternal grandparents…”

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Unless the chamber reverses itself, it will be the first time in more than 20 years that the public or its representatives has decided to close a reactor.

Make it “have decided” to agree with the closer element of the subject.

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Ms. Palin, who is also a paid contributor to the Fox News Channel, further criticized “Family Guy” as well as her corporate siblings at the Fox network and television studio in a Tuesday appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

“What do you say about this Fox Hollywood episode of this cartoon?,” she said. “When are we going to be willing to say, you know, some things just aren’t really funny?”

No comma after the question mark.

Link to the article