This post is a response to comments from readers about my use of “insure” in Editors insure content matches audience readiness for it. I’m using this as a teaching moment for my technical editing students so it might be too long for others. Skip ahead if you just want to get to shibboleths or white…
No grammatical construction raises the ire of writing “experts” like the passive. Geoff Pullum (a regular contributor to Lingua Franca at the Chronicle of Higher Education) provided two marvelous examples in a research paper titled “Fear and loathing of the English passive.” The passive voice liquidates and buries the active individual, along with most of the awful…
For National Grammar Day, I’m posting a slightly edited version of “Shibboleths and entering the professions,” which appeared on Pros Write back in 2012. I wrote the original in response to the raised eyebrows after I posted “Language choices can be unsuccessful — but never wrong.” For some readers, my belief that language can never…
Yesterday in “The big grammar quiz of 2014,” the UK’s Management Today published a terrific piece about grammar in workplace writing. Test yourself with their quiz. Then review your score with their key, which includes thoughtful and accurate explanations. If you rely on Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, you will resist those explanations. But…
I’ve been meaning to send you over to this grammar quiz from James Harbeck. But first let me remind you to avoid listening to any “expert” who focuses on limiting your stylistic choices by telling you to “avoid passives.” Here are the items you must judge as passive — or not. An accidental discharge of…
Thanks to one of the readers of Lingua Franca, where Lucy Ferriss weighed in on the buzz about “Word Crimes” last week, I happened upon this video. Perfect for a little Friday fun! Visit Arnold Zwicky’s X Nazi for a little discussion of the use of “nazi” to signal hyperbole. Check out Know Your Meme for more fun with grammar…
The digital world — including linguists everywhere — is rockin’ to Weird Al Yankovic‘s “Word Crimes,” a parody of the hit song “Blurred Lines.” He rants about those who don’t know when to use “fewer” instead of “less” or to use the apostrophe in “it’s.” It’s all in fun. Mostly. But those lyrics make clear people do judge us based on…
Doge is funny, in part, because doge’s style is odd. As in not quite human. In other words, Doge’s language calls attention to itself. One of the explanations for odd-sounding style is called selectional restriction. Because the kind of attention doge elicits is obviously undesirable in workplace writing, selectional restriction is one of the topics covered briefly…
Do you offer grammar advice to others? I urge you to read 12 mistakes nearly everyone who writes about grammar makes to insure you’re not repeating common mistakes. Jonathon Owen, blogger at Arrant Pedantry (and also a linguist, writer, and editor) knows what he’s talking about. To me, the most serious mistake self-proclaimed “specialists” make is…
No matter how well you’ve mastered the etiquette of “proper” English — like confusing word pairs (its vs it’s) — this game from Us vs Th3m will challenge you! I got to Level 8. Can you?