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Pam Nelson: The Grammar Guide

 

‘Spelling’ archive

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May 12: Check out the new Grammar Guide quiz (inspired by good usage)

I often use published mistakes for my Grammar Guide quizzes, but today I was inspired by writers and editors who got things right. All of the sentences in today’s Grammar Guide quiz (It’s No. 71) come from The New York Times. I read the national edition in print on Sunday mornings. This quiz will betray my reading interests; I turn first to the Sunday Review, the Book Review and Sunday Styles (I love the wedding reports). As usual, the quiz is more about usage and copy editing than about the mechanics of grammar. And I am somewhat prescriptivist in[.....]

March 20: Hyphenated expressions and their place in a sentence (3)

Somehow, I became confused about how to treat compound modifiers that are used not before a noun but elsewhere in a sentence. These are the compounds such as well-known and low-key. They are hyphenated when they appear before a noun: a well-known singer, a low-key diplomat.

March 4: A new quiz for National Grammar Day 2013

Today is National Grammar Day. My fellow grammar geeks have been busy. If you check out the Grammar Day page, you’ll see all sorts of activity and postings. I am disappointed that none of my Grammar Day haiku on Twitter achieved honorable mention in the Grammar Day haiku contest, but I enjoyed all the charming and clever entries. Fun was had by all. I am a little late with this post, but I have a new Grammar Guide quiz. This one is all about word choice, and, of course, it’s more about usage and editing than grammar. But “grammar” is large[.....]

Jan. 3: We often accidentally let this one go

I have seen this nonstandard spelling more than once: But investigators say Furey had actually been showing the boy the gun when it accidently discharged. To teach someone how to avoid this spelling, I would remind him or her that the shooting could be described with the adjective accidental. So when we use the adverb form, we add -ly to accidental. This is advice derived from Paul Brians’ explanation.

Dec. 2, 2012: What, me worry? When a copy editor reads the paper (13)

My recovery from newspapers has hit a few bumps lately. I haven’t missed the work exactly, but I have seen a few lapses in my local newspaper, which happens to be my former employer, that caused me to cringe, left me irritated and made me wish I were still there to have (perhaps) averted the mistakes. I write today in sorrow that the organization I once worked for had to thin its ranks of more experienced copy editors. We truly are missed. I started to write this post without identifying the paper because I have friends who work there[.....]

Aug. 19, 2012: Sometimes it’s just a spelling error — Quiz No. 68

John McIntyre wrote recently in his You Don’t Say blog about whether an incorrect spelling could be considered a typo rather than a writer’s ignorance of the correct word. The example he used is principle/principal. As Mr. McIntyre wrote, sometimes the writer merely mistypes, but sometimes the mistake is the result of confusion.

June 12, 2012: Irregular verbs: Splitting from or clinging to old forms

A verb in a newspaper report sent me to the dictionary and usage books. Presbyterian churches around Charlotte now face the same philosophical debates over Biblical authority and homosexuality that have cleaved other religions. I wondered whether cleaved was the most accepted spelling for the past participle of cleave, meaning, in this case, to split apart. The tense in that clause is present perfect, which combines has or have with the past participle.

May 16, 2012: Word choice quiz: More tricky sentences (1)

I’ve run across some interesting examples of confused words lately. Sometimes, even in context, these sentences can be quite challenging. I chose what I think is the better word, but some writers and editors might disagree. Give the quiz a try.  

April 3, 2012: Hey, use a dictionary, kids

The UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication has decided to drop the spelling portion of a test of grammar and usage that it has given students for almost four decades. Here is a post about the change on the Romenesko blog. The J-school will replace the spelling portion with testing on word choice. I am not too worried about the journalists of the future not being able to prevent or catch ordinary misspellings and typos in their copy. Spellcheckers are not perfect, but they are valid tools and getting better. It is more important to me that[.....]

Feb. 15, 2012: “Lowly” copy editor? Surely you jest (2)

A post by Yoni Goldstein at the National Post of Canada asserts, I hope with irony, that the copy editor in modern newsrooms is “basically, a human spellchecker and guardian of the newspaper’s arcane style guide, a set of rules (like whether to spell the word “aging” or “ageing”) most editors and reporters either ignore or forget.” This has caused a stir among our kind. I first saw the link on a Facebook post by Testy Copy Editor and later read a spirited and pointed response from John McIntyre, who has said what needs to be said about this.[.....]

Jan. 10, 2012: Spelling: Good advice from an old book (1)

This advice on learning to spell correctly comes from the 1950 edition of “The Century Collegiate Handbook,” by Garland Greever, Easley S. Jones and Agnes Law Jones — a book I bought for $2.50 at an antiques store. Form right muscular habits in spelling: Never permit yourself knowingly to write an incorrect spelling of a word. Not only will the erroneous form impress the memory through the eye, but the manual act of arranging the letters falsely will do much to create a wrong habit. Of course, the writers were speaking to students who were using pencil or pen[.....]

June 2, 2007: Live for free or die

My headline is meant to be funny. A reader has taken us to task several times for using “for free.” This reader, Gerry from Chapel Hill, considers this phrase an error. Using “for” with “free,” commentators have said, is wrong because “free” as an adjective or an adverb cannot be the object of a preposition (for) and because the phrase is redundant. You just don’t need to say “for free.” It’s not the same as “for nothing.” Theodore Bernstein in “The Careful Writer” rejects “for free,” and so do other experts. However, “for free” is an idiom, and idioms[.....]

Jan. 3, 2007: Confession: I changed a sign

We grammar geeks often wince at the sight of misused words in signs we see in public places. We threaten to carry a red pen and fix them. I didn’t use a red pen, but I did edit in a public place recently. I was in a large antiques store somewhere in North Carolina, looking at an old kitchen table. A handwritten sign with the details about the table was taped to the top, which was a bright, 1960s yellow. The sign suggested that black chairs would “compliment” the table. In a split second, I decided to make the[.....]

Nov. 16, 2006: Fetch me a thesaurus

A reader called today (somehow she ended up with me) to object to our writers’ use of the word fetch. She wondered why we would use such an old-fashioned word. To her, the word smacks of colloquialism. I was not really prepared to defend fetch, so I grabbed my desk dictionary, which mentioned nothing about the word being colloquial. I think the reader thought I was just another Southerner defending our honor, but the truth is that I just didn’t have a good argument for or against fetch. [More:] Here is the passage from today’s paper that apparently prompted[.....]

Oct. 13, 2006: Heads up

Headlines need to be accurate, attract attention and give readers a preview of the story. Good headlines also draw on our shared culture to establish a connection for the reader. Here is a good example from today’s (Oct. 14) paper of a headline that makes a connection: Lab’s big production: breeding Nemo This works on several levels. First the headline makes allusions to a movie, a “big production,” and to a particular movie, the phenomenally successful 2003 animated film “Finding Nemo.” The headline writer cleverly echoes the title of the movie by using the same structure, “breeding Nemo.” This[.....]

Oct. 8, 2006: Profanity vs. vulgarity

A letter writer took the newspaper to task recently for publishing a comic strip that used a coarse term for a bodily function. The writer called it “profanity.” I have always made a distinction in my mind between profane language and vulgar slang. Profanity, the dictionaries say, primarily deals with being irreverent toward a deity — what Christians often learn as taking the Lord’s name in vain. Vulgar slang, on the other hand, has more to do with body functions that we usually don’t refer to in polite company. The letter writer’s point, though, was that off-color words don’t[.....]

July 23, 2006: Shocking use

A reader complains that writers are misusing “electrocution.” (Not in The N&O specifically, just in general use.) He points to a sentence on a Web page about a dog training mat: It has four adjustable levels of electrocution, as well as a beep-only mode if you just can’t bear to punish the poor pooch. “Electrocution” means to kill with a charge of electricity. An electrocution can be either deliberate, as in an execution, or accidental. Either way, the being who is electrocuted ends up dead. This article was originally posted by the Raleigh News & Observer, a subsidiary of[.....]