Comma Coma #3: Commas and the Three Bears

The first core problem with commas is this:

In grade 3, you were told to put a comma where you pause.

The vowels are dots and dashes placed under these
consonents. You won't see them in public signs though.

This implies that the pause came first.
1.  You hear a pause.
2.  You insert a comma.

In a world where everyone speaks, reads, and understands the same language in the same way, that might be possible.

In written Hebrew, there are no vowels because it is assumed that people who speak the language can fill in the vowels themselves.

So we should know where commas go just from listening to spoken language, right?
Well, it would be pretty to think so.

Then there's the problem with the so-called comma rules that appear in all the style guides.  (I previously suggested two of these rules.)  This brings us to the second core problem with commas.

 Rules should be thought of as suggestions.

If you follow all the rules, you might end up with a sentence like this one from my graduate student's essay.  He was writing about a time when he was misperceived:

One night, while walking to the bar, Kate told me, "You know, you are not at all like we thought you were."

Four commas in 22 words.  Aarggh.

Papa Bear said, "This sentence has too many commas."
Momma Bear said, "Let's take them all out."
Baby Bear said, "How can we make this sentence just right?"

In a case like that, ask yourself:

• Which comma is the most essential?
• Can I change the words so that it is readable with fewer commas?

What would you do?  I mean, what would you do when you want to write better (dammit).



Suggestion:  While walking to the bar one night, Kate told me, "You are not at all like we thought you were."

Pronoun Perplexity: Objective vs Subjective

My graduate student was sharing the cost of a wedding gift with several friends.  He wrote these two sentences about choosing a gift card:

This situation occurred to my friends and I . .

 The store had a variety of items that him and his

fiance could purchase . . .

I could overlook one pronoun offense, but the second one a few lines later meant that he was away the day that they taught objective pronouns in grade school.  

Being in Canada, I also considered that either his friend was in a gay marriage (fiancé) or he didn't know how to spell fiancée.  But back to the pronouns:

Use "me" when the pronoun is the object of a verb.

"Give me the vodka."

Use "me" when the pronoun is the object of a preposition.

"He gave the vodka to me."

It doesn't matter if he gave the vodka to you and a half a dozen of your friends.  You still use the objective case (me).

Circle the correct pronoun:

1. Give (me, I) and my fiancée the present.
2. This machete was given to my friends and (me, I).
3. My friends and (me, I) gave a casket full of machetes to the bride and groom.
4. The store had several wedding rings that (him, he) and his boyfriend could admire.
5. Proofread specifically for objective pronouns before you send your letter of intent to the Graduate Studies Department and (me, I), providing you want to write better, dammit.

Answers:  me, me, I, he, me

Write When You're Angry. Edit When You're Calm.

This baby must not edit her essay until she calms down.

If you are feeling strong emotions, write away.  Anger, regret, and sorrow can propel powerful, interesting stories.

I can always tell when my students feel strongly about a topic because those passages are full of errors.

In the assignments that I am marking now, my students interviewed two people about their listening skills.  They asked important people in their lives, "How do I listen to you when you give me information, when we are in an argument, and when you are telling me your feelings or problems?"

In one essay, my student interviewed his buddy and his girlfriend. In paragraph one, he wrote that his buddy said he was an awesome listener.  This is a beautifully written, error-free paragraph full of specific events of empathic listening.

In paragraph two, he wrote about his interview with his girlfriend. She reminded him of the time when he forgot an item while shopping or didn't listen to directions and got lost driving.  Then  she recalled an argument they had. The writing is suddenly full of missing words, spelling errors, and typos.

When he is reading over paragraph two, he becomes more emotional.  This shuts out the editing part of the brain.  I end up reading an essay that seems to be written by two different people.

Don't press send.  Let the essay sit for a day.  Maybe the rational, judging brain can read over the essay tomorrow.  Read the emotional passages slowly aloud and you might be able to find the typos.  When you are aware that your inner editor can go AWOL, you should be able to write better (dammit).

Paragraph Lengths

Writing is about CONTENT.  Readers are looking for your message and your thoughts.  Readers take in information in chunks.  Interested readers will try to understand the content chunk by chunk.  Let's look at a piece of writing as a meal:

a five-course Indian meal or a five-course Japanese meal or any meal really.  

The courses of the meal can be of varying sizes and ingredients, but you do not want to totally stuff yourself on any of the courses or you won't have room for dessert.

It's the same with writing.

Let's consider our ingredients:

1.  A phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another.  Consider the phoneme as a molecule of an ingredient of food in your five-course meal.

Phonemes differ from language to language and can be a source of errors.
A student sent me this email:  "My plane was delayed.  There was a tycoon."

He chose the wrong phoneme and mixed up the "k" sound in "tycoon" with the "f" sound of "typhoon."  If you choose the wrong phoneme, you lose the meaning of your word and ultimately of your sentence.

2.  A word is a unit of meaning composed of one or more phonemes.  Consider the word to be like an ingredient in one of the courses in your meal.  

3.  A sentence is a collection of words put together to create a message that includes a subject and a verb.  The subject is usually a noun and the noun can "be" or can "do" something in your sentence.  Just like you need the right ingredients to make a soup and not a soufflé, you need specific parts of speech to make your sentences say what you want.  You need a noun and a verb.  To add flavour, you might throw in an adverb or adjective.  Articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are the secret ingredients that hold your dish together.

To sustain the metaphor, the ingredients (words) are put into sentences (dishes). 
These dishes will form a course of your meal.  For example, stir-fried vegetables, rice, and a chicken ball might be your main course.  Broth, won tons, and green onions together would be the soup course.

4.  Related sentences are grouped together to form paragraphs.  When the story takes a turn, the writer will usually start a new paragraph.  When you finish one course - soup, salad, or appetizer - you move smoothly into your next one.  Your paragraphs are just long enough to give you the flavours of that dish and lead you to the next.

The meal analogy can work for short pieces of writing.  In longer pieces of writing, you must create a section or a chapter composed of several paragraphs.  Give it a sub-heading to guide the readers along.

This meditation occurred because I was reading an essay that has four paragraphs consisting of 408, 186, 120, and 359 words.  My reading was interrupted by the long paragraphs and instead of finishing my marking, I wrote this blog.

I wish the long paragraphs were broken into more bite-size pieces.  Paragraphs should not fill a page if you want to write better (dammit).

"Are You a Good Which or a Bad Which?"

Remember Glinda's first words to Dorothy when she landed in Oz?  She said, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

Think of that line whenever you use the word "which" in your writing.  There is only one good which.  The good which has the power to refer back to a "a single, clear, unmistakable noun" as the author of a Towson University writing website says.

So let's look at the sentences in my student's essay that sent me to Oz:

"If I am being completely out there, she will quickly jump in to correct me, which sometimes doesn’t result in the best example of listening."

In this example, the writer wants "which" to mean "the friend jumping in to correct me."  This is a behaviour, a memory, an observation, but not a single clear noun.

In the second example in the same essay, the student sensed something was wrong with the sentence structure and thought, perhaps, that he could fix it by starting a new sentence:

"If my friend never listened to what I have to say, I can almost certainly predict that I would not have an interest in listening to what he has to say. Which would then make me a bad listener, even though I have the capability to be a great listener." 

Here  "which" refers to  "not hav[ing] interest in listening to what he has to say."  This is a thought, a concept, an outcome but not a single clear noun.

Both of these are very bad whiches, enough to make the whole house that is our paragraph fall from the sky (unless we write better, dammit).







Answers:
1) Start a new sentence.  Say, "Correcting me does not indicate good listening."
2) Don't start with "which."  Say, "I have the potential to be a great listener, but it has to be a two-way street."

Comma Coma #2: Are You Appositive?

In my first blog, I speculate on reasons why graduate students seem unfamiliar with so many rules of style.  Another reason is that some of my students have been away from school for many years and working in places where correct writing was neither necessary nor valued.

The first thing to forget is the squiggle sprinkled throughout text known as the comma.

Should they remember the comma, they most remember the words of their Grade 3 teacher:  "Insert a comma where you pause."

This rule is not much help to stutterers or speakers unfamiliar with the normal cadence of a language.

Here's another comma omission:  Sometimes one noun or a noun phrase will rub up next to another noun to give the first noun more dimensions.  This is called the noun in apposition.  "Appositive" means to put next to - near, but we don't want it too close, so the noun in apposition is separated from the first noun by a comma.

My student's essay began with these sentences:

My friend, Max and I do a lot of hanging out together.

I live with my spouse Gretchen and our relationship is more complicated than my friendship with Max.   

How many commas are missing?

Know this:  If you find them, you will write better (dammit).

Answers:
1.  My friend, Max, and I do a lot of hanging out.  [The word "together" seems redundant.]
2.  I live with my spouse, Gretchen, and our relationship is more complicated than my friendship with Max.

Comma Coma #1: Interrupting the Flow of the, Oh My Gosh, Sentence

Of course there should be a comma between "Better" and "Dammit" in the name of this blog, but as long as we know the rule, we can break it.

Write Better Dammit, this blog, is an homage to #writebetterdammit the tag on the website Hubski.  The tag was first used by Caio and is one of my favourites on that website.  

What is Hubski?  It has been called "an online pub with creative and thoughtful people belly-up at the bar of reason and sanity."  I found it while searching for the Higgs-Boson.

There should be a comma between "Write Better" and "Dammit" in the name of this blog because "Dammit" is what is known as an interjection.  It is inserted into spoken and written language to convey emotion and is separated from the rest of the sentence by commas.

There are several comma rules and that is one of them:  Put commas around words that interrupt the flow of a sentence in order to write better, dammit.

EDIT:  Comma inserted August 31, 2015.

CAPITAL CONFUSION #1

The title of my graduate student's essay is this:

Am I music to your ears?

Sweet title!  He even managed to remember the question mark.  He didn't remember the capital letters.

Capitalization is often a matter of preference, but some rules are well established.  Here's the word from The Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage (considered the Canadian usage authority):

In the titles of books and works of art [which this essay is], the first and last word are capitalized . .  All internal words are also capitalized except coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor), articles (a, an, the), and prepositions of fewer than five letters.

So Am I music to your ears? should be

Am I Music to Your Ears?

The assignment asked students to ask two people: How do I listen to you?  Am I good listener?  Am I a caring, empathic listener (music to your ears) or a self-preoccupied, distracted listener?

More importantly, will they listen to me when I tell them how to write better (dammit).

Edit:  When a word in a title is hyphenated, should you capitalize both words?  There is no rule.  I have a preference for both words capitalized - but whatever you do is correct enough.  Look at your title.  Which is prettier?

Non-defensiveness -- Double Bonanza!

or 

Non-Defensiveness -- Double Bonanza!

What is This Blog About?

This blog hopes to teach you to write better.

This blog is for my graduate students.  I will post their writing errors and instructions for improvement.  The authors will not be named, of course.

This blog is for me.  I find myself writing personal notes to my students over and over again encouraging some specific improvement.  Most of the notes deal with the same matters.  Instead of teaching them writing skills in long personal notes, I'll point the student to this blog.

Am I a writing fascist who insists that my way is the only way?  Mostly not.  Language is dynamic and personal styles make writing exciting and surprising.  I want to be excited and surprised.  Mostly, though, I want to read through a piece without struggling to understand the meaning and intention of the author.

When my smooth reading is interrupted, I try to find out why.  If the error is a common one (which it always is), I hope to discuss it here.

My reading is interrupted or *s*l*o*w*e*d* down by commonly recognized errors in grammar, diction (word choice), syntax (word order), spelling, and punctuation.

My reading is often slowed down by repetition and wordiness and general lack of proofreading.

Most of all, my reading is slowed down by long sentences, incomprehensible 40-60 word sentences that left me in the dust after the first 25 words.

Will people argue with me?  Probably.  Many things are debatable.  I could be wrong.  I will reveal all my sources.  When it's a question of a personal preference, I will disclose.

So who's right about writing?  Whose opinion should you trust?

Yesterday, my awesome student, Chris Daellenbach, told me this:  "I went to a private school and, consequently, I had the same English teacher for four years.  I developed a style according to that teacher's instructions.  As soon as I got to university, my professors told me they didn't like my style.  They said I was writing wrong."

I hear that a lot.  I've had students cry in my office because they were A+ writers in high school and I gave them some other letter of the alphabet.

Why are there so many errors in graduate and undergraduate student writing?

1. The student was just away the day apostrophes (or whatever) were covered.
2. High school teachers will teach writing, but generally mark for self-esteem (more on this another time).  I mark for self-esteem too but I do it like this:  "You will get the mark you deserve, if you find and fix 10 spelling errors."
3. Teaching assistants and undergraduate professors might circle errors and put a mark on a paper. Students will look at their mark and file the paper away if it's a good mark or throw it away if it's a bad mark.  Unless the course is specifically a writing course, the TA and professor might not teach writing.  They will suggest you read Strunk and White.
4. Unless it is a writing course, the TA or professor marking the essay will look for the main ideas and not the minutia of clear expression.  They know that the more you perfect the style, the more you perfect the message, but they have too many students and too many papers to read.  They might not know if it is good or bad writing.  They might not know how to fix it.  They will know if it is a Bish paper or a Cish paper and will tell you why if you ask.
5. Txt Messaging?  LOL - I don't know.  Maybe.  I have no evidence.

Anyway, if you were away that day -- the day everything you don't know was taught -- you'll find it discussed in this blog eventually.

BONUS marks and chocolate kisses if you let me know about any typos you find in this blog.  I, too, want to write better, dammit.