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Blog postPart of my job is running the Bremner Editing Center at the University of Kansas, where journalism students can get one-on-one help editing their work. It’s always best to have a second set of eyes on anything you write for publication (or a grade), to catch awkward or unclear passages as well as typos, skipped or duplicated words, and tricky homophones. It’s hard to see mistakes in your own work, since you already know what you meant to say, even if it’s not what you actually wrote.
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Blog postThe Muller report has been in the news a lot lately, and while I don’t want to wade into politics here, something on a recent cable news show caught my ear. Presidential historian Jon Meacham was talking about Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the way his report — and his speech on May 29 — were filled with words carefully chosen to convey just the right nuance. Then he said “It’s hard to diagram some of those sentences,” (here’s the video; it’s about 5 minutes in) and, well, challenge accep
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Blog postCenturions correcting Latin sentences, grammar-based walked-into-a-bar one-liners, long listicles of nerdy jokes, wordplay and cheesy punchlines are all linguistic humor that editors can appreciate.
Got a favorite joke? Leave it in the comments!
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Blog postI’ve said this before, but it’s probably time to say it again: “who” is well on its way to losing its case marking. That is, the objective case “whom” is fading, leaving us with “who” for both subjective and objective uses (like the pronouns “you,” “it” and “what”). In conversational speech, “whom” is already long gone, and in all but the most formal writing, at best “whom” is inconsistently used. Anymore, the only place you really need “whom” is directly following a preposition: To whom it <
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Blog postFor our fourth sentence, we’ll depart from movie quotes. This sentence is close to one I found myself writing in an email, and I realized that although it was perfectly clear (and grammatical — it IS acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition in English), it would make for a more complex diagram because of understood but omitted words.
Here’s the sentence: “Her research is something I have no clue about the topic of.”
Photo by Max Pixel, shared under Creative Commons Zero -
Blog postFor our third sentence to diagram, we’ll get more complicated with a sentence that uses layers of recursion. In language, recursion basically means that we can embed – and keep embedding – clauses or phrases within a sentence while still maintaining grammaticality and comprehensibility.
It’s easier just to show an example:
Scene from “The Princess Bride”There are four subject-verb pairs in this short and memorable sentence: “I think,” “it means,” “you think” and “it means” (ag -
Blog postFor our second sentence to diagram, we’ll stay fairly simple — no compounds or subordinate clauses — but we’ll pile up a few more modifiers and have an imperative verb: We again have a subject-verb-object structure, with modifiers. Imperatives (command verbs) have the understood subject “you,” because you’re directly telling someone to do something. It’s … Continue reading #Diagramming challenge No. 2 (sentence and answer) →
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Blog postAt the recent ACES: The Society for Editing conference, I gave a session on diagramming sentences. It was during the last session period of the conference, on a sunny Florida afternoon, and more than 100 people packed the room to learn, or refresh their memories, about sentence diagramming. (We’re talking about the classic “Reed-Kellogg” method here, not the tree diagrams of great utility to linguists.)
Diagramming has fallen out of favor as a pedagogical tool (it was of questionable -
Blog postMark of quality or sign of rudeness?
“I am silently correcting your grammar.”
Many editors own a T-shirt, sticker or button bearing this slogan, marking them as people who care about language, or at least have a sense of humor about it. However, others think it’s not at all funny and is yet another reason for people to think editors are snooty pedants who gleefully scold the less-educated.
Both have a point, but I’d like to point out that once an editor has spent years -
Blog postNumerous writing guides (and, judging from the people I encounter, hundreds of writing teachers) drum it into student’s heads that the passive voice is to be avoided at all costs to avoid the passive voice at all costs. That’s not always bad advice, but, as with most grammar “rules,” it’s a guideline rather than a commandment carved in stone.
First things first: Passive voice is a perfectly legitimate part of English (and most other languages). Using the passive voice is not a grammar
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