Steve's Style Guide Over the Years I Have Compiled a List of Grammatical
Steve’s Style Guide
Over the years I have compiled a list of grammatical snafus that are rife in student writing at SSU. For the sake of your grade (and for the sake of my sanity!), please be sure to check your paper for the following.
1. Mistakes in the use of apostrophes, particularly in the formation of plural and possessive nouns.
Making a noun possessive requires the use of an apostrophe: ’s for single nouns, s’ for plural nouns. The apostrophe is almost never used to designate a plural, non-possessive noun. The few exceptions to this are exceedingly rare, and tend to be unusual constructions like so-and-so (for which the plural, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, is so-and-so's).
Possessive pronouns do not require an apostrophe. This means that the possessive form of it is its. Mistaking it’s (a contraction of it is) for its is the most common grammatical error in student writing at SSU.
Many students are uncertain how to form the possessive of a singular noun that ends in s. The rule is simple: if you would pronounce an additional s in speech, you must add it in your prose as well. For instance, the possessive of Lois is Lois's; the possessive of Kansas is Kansas's. The exceptions to this rule are limited to a small number of Biblical and Hellenized names (Jesus' crucifixion and Euripides' play).
In creative or casual writing, an apostrophe can also be used to indicate a noun-verb contraction or a negated verb contraction. Consider, for instance, the following two sentences.
Sammy Sosa’s a lousy right fielder.
Sammy Sosa retired in 2006 because he didn’t want to take a drug test.
An apostrophe should never be used when designating a span of years (e.g., 1970’s should be 1970s).
2. Confusing homophones.
In my experience, the two most common sets of confused homophones are the following:
principle (a noun meaning a fundamental law or doctrine) / principal (a noun referring to a person with authority, a thing of primary importance, or a sum of financial capital).
affect (most commonly a verb meaning influence) / effect (most commonly a noun meaning result).
Affect and effect also have less common meanings:
affect (a rare, archaic noun meaning feeling or affection) / effect (a verb meaning to bring about).
3. Confusing transitive and intransitive verbs.
Transitive verbs take a direct object; intransitive verbs express a state of being. Some verbs have both transitive and intransitive forms. Consider, for instance, the stylistically awkward yet grammatically correct sentence, "I feel awful because I feel a stab of pain in my temple."
Most errors with transitive and intransitive verbs involve lie/lay.
Lie is intransitive verb that refers to the position of an object. Its past tense is lay.
Lay is a transitive verb that means to place or to set. Its past tense is laid.
Please also note that comprise is always a transitive verb. Therefore, the common phrase “is comprised of” is grammatically incorrect.
4. Confusing which and that.
Students often use these words interchangeably, but they are not the same. "Which" introduces a non-restrictive clause, which is always set off by a comma from the word it modifies (like in this sentence) and from whatever follows. "That" introduces a restrictive clause that typically goes without commas (like in this sentence). Because restrictive clauses require less punctuation, they are preferable (although not always possible). Like Hemingway, I admire simple, direct, austere prose.
5. Confusing the past and past-perfective tenses.
The English language is blessed with two past tenses: the simple and the perfective. The latter, of course, is most often formed by the addition of "had" to the simple past, although some verbs have separate past-perfective declensions (see/saw/had seen or is/was/had been). In general, the past perfective is used to denote an action that occurs before an action that has already been rendered in the simple past. Consider, for instance, the following sentences
Sean says that Bill had been to the movie. (present + past perfective = grammatically incorrect)
Sean said that Bill was at the movie. (simple past + simple past = grammatically correct but with an ambiguous chronology. Did Bill see the movie before Sean spoke? )
Sean said that Bill had been to the movie. (simple past + past perfective = grammatically correct with clear chronology.)
6. Excessive use of passive verb constructions.
Christopher Lasch, an American intellectual historian and one of the great stylists of the profession, described the passive voice as “inert, lifeless, and evasive.” It “disguises the subject and makes it hard to assign responsibility for an action.” Of course, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure this out. Even my kids, who are six and four, understand the value of the passive voice: they use it to avoid blame. “My toy dinosaur got broken!” “Ethan is scratched!” Who, my wife and I wonder, are the agents of these actions?
Students often try to eliminate the ambiguity of the passive voice by adding a prepositional phrase. This results in sentences that are unnecessarily verbose and stylistically awkward. Consider the following:
The question asked by the professor was difficult. (8 words)
The professor asked a difficult question. (6 words)
These sentences are identical in meaning, yet the latter requires fewer words and is thus stylistically superior.
Some students have devised another way of resolving the passive-voice conundrum: they substitute an indeterminate subject and an active verb for an evasive passive verb. Consider the following:
It is said that a bird in hand is better than one overhead. (Uggh! This sentence makes me cringe.)
They say that a bird in hand is better than one overhead. (This sentence is better— the verb is active, after all—but it’s just as evasive as the passive sentence. Who, pray tell, are they?)
Murphy’s Law says that a bird in hand is better than one overhead.
7. Hyphen-mania!
According to the New York Times, Shakespeare was the greatest hyphenator of all time, giving us leap-frog and bare-faced, among other hyphenated constructions. (Some contemporaries even rendered Shakespeare as Shak-speare!) Fortunately for us, hyphenation need not be ubiquitous or confusing. The following rules encompass most situations where you might be tempted to use a hyphen.
First, you should never hyphenate words when the Oxford English Dictionary or Webster’s indicates that the resulting construction exists as a single word. For instance, post-war should be postwar, leap-frog should be leapfrog, and bare-faced should be barefaced. (Sorry Shakespeare!)
Second, uncapitalized compound words are hyphenated only when used as an adjective. Consider, for instance, the following sentences.
Obama and McCain are fighting for the votes of the middle class.
Obama and McCain are fighting for middle-class votes.
Third, proper (capitalized) compound words are never hyphenated when used as an adjective unless they are also hyphenated when used as a noun.
8. Other annoying things.
Single quotations. In American (rather than British) usage, single quotations are almost always used to designate a quote within a quote. Neither single nor double quotations should be used to indicate irony or something the author doesn’t personally believe.
Split infinitives (e.g., to + adverb + verb, to loudly speak). Avoid at all costs. They can easily be remedied by reordering the words (e.g., to + verb + adverb, to speak loudly).
The same goes for clichés, casual jargon, and idiomatic expressions. They mainly indicate intellectual laziness.
Erratic verb tenses. Be consistent! If you discuss Machiavelli in the past tense at the beginning of the paragraph, don’t switch to present tense at the end of the paragraph (or even worse, in the same sentence!).
Fragmented sentences. This is an elementary mistake. If a sentence doesn't have both a subject and a verb, it's a fragment. In my experience, fragmented sentences tend to be symptoms of prose so convoluted that the author loses track of the subject or verb.
Run-on sentences. Run-ons are the opposite of fragments: a string of sentences that are run together as one. Be polite to your reader and divide them! Humankind has already produced one James Joyce. It does not need another.