My Father’s Places by Aeronwy Thomas

Leave a reply

Every writer needs a good editor (a person who oversees a book’s content) and a good copyeditor (a person who makes corrections in grammar and usage). That sound principle was reinforced yesterday when I read a lovely book that could (and should) have been even better: My Father’s Places by Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

The book is an enchanting memoir of growing up in Wales. Even someone unfamiliar with Thomas and his poetry would certainly enjoy Aeronwy’s account of a magical childhood spent playing near the seashore and living in a lively household with two madcap parents. And if you love Thomas’s poetry (as I do), the book is rapturous: Aeronwy has her father’s gift for vivid language, and as a bonus she sometimes shows her father at work on Under Milk Wood and other projects.

But it didn’t take long for me to suspect that the book had been rushed into print without careful editing. There are confusing anecdotes that make sense only when a missing piece is supplied several pages later – and that’s only one of the problems. “Children’s” is printed with not one but two apostrophes, and Aeronwy numerous times talks about “peddling” her bike (no, she wasn’t selling it). There are many references to “the Aga,” but it’s only far into the book that you learn that it was a brand of stove. Some words are never explained at all. I read the book on an airplane, so I couldn’t look up “mitching” (“loitering”) or “twp” (Welsh slang for “stupid”).

Many confusing details could have been fixed if a thoughtful reader had gone through the manuscript. For example, in one chapter Aeronwy takes an album to a birthday party as a gift, but it turns into a comic annual several pages later.

Often I found myself rereading a section, thinking I had missed something. For example, one paragraph begins “The anticipation of seeing movies was never quite matched by the event.” Clearly we’re going to read about disappointments and unmet expectations. Instead, though, Aeronwy tells us “it was heaven” to see Laurel and Hardy, Zorro, and Tarzan on the screen.

Parts of Aeronwy’s narrative are disjointed and puzzling. Just before her father’s untimely death, he decides to send her to boarding school – which turns out to be, inexplicably, a ballet academy. Did Aeronwy tell him she wanted to be a dancer? Did she have dance training in Laugharne? There’s no explanation.

Even the title is confusing. Why “my father’s places”? More than 90% of the book is about Laugharne, in South Wales. What are these other “places”?

The more I read, the more certain I was that the manuscript had never been edited. So it was a shock to read, on the last page, Aeronwy’s warm acknowledgement to both her editor and her copyeditor. What were they doing while they were supposed to be working on her book?

A plea to all the future writers out there: Find yourself an alert and unrelenting ceditor. Your book will thank you, and so will your readers.

Thomas

Share

Theater or Theatre?

Leave a reply

Which spelling is correct: theater or theatre?

That used to be a simple question. “Theater” is American usage (thanks to Noah Webster, who established the first American spellings back in the 1780s). Americans write “center,” not “centre,” as the British do, and “theater,” not “theatre.”

Except that isn’t true anymore, at least not about “theatre.” I was startled recently to see “theatre” in an article in The New Yorker, which is usually meticulous about copyediting (although I did see “Dumpster” once without its capital D – it’s a trademarked word). Then I saw “theatre” in a comic strip. Then I saw it all over the place.

A friend who’s head of a college theater department explained to me that a “theater” is a building and “theatre” is an art. Or maybe it was the other way around. I couldn’t find those distinctions in any dictionary. But since he’s a professional, he must be on to something.

The New York Times still uses “theater,” the American spelling, unless an organization uses the British spelling. So it’s American Ballet Theatre or Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Tomorrow evening I’m going to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre to see The Book of Mormon. Wednesday afternoon my sister and I are going to the Richard Rodgers Theatre to see Porgy and Bess. Both are in New York.

Bottom line: You can take your pick – just be consistent after you make your choice. I’m sticking with theater, at least for now.

One more comment: On a TV news show recently I was startled to hear an educated person pronounce the word “thee-AY-ter.” She did not make a good impression. Here’s another bottom line: Hang around some educated people and imitate what they do. (Just don’t imitate her.)

Share

A Recovering Prescriptivist

Leave a reply

A prescriptivist is someone who believes that language has absolute rules about what’s right and wrong.

I’m a recovering prescriptivist. And, since “recovering” is used nowadays only for addicts who can expect a forever fight against their addictions, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever really change into a descriptivist (a person content to describe language habits rather than pontificate about what’s right or wrong).

Nevertheless, I’m no longer the 100% prescriptivist I once was. The curtain has been pulled back, and I’ve seen the Wizard of Oz and his clanking machinery. Or (more accurately in my case) I learned about Lindley Murray and others of his ilk – the autocrats who lumbered our language with senseless rules like “each and every have to take singular pronouns” and “never split an infinitive.”

Last night I curled up with the latest issue of The New Yorker to read a marvelous article about the prescriptive vs. descriptive language debate. Joan Acocella (whose day job is writing great articles about dance for the magazine) reviewed The Language Wars: A History of Proper English by descriptivist Henry Hitchings.

The article is wonderful. For example, Acocella refutes Hitchings’ attack on H.W. Fowler, pointing out that Fowler is not “the starchy old schoolmaster” that Hitchings makes him out to be.

Here’s what really thrilled me (and started me thinking about “recovering prescriptivists”): Hitchings thinks that the who/whom distinction is on the way out. (So do I.) But, Acocella says, “we never see any confusion over these pronouns in his book, which is written in largely impeccable English.”

Do I have the guts to deliberately use “every” with a plural pronoun in something I’m writing for publication? No. Coward that I am, I always recast the sentence to avoid the hideous “his-or-her” construction that’s one of the banes of modern writing. My reasoning is that even though I’m a descriptivist (sort of), there are lots of prescriptivists out there just rubbing their hands together, waiting for me to make an error.

Well, I did split an infinitive in the first sentence in the previous paragraph.

As I tell my students, your language choices need to satisfy the group for whom you’re writing. And there, my friends, is a grammatically correct sentence that’s absolutely hideous. Maybe I’m further along the road to recovery than I thought I was (although I did just look up farther and further to make sure I got this sentence right). As I said, I’m recovering….


Share

British vs American English

2 Replies

British vs. American English: The age-old debate.

Here’s how the argument goes: The English language originated in Great Britain. Obviously British English is more correct than American English, right?

Wrong.

They’re simply different–and we’ll be taking a look at some of those differences today.

It would be natural to assume that England has preserved the real thing, and that America has corrupted the English language. The truth, though, is much more complicated. American English has actually preserved some words and expressions that were gradually forgotten in the British Isles. For example, Americans still use “fall” to refer to the season after summer; in UK, most people use “autumn.”

Another factor to keep in mind is that English has changed drastically over the past 1500+ years. What’s correct at one time is wrong at another. For example, the word “silly” originally meant “innocent.” Today it means foolish. Which is right? The answer is that both are correct – at different times in the history of the language.

But let’s stick to today’s subject: The differences between American and British English. Here are a few of the most important ones. You can learn more at these links:

Punctuation

  • The British tend to use more commas than Americans do, especially with introductory words and phrases.
  • The British often use ‘inverted commas’ for quotations.
  • In the UK, periods are called full stops.
  •  In the US, periods and commas have to be placed inside quotation marks:

Joe said, “Let’s go out for a pizza.”  AMERICAN

The UK uses a different system and offers several choices for quotations and direct speech. You can learn more here: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/quotes/marks

WORD CHOICES

This chart lists some of the most common differences between British and American words:

American

British

vacation

holiday

diaper

nappy

cent

pence

toward

towards

among

amongst

while

whilst

hood (of a car)

bonnet

trunk (of a car)

boot

elevator

lift

truck

lorry

mail

post

soccer

football

Spelling

Noah Webster (1758 – 1843) was an American lexicographer and spelling reformer who simplified some English spellings. Those changes live on today. For example, the British centre became center, theatre became theater (although many American institutions still use theatre, as does The New Yorker magazine), colour became color. All right is often spelled alright in the UK, even in formal writing.

Usage

In the UK, collective nouns often take a plural verb: The team are ready to play. In the US, they rarely do. Technically a plural verb can be used to signify disagreement (The team are quarreling about the proposed new rules), but most American writers would simply write it this way: The team members are quarreling about the proposed new rules.

Slang

Common expressions can have very different meanings when you cross the ocean in either direction. In the US, knock up is a vulgar expression meaning to get a woman pregnant. In the UK, knocked up can mean tired; knock up can also refer to knocking on a door to wake someone up the morning.

Which is Better? Neither!

If you (like me!) speak American English, don’t apologize. Our version of our wonderful language is just as rich and valid as the British version. Different doesn’t necessarily translate into one-is-better-and-one-is-worse.

Share

A Pronoun Problem: “That” is a Tricky Word

Leave a reply

If someone asked me for a list of the most troublesome words in the language, I’d put “that” high on the list.

Don’t get me wrong. “That” is a wonderful word that I use all the time (notice the that there?). But that also causes more than its fair share of its problems – something I was reminded of again in this morning’s newspaper.

In an article about the nation’s debt, a senior fellow from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center had some cautionary words for both parties–and a sentence that illustrates why that is a problematic word. 

What’s so interesting is that the speaker – Roberton Williams – used that correctly. Still, I would have rewritten the sentence to eliminate a pronoun problem I’ll explain in a moment.

Let’s take a look at Williams’ sentence. After warning the president that he needs to be more realistic about raising taxes “across the board on a broader group of people,” Williams had this message for Republicans:  “On the other side, the Republicans are going to have to realize that not increasing taxes requires the very, very large cuts in spending that disproportionately benefits low and middle-income households.”

My husband, who read the newspaper before I did, pointed out the sentence to me. “Shouldn’t it be benefit?” he asked.

Makes sense–but no. He (like me and everybody else who has ever taken a writing class) was taught that you ignore the prepositional phrase when you choose your verb. So the sentence would essentially read like this: “very large cuts that disproportionately benefit low and middle- income households.” You would skip over “in spending” because it’s a prepositional phrase.

But sophisticated sentences don’t always work that way. Sometimes the prepositional phrase (“in spending”) is connected to something important.

I instantly knew something was wrong. Nobody in this political climate is talking about cuts that would make life better for low and middle-income households. Well, there’s been some talk about cutting oil subsidies, but that ain’t gonna happen.

What’s really on the table is cutting spending that disproportionately benefits low and middle-income households.

To put it in another way: Are we talking about “cuts that benefit” or “spending that benefits”?

Good writers care less about grammatical correctness and more about clarity. Yes, Williams got it right. But I would have rewritten the sentence so that the meaning would be clear the first time you read it:

On the other side, the Republicans are going to have to realize that not increasing taxes will require very, very large cuts in spending and, as a result, disproportionally cut benefits for low and middle-income households.

I suppose you could use Williams’ sentence to argue for a return to sentence diagramming. Anyone diagramming that sentence would have immediately seen the difficulty–what’s the antecedent of benefit?–and fixed it.

But there’s an easier and better way that’s especially beneficial to people like me who don’t have time to diagram sentences and (frank admission here) don’t know how to do it. If a sentence seems complicated or confusing, rewrite it.

Share

National Grammar Day

Leave a reply

Happy National Grammar Day!

You’re expecting a discourse about imperatives, interrogatives, absolute modifiers, and object complements, right?

You won’t be getting it here. Truth to tell, I struggle with some of that terminology. (Just now I had to look up “absolute modifiers” – it’s a term I’d never heard before. Turns out it refers to words like unique and pregnant that can’t be modified. You can’t be very unique, sort of pregnant, or kind of dead.)

Lots of people believe that what’s wrong with writers today is their lack of grammatical knowledge. If you share their views, you believe that everyone should spend a lot of time in school labeling parts of speech and underlining various kinds of words and phrases in workbooks (or, if you’re trendy, on a computer screen).

I’m not one of those people. I draw a sharp distinction between grammar (the rules and terminology that construct a language) and usage (the rules that people follow when they write and speak).

I vote for usage.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Just yesterday in the newspaper someone wrote that he “felt badly” about something that had happened to him. Wrong: It should be “felt bad.”

If you’re a grammarian, you’d go into a discourse about the differences between copulative and transitive verbs, and you’d explain that a predicate adjective rather than an adverb was needed in that sentence.

Shucks. Wouldn’t it be much simpler to note that educated people tend to say “felt bad”? Is all that grammatical baggage really necessary?

When I press the brake pedal on my car, I don’t think about the stopping process involving pedal, brake pads, and tires. I think about good driving practices.

Going back to the prohibition against “very unique” and “sort of pregnant”: I knew that already. Why impose a clunky discourse about “absolute modifiers”? Why do we have to complicate something simple?

So…have a great time celebrating National Grammar Day today. But while you’re at it, please raise a glass in honor of usage too.

Fingers tapping on a keyboard


Share

Is It Who or Whom – And How Do You Know?

Leave a reply

Here’s a tidbit from “After Deadlines,” an ongoing commentary about writing issues in the New York Times:

Still, in what might be a combination of generosity and caginess, Mr. Guettel helped supply Prospect with a music supervisor, Robert Meffe, whom Ms. Lucas said “has sort of been the ear of Adam” at “Myths and Hymns” rehearsals.

Whom has? No. Make it “who,” subject of the verb in the relative clause.

* * * * * * 

I’m grinding my teeth. Despite having a Ph.D. in English and the authorship of two English textbooks under my belt, I have to stop and think about what “subject of the verb in the relative clause” means. Surely I can’t be the only who struggles with explanations like this one!

Here’s how I do who and whom: I substitute “he” for “who” and “him” for “whom.” (Yeah, it sounds a little like “Tea for Two.”)

So let’s try it again:

Him, Ms. Lucas said, “has sort of been the ear of Adam”…

He, Ms. Lucas, said “has sort of been the ear of Adam”…

“He” works better, so “who” is the correct choice. (Commas around “Ms. Lucas said” would help, wouldn’t they? You drop your voice there.)

Still, in what might be a combination of generosity and caginess, Mr. Guettel helped supply Prospect with a music supervisor, Robert Meffe, who Ms. Lucas said “has sort of been the ear of Adam” at “Myths and Hymns” rehearsals.  CORRECT

One more point: This sentence is much more complicated than it needs to be. Simplify it, and you accomplish two wonderful things: The who or whom problem disappears, and the information is easier to read. Here’s how I would fix it:

Still, in what might be a combination of generosity and caginess, Mr. Guettel helped supply Prospect with a music supervisor, Robert Meffe. Ms. Lucas said that Meffe “has sort of been the ear of Adam” at “Myths and Hymns” rehearsals.  BETTER

And I can’t resist making one more point: When in doubt, use who. Whom is gradually disappearing (hooray!).

whom

                                      Whooom?

Share

Finding Writing Topics in Unexpected Places

Leave a reply

It’s the cement block that all writers carry on our backs: Finding writing topics. Recently that cement block has become even heavier, as you’ve probably discovered if you have a Twitter account, a blog or two, and a couple of editors who keep asking for articles.

Like many writers, I find Twitter especially challenging. Yes, it’s a marvelous tool for attracting potential readers, and it’s fun to use – I soon lost my fears about the dreaded 140-character limit.

But what am I going to Tweet about? This morning I ate breakfast, watered a couple of plants, and made plans to go out for pizza with my husband. If I find those tidbits of information boring, what are my readers going to think?

Even worse, my specialty – writing, grammar, and usage – does not lend itself to infinite variety. How many times can I write charmingly about, say, an indefinite pronoun reference? Once, if I’m lucky.

When I asked a technology-savvy friend for advice about posting on Twitter, he counseled me to simply keep reading Tweets from other users. Inspiration will come, he assured me. And he was right.

It finally dawned on me that there’s a marvelous tool right over my desk that can help me find topics to Tweet and blog about: My calendar. Still another great tool is delivered to my doorstep every day: The newspaper. And the radio in my car is another wonderful resource.

Let me begin with the calendar, a treasure trove of ideas for Tweets and blogs. One afternoon I sat down at my desk with a writing pad and calendar, looking at each month for events that might have a writing tie-in. It didn’t take long to find more than a dozen of them.

Of course there’s National Grammar Day (March 4). But what about the rest of the year? Well, I can Tweet about the apostrophe in New Year’s Day. When Easter rolls around, I’m planning to Tweet about jellybeans (one word or two?) and marshmallow Peeps (why the capital “P”?). You get the idea.

Let’s turn to the newspaper. Alas, there isn’t a single Republican Presidential candidate with a name ending in “s” (why did Mitch Daniels have to opt out of the primaries this year?). But a recent Blondie comic strip about the “Ditherses” (Julius Dithers is Dagwood’s boss) led to a post about plurals and apostrophes in family names.

A newspaper story quoted someone using the words preselect and preprune – inspiration for a blog about the overuse of pre. I’m enjoying this year’s presidential race because it’s providing a steady supply of gaffes and questionable grammatical constructions for Tweets and blog posts.

But what if you aren’t a grammarian? The answer is that you’ll probably find it even easier to unearth topics. For example, I have a website about police report writing. New Year’s Eve provides an opportunity to write about drunk driving. Breaking news stories can often be tied to report writing. Recently the White House instructed the Department of Justice to adopt a new definition of rape.

Gardening, parenting, teaching, sports, cooking…they all vary with the seasons, and they all show up in the news from time to time. I have a friend who writes adventure stories about terrorism – he can find plenty of material for Tweets and blog posts in the daily news. Another friend who recently wrote a juvenile novel about bullying has discovered an endless stream of news stories about the problem.

Still doubtful? You’re not the only one – but I’ll bet I can convince you. Just yesterday a friend who’s a physician’s assistant tried to convince me that medicine doesn’t vary with the calendar. Really? What about flu season, swimmer’s ear, hay fever, sunburn, icy sidewalks, and New Year’s resolutions to get healthier?

Here’s a starter list of resources you can browse for writing topics. What others can you think of?

  • a calendar that lists holidays and other special days
  • the daily comics in your newspaper
  • the in-house newsletter at your job
  • a stroll through a hardware store
  • a stroll through a grocery store
  • a stroll through a big box store, like Wal-Mart or Target

And here are some news sources with excellent websites you can visit for inspiration: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio.

This approach to finding writing topics works far better for me than traditional advice about “discovery exercises” – brainstorming, mind-mapping, the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, Why), and so on. Having taught college writing for 30 years and authored two writing textbooks, I’m an expert on all of these methods. And I’m here to tell you that they are…limited. And frustrating.

The problem? When you do a discovery exercise, you’re looking at a blank sheet of paper or an empty computer screen. The only input is what’s already in your brain. That’s great if ideas are flying so quickly that your pencil can’t write them down fast enough. The reality, though, is that the reason you sat down to do a discovery exercise in the first place is that you’re stuck for ideas.

Why not just open up a newspaper, flip the pages in a calendar, or visit a website that features commentaries on current events? I guarantee that in just a few minutes you’ll be running to your keyboard with at least three great ideas. And you’ll have fun doing it – a sure sign that you’re on your way to a successful writing experience.

 

Share

Top Ten Grammar Peeves

6 Replies

I saw this list on Facebook this morning. Uh-oh!

Top 10 grammar peeves 2

There’s a mixture of good and bad information here. Let’s take a look:

 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 are accurate and make good points – though I’ve heard “nonplussed” in a conversation only once, so I don’t think #7 is a useful piece of information. And BTW, I do know what it means (perplexed). One more thing: I can’t ever recall seeing “nonplus” (without the -ed ending) anywhere. So I was nonplussed (hah!) when I saw it on this list.

Enough about that. What about 2, 8, and 10?

#2:  Apostrophes are used to form plurals of symbols and letters used alone:  Dot your i’s and cross your t’s. They’re sometimes used with plurals of numerals: Her 1’s look like 7’s. (You should know that some style manuals limit this kind of apostrophe usage to even decades – the 60’s but not 70s – and some don’t use it at all.)

#8:  Psychologists often use “affect” as a noun meaning feeling or emotion (this usage is standard and appears in all the dictionaries). And “effect” is sometimes a verb meaning accomplish or make happen: We effected the changes after only a short delay.

#10:  Of course “irregardless” is a word. Any unit of sound with a meaning is a word. If your child loves his “binky” (pacifier), then “binky” is a word in your house. It’s more helpful to label “irregardless” (and “binky”) nonstandard.

I’m also going to argue for a minute about the title: Top Ten Grammar Peeves. Grammar is the underlying structure of language. Here’s an example of a grammatical problem: I gave the receipt to she and her brother (instead of her and her brother). (I actually hear that kind of thing once in a while. Sigh.)

These Top Ten Grammar Peeves are usage problems – choosing the wrong word or the wrong punctuation.

Despite the issues with 2, 8, and 10, I’m pleased that this list is circulating. Maybe we’ll see fewer unnecessary apostrophes and less confusion between your and you’re (an error I see daily on Facebook). If this list encourages writers to take a little more time to check their usage, it will have accomplished a lot (which should have been Pet Peeve #11: PLEASE write a lot as two words, not one!).


Share