Today we’re going to talk about sentence fragments (incomplete sentences). They’re a common problem with students and inexperienced writers. We English teachers hate them (with good reason!), and often we spend huge amounts of time trying to teach students how to avoid them. Which only creates confusion and anxiety.

And there, my friend, you have a sentence fragment: Which only creates confusion and anxiety.

You can’t start a sentence with which. (Questions starting with which are ok, of course, but not sentences.) I suppose it’s possible that someone could come up with a legitimate sentence that starts with which, but I don’t recommend making a habit of it.

As an English teacher with decades of experience, I could give you a long spiel about avoiding fragments. But why not make it simple? Here are three tricks that will help you avoid most fragments:

1.  Start every sentence with a person, place, or thing.

I tell police officers and other public safety workers to use this strategy for their reports. You won’t end up with fancy sentences, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Many everyday tasks don’t require fancy writing. What you will end up with are complete sentences – no fragments.

2. Memorize this list (it’s short!) of no-no ways to start a sentence: which (you know that already!), like, who, and such as.

Honesty compels me to add that yes, you can write a perfectly good sentence that starts with like. I often do it myself. But please don’t unless you’re sure you’re doing it correctly. Fragments starting with like are very common.

Like my cousin Jane who works in a big hospital.  FRAGMENT

Like many children, Blake loves to play with his Legos.  CORRECT

3.   Avoid starting a sentence with an -ing word unless (again) you’re sure what you’re doing.

Jumping up and down with joy when her father walked in the door.  FRAGMENT

Molly jumped up and down with joy when her father walked in the door.  CORRECT

Are you thinking I should include a correct sentence starting with an -ing word? OK, here’s one:

Dancing never fails to bring me joy.  CORRECT

There’s not a lot here to remember – and these tips can be a great confidence builder. Here they are again! When in doubt:

• start every sentence with a person, place, or thing
• avoid starting sentences with which, who, like, and such as
• avoid starting sentences with an -ing word

In 1996, 110 people were killed when a ValuJet flight crashed into the Everglades. For days afterward, news reports on TV and radio vividly described how the plane was lost in the alligator-infested waters of the Everglades.

Finally – FINALLY! – an NPR listener called in with a correction. Alligators, he noted, do not “infest” the Everglades: it’s their home.

A  news story in our local newspaper this week had a similar pro-human/anti-wildlife slant. A nearby town is rejoicing because it will soon be getting a new park: “Lake Emerges from Undergrowth as Property Reclaimed” is the headline. According to the newspaper story, the undergrowth that was “choking” the banks of a lake has been cleared. The natural resources manager (!) is thrilled with the “restoration” of the lake.

I wonder if the rabbits, birds, and other creatures who used to live there are celebrating. I suspect not.

Of course I like parks, including lakefront parks, and I’m glad the town is getting a new recreational area. Sometimes it’s useful to clear away plants. What’s bothering me is the bias in the language. Anyone reading the paper would get the idea that natural growth on a lakefront is always bad, unsightly, and useless. I wish the “natural resources manager” had made a statement stressing the importance of a balance between the needs of humans and the needs of wildlife.

“Manage” is a useful word that has – alas – acquired a scary connotation. Any time I hear a news report about “managing” resources – human or otherwise – I see dollar bills flying through the air.

The lakefront “restoration” reminded me of another recent news story that featured manipulative language: the removal of Dr. Dao from United Flight 3411. The CEO’s letter to UA’s employees was full of polite language about what quickly turned into a public relations nightmare for the airline:

• Dr. Dao was “politely asked to deplane.”
• The airline followed “established procedures” in dealing with “this incident” that involved a problem with “involuntary denial of boarding process.”
• Dr. Dao was “approached…in order to gain his compliance.”
• “Our agents…were left with no choice” but to call security “to assist.”
• They “were unable to gain his cooperation and physically removed him from the flight as he continued to resist” in “defiance of both our crew and security officials.”

Unfortunately for United Airlines, other passengers used their cell phones to video the “incident” – which involved a screaming passenger who needed medical treatment afterwards.

Many people (including me!) try to soften an unpleasant incident with manipulative language. I’m remembering a consulting job I did once with a public safety agency. I was brought in to help officers with their paperwork, and the reports I read were puzzling. Clearly everyone knew how to write well. But sometimes I’d come across a sentence or paragraph that was so garbled that I couldn’t figure out what the writer was trying to say.

The chief grinned when I showed him a few of those mystifying reports. “I know exactly what’s going on here,” he said. “The officer lost or damaged a piece of equipment and is trying to make it sound like it’s not their fault.”

I used to do the same thing with my parents. (It never worked. Not once. Sigh.)

Language is one of the most basic – and most important – tools we use in our everyday lives. Think of how smoothly the world would function if we all strove to use words unflinchingly and honestly. Sounds like a good resolution for us to make!

I just read a terrific article about Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the hit Broadway show Hamilton. The article focused – surprisingly – on his writing practices.

I find Miranda to be an enigma precisely because he doesn’t seem to be an enigma. I watched (several times – it’s wonderful) the PBS special about the making of Hamilton. I was surprised to discover that Miranda is so laid back and – well – young. There’s something puppy-like about him, as if he were just discovering that the world is a really neat place.

And yet he started filming segments for the PBS documentary years before the opening night of Hamilton. That required a lot of business savvy, along with immense confidence in a show that wasn’t close to ready for a Broadway audience.

I haven’t seen the show yet, but I spent about a month listening to disc 1 from the cast album. (I didn’t like disc 2 as much, since it’s about problems that Alexander Hamilton created for himself.)

There’s a lot to learn from the show. Who knew that so much interesting stuff was happening during the Revolutionary War? And that rap could be so much fun to listen to? (It helps that the musicians who back up the songs in the show are world class.)

Several ideas jumped out at me when I read the article about Miranda’s writing practices. I loved his description of the phases of writing (such as “I’m a Fraud” and “I’ll Never Finish”). Maybe more people would do more writing if they realized everyone has doubts during the writing process.

The second powerful idea concerned a friend’s birthday party. On the way there, Miranda had a breakthrough moment with a song he’d been struggling with. He went to the party, wished his friend a happy birthday, and then went home to finish the song. Miranda’s point: when you have a breakthrough moment, it has to take priority in your life.

I have a similar philosophy. Nothing – and I mean nothing – is more sacred to me than sleep. I’m a hopeless mess if I don’t go to bed at a decent hour. But I’ll get up in the middle of the night and write for a couple of hours if a writing project wakes me up and insists that it wants my attention now.

Miranda’s third point – ironically – conflicts with his story about the birthday party. He’s a strong believer in writing on a schedule rather than waiting for inspiration to strike. When he was writing Hamilton, he had be onstage every night at eight o’clock for another show. So Miranda had to make a writing schedule and stick to it.

Miranda’s experiences with writing sparked two thoughts of my own:

1.  Successful writers constantly bounce back and forth between inspiration and toil. Writing requires discipline – but if that’s all you have, you’re going to produce some pretty dull stuff. You need a system for recording inspirations that strike when you’re away from your desk.

Miranda had his notebook with him when he was riding the train to his friend’s party, but he also needed a piano to work out the music, and that required a trip back home. I do a lot of the preparation for writing while I’m driving back and forth to ballroom lessons. Of course I can’t write anything down. My system is to find a place to stop the car and then call my husband (who always says “Think about your driving, not writing!”) and ask him to write a few key words for me to read when I get home.

2.  (This is about Hamilton, not just Lin-Manuel Miranda): Don’t be afraid of formulas and standard plots. After I’d listened to disc 1 from the Hamilton album, I tried to figure out why I didn’t like disc 2 nearly as much. Here’s what I came up with: disc 1 is a traditional rags-to-riches story – actually two of those stories blended together: How an impoverished orphan became an important political figure, and how a ragtag army from a small colony defeated a wealthy empire. No wonder Hamilton is such a huge hit!

I find it comforting to know that famous writers share so many of the same doubts and have to work through so many of the same problems. That’s something I need to remember the next time one of my drafts is so awful that I’m ashamed to admit that I’m the one who wrote it. Persistence, inspiration, toil, discipline – they all have a role to play in our quest for writing success.

                      Lin-Manuel Miranda

I’ve been doing some reading in connection with a book I’m writing about Shaw. Last night I read an essay about Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion by Steven Cavell. (It’s included in a book called Cities of Words.) I didn’t like the essay and didn’t find much that would be useful for my book. But the essay did get me thinking about sentences – poorly written sentences and sentences that lack strength and vigor.

Today I’d like to pull a few sentences out of Cavell’s article and talk about what bothered me about them. (If you’re a Shaw enthusiast, be assured that I disagreed – sometimes vehemently – with the points Cavell is making. But my topic today is sentences, not Shaw.)

1. “But Professor Higgins will give Eliza Doolittle a little discourse defending the coldness of a way of life identifiable as one Shaw ratifies.”

“Identifiable as one Shaw ratifies” is…gobbledygook. Here’s what Cavell is apparently trying to say: For both Professor Higgins and Shaw, coldness is a way of life. (Not true of Shaw, by the way!)

2. “This writer, whose individual prefaces to his plays are as notable and interesting as the plays themselves that they preface, declares, in the opening sentence of his preface to Pygmalion, ‘As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place.'”

This sentence combines two unrelated pieces of information: 1) Shaw wrote good prefaces and 2) he wrote a sequel to Pygmalion. Weak writing! When you read good writing, you feel that you’re on a horse that knows where it’s going and wants to take you there. Here I feel that I’m just wandering around the scenery. 

(And why did Cavell call Shaw “this writer” instead of using his name? And what’s the difference between a “preface” and an “individual preface”? Nothing. That unnecessary “individual” is another sign that Cavell is a weak writer.)

3. My final example is such a mouthful that I’m not going to quote the whole thing. I want to point out something about the words in green:

“Shaw’s reading of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, as told in Ovid – where Pygmalion falls in love with his statue Galatea and asks the gods to bring her to life – in terms of a man’s training a woman in the further possession of language, brings the myth within range of the guiding demand for education….”

Here’s what jumped out at me: There are two clauses in a row. The first one is set off in dashes, and the second one is marked by a comma. That’s weak writing. There’s no connection between the clauses – no transitional word like because, so, but, therefore – to help readers figure out what’s going on. This long sentence (and I’ve left out a lot of it!) just drifts from place to place without a definite destination.

I have one more comment about Steven Cavell’s essay (and this will surprise you!). He writes like I do. Many of my sentences are just like his – wordy, weak, and purposeless. But here’s what’s different about my writing: I revise it.

Let me wrap this up with a few pointers I’ve picked up in my own writing career:

• If  a sentence has more than three commas, I check to see if it’s too complicated. Often it is, and I revise it.
• Breaking a sentence in two solves a surprising number of problems.
• You’ll never impress anyone by writing “the fluid supply in my writing implement is exhausted” when what you mean is “my pen is out of ink.”
• When writing is plain and simple, grateful readers think you’re a brilliant writer.
• If something I’m writing doesn’t move forcefully across the page, I either revise it or throw it away.

Photo courtesy of Ben Deibert – Flickr

My friend Jane McGinnis just requested a post about the difference between “Jean and I” and “Jean and me.” Consider it done, Jane!

Here’s how you figure it out: Shorten the problem sentence, and you’ll instantly hear the right word.

First, write any sentence – any sentence at all – with “Jean and I” or “Jean and me.” It’s ok to guess! (I know, I know. An English teacher just fell to the floor. Don’t worry – we’ll revive her in a minute.)

Jean and I went to the store.

Me and Jean went to the store.

Let Jean and I know when you need a ride.

Let Jean and me know when you need a ride.

Obviously some of those sentences are wrong – but which ones? Here’s how you figure it out: just delete Jean and. (This “make the sentence shorter” trick can solve many grammar and usage problems.)

 I went to the store.

Me went to the store.

Let I know when you need a ride.

Let me know when you need a ride.

Once you get your short sentence right, you’ll instantly know the answer. After that it doesn’t matter how many names you add (Jean, Carol, Lucy, and Dave). If I is the right word for your short sentence, use I in the long one. If me is the right for for your short sentence, use me in the long one.

You’ll be right 100% of the time. (How many things are you familiar with that work 100% of the time? Isn’t this trick wonderful? I used to call this the “thumb rule” – you use your thumb to make the sentence shorter – and it was fun to watch my students carefully covering the words with their thumbs)

I went to the store.

Jean and I went to the store.

Jean, Carol, Lucy, Dave and I went to the store.

Let me know when you need a ride

Let Jean and me know when you need a ride.

Let Jean, Carol, Lucy, Dave and me know when you need a ride.

Now we can pick up that English teacher off the floor, and I can add a few comments:

1. Many people mistakenly think that “I” is always right and “me” is always wrong. I’ve had people correct me when I was using “me” properly in a sentence! “I” sounds more elegant, so some people overuse it. Don’t get tricked that way.
2. English teachers love to do these pronouns the hard way. Ask them whether “I” or “me” is correct, and you’ll get a long lecture about pronoun case, transitive verbs, and subjective and objective pronouns. If I had to work through those concepts every time I started to speak or write, I’d never get anything done. Forget about formal grammar – you don’t need it.
3. I am waging a lonely but valiant battle about a new mistake that’s making its way into the language. Here’s an example:

I bought a housewarming present for he and Marilyn.  WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG

Let’s try our “shorten the sentence” trick:

I bought a housewarming present for him.  CORRECT

I bought a housewarming present for him and Marilyn.  CORRECT

When I hear this mistake, I sharply set the person straight, right on the spot. If it’s on TV or in print, I foam at the mouth for a while and then write a stern letter. (Colin Powell got one of my letters. I received a lovely apology from him.)

Any questions? You can download a free handout that explains every pronoun rule you’ll ever need (there are only three of them!) at this link: Pronouns Made Simple.

Here’s something that has happened to me over and over. I meet someone for the first time. We start talking about our careers. I mention that I’m an English instructor. Immediate response: “Writing is in such a terrible state nowadays” or “Nobody knows anything about grammar anymore” or a similar comment about how frustrating my job must be.

My take on my career is very different, of course. (If teaching English was so awful, I would have chosen to major in a different subject!)

Yes, many students have difficulty with writing tasks, and yes, they don’t know much about grammar. But those two facts not constitute a reason for despair. To clarify what I mean, I’m going to use an analogy from ballroom dancing.

I want you to stand up, step away from your computer and take two steps forward and two steps back. After you’ve done that, you can come back to your computer and read on.

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Now I’m going to evaluate your four steps from the standpoint of a judge in a ballroom competition. Everything you just did was wrong. Your posture was off, you didn’t shape your feet correctly, your top line wasn’t strong enough…I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

How can I make those judgments without even having seen you take those four steps? Because everyday walking has almost no connection to ballroom dancing.

That doesn’t mean that ballroom instructors sob and wring their hands when a beginner comes in for a lesson. There’s no reason to expect someone to walk in the door the first time knowing how to move like a dancer who’s had years of training.

Obviously it helps if you have a background in ballet, but even then there’s a lot to learn. Flying around the stage on pointe shoes is very different from trying to move gracefully when you’re plastered up against a partner whom you might have met only seconds before and who might not know the patterns you’ve been taught.

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The same principle applies to beginning writers: Academic writing is very different from ordinary speech, even though they both involve the same language.

Students who walk into a high school or college English course have been using language since they were toddlers. They’ve mastered a wide variety of sentence patterns and a large number of vocabulary words. They know English, right? Wrong. When they submit their first couple of papers, they make the horrifying discovery that their work is full of mistakes. Much hand-wringing follows, and blame is assigned all around.

It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that of course there’s going to be a transition period for these writers. If we could all just calm down and stop making students feel stupid and guilty, we could skip the recriminations and start helping them become better writers.

Students (and adults who yearn to write) need an attitude adjustment too. They’re stepping into a new venture with its own rules and customs. There’s going to be a transitional period when it’s going to seem that nothing is going right. Students need to resolve to a) hang in there and b) absorb everything they’re taught.

Here’s a memory from my doctoral program. One night I ran into a fellow student who was finishing up his dissertation. I was just getting ready to start writing mine, and I asked him what the process had been like for him. I’d heard a string of horror stories about pitched battles between students and their advisors.

To my astonishment, he said it had been a terrific experience. “Really?” I gasped. Nobody has a terrific experience writing that blasted dissertation.

“I did some thinking about it right at the beginning,” he told me. “I figured this was my only chance to work closely with a group of world-class scholars on an important project, and I was going to take advantage of everything they could teach me.”

Wise words, wise student! And it also helps if you’re lucky enough – as both he and I were – to be working with advisors who realize that nobody starts out knowing how to write a doctoral dissertation. Bottom line: patience, persistence, and encouragement will win the day.

Here’s a chance to test your knowledge of some tricky words. Which sentences do you think contain errors? When you’re finished, scroll down for the answers.

1.  The new agency is comprised of five departments.

2.  Because Jack was disinterested in college, he dropped all four of his courses.

3.  I try to use the same PIN number for all my accounts.

4.  Babette’s writing skills are excellent, but she needs to improve her verbal presentation skills.

5.  The continual stream of soothing music helped Faye fall asleep quickly.

6.  I set aside time for a long walk everyday.

7.  The criterion for hiring a new manager need to be stated more clearly.

8.  You should wear that shade of blue more often; it compliments your eyes.

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Here are the answers:

All eight sentences contain misused words!

1.  The new agency is composed of five departments.  (Comprised means “includes”) You could also write the sentence this way: The new agency comprises five departments.

2.  Because Jack was uninterested in college, he dropped all four of his courses.  (Disinterested means “impartial” or “unbiased”)

3.  I try to use the same PIN for all my accounts. (PIN number is redundant. A PIN is defined as a Personal Identification Number.)

4.  Babette’s writing skills are excellent, but she needs to improve her oral presentation skills. (Verbal means “referring to words.” A written document is considered “verbal.”)

5.  The continuous stream of soothing music helped Faye fall asleep quickly. (Continual means “continuing with occasional interruptions.” Continuous means “continuing steadily.”)

6.  I set aside time for a long walk every day. (Everyday is an adjective and has to be followed by a person, place or thing: My everyday routine was interrupted by a power outage.)

7.  The criteria for hiring a new manager need to be stated more clearly. (Criterion is singular.)

8.  You should wear that shade of blue more often; it complements your eyes.  (Complements means “enhances” or “completes.” Compliments – spelled with an “i” – means “praises.”)

Last week, while I was waiting to meet a friend at a coffee shop, I picked up a flier for a couples workshop. The title was ‘C’ Your Way to a Better Marriage, and it promised to cover the “3 C’s of Relationships: Courtesy, Communication, and Commitment.”

I am quite happy with my marriage (43 years and counting!). But even if I were looking for ways to improve our relationship, I wouldn’t have signed up for that workshop. The reason? It violates one of my most important rules for living (and, incidentally, writing): Never tell people what they already know.

Now I’ll readily admit that my communication skills could use some work, and I could be more courteous when I’m talking to Charlie, and there are moments when we both question our commitment to each other (like when he talks too much about hockey and I forget to put gas in the car).

But both of us – and just about everyone who’s serious about marriage – already pays lip service, at the very least, to Courtesy, Communication, and Commitment. As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland: “There’s no there there.”

I once heard a minister – I’ll call her “Julie” – talk about her experiences with counseling troubled couples. She said she avoids offering conventional advice (“be more loving,” “practice listening”) because couples immediately tune her out.

Instead she always begins by imposing a rule: The spouse who brings up a complaint is allowed to talk only about their own behavior. So if I complained about Charlie’s endless talk about Sidney Crosby and Mike Babcock, “Julie” might ask me what  strategies I – myself – have tried to make our conversations more lively.

This isn’t a column about marital advice (well, it is, sort of), and I want to add that “Julie” was well aware that her rule could open the door to victim-bashing and other evils. She had many tools in her counseling toolbox.

But here’s the thing. Her counseling strategies were designed to catch couples off guard. She aimed to shake up the people she was working with and challenge them to think in new ways.

Folks, those are the very things that writers are supposed to do.

Some years ago someone hired me to copyedit a novel. I read the first chapter and immediately returned it (reluctantly – I could have used the money).

The novel was about a man who’d lost his job. With no money for rent and groceries, the family temporarily moved in with Grandma and Grandpa. At the end of Chapter 1, the unemployed man and his wife were sitting alone at the kitchen table, talking about what lay ahead. In spite of their worries, they were confident about the future. “We’ll make it somehow,” the wife said, squeezing her husband’s hand.

It was warm and wonderful – and dull. Why on earth would you turn the page to start reading Chapter 2? You’ve already learned that everything is going to be ok. There’s nothing to drive the rest of the book forward.

Everything you write should have an edge – something unexpected that keeps readers interested. (To experience what I’m talking about, read Chapter 1 of any novel by John Grisham.)

If you’re writing about a familiar topic (like marriage!), find an unusual angle. Dig below the surface to find a contradiction or conundrum. Here’s an example: Everyone agrees that communication is vital for a healthy relationship. (Ho-hum.) But should a husband tell his wife that he’s attracted to, say, a hot-looking woman he’s just seen on TV? In other words, are there things that are better left uncommunicated – and if so, what are they?

What about courtesy – is it 100% necessary? Am I allowed to be in a bad mood because my favorite dancer just got booted off Dancing with the Stars, and is Charlie allowed to be annoyed because I’m not my usual charming self (hah!)? And are there any limits to commitment? What if she habitually abuses one of the kids, or he refuses to quit gambling?

Writing is – first and foremost – about thinking. If you don’t have something fresh to say, find another topic or another approach. Here are some suggestions:

1.  Stories are solid gold. Every writer should have a large repertoire of provocative stories stored somewhere in your brain.
2. Watch your own reactions as you interact with other people. What surprises or puzzles you? Life’s little mysteries can open the door to terrific writing.
3. Read, read, read. How long does it take for you to realize that a particular writer has (or doesn’t have!) something worthwhile to say?

                 August 4, 1974