gwyn | Entries tagged with usage

I haven't had as much time to work on this week's Usage Mythunderstandings as I would have liked -- turning out to be a busy day. Next week I might do it earlier than Friday, because of the big U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and my birthday, which means the Shopping with Evil Twin extravaganza. So anyways. This week's topic: The Larch. No, wait, sorry, The Comma.

I wasn’t going to tackle commas right away, because... well, you could write pages and pages on the comma and still not address all the confusion. And since I’m not here to write a “you must do this” column, I’m not going to waste those pages — seriously, grab a simple grammar book from the used bookstore, or the library, or www.bartleby.com, and spend a few minutes on the comma. There is so much info to take in, it might not penetrate for a while, but the more you look at it, the easier it’ll get. Trust me. If someone as stupid as I am can figure it out, you can, too. (Also, if you watch this space, take a look at how I use them here. You can see varying sentence styles with lots of different comma and punctuation uses, and just seeing where I’m putting them might end up being helpful. Who knows?)

The first thing to remember about commas is that some usage is based on grammar rules of standard English, and some is based on style — whether it’s a regional style, such as the difference between British English (BE) and American English (AE), or the styles publications, companies, or institutions choose for written materials. Much of what we think is wrong or bad may simply be a difference in style. I probably correct comma/punctuation misuse more than any other thing in my job, even more than the apostrophes I mentioned last week. Punctuation is a really challenging concept for many people, even well-educated people, and the inconsistencies in English make it even more difficult. Throw in those style concepts, and you’ve got trouble. Right here in River City...

I’m on this small e-mail list where once in a while we’re mean and do “turkey reads” (MST3Ks) of bad fanfic, and one time, one of the turkeyers said, “I weep for the commas.” Because this guy had no idea how to punctuate, so he never did. I’ve used one of his lines from a terrible X-Files story as a .sig for years because I love the utter purity of his stupidity — not only is there no punctuation, it’s a line of dialog that no human would ever speak: “Well lets talk some more and lets have some beer and snacks.” (And no, I have no shame about mocking someone like this in a public place.) Then another person turkeyed something with commas after every other word, so obviously she’d taken all of the commas and that’s why he couldn’t use them — because there was a worldwide comma shortage. Maybe even more than bad spelling and homophone abuse, comma problems plague fanfic.

What commas do best is create sentences that are more than just choppy single lines, and allow us, in writing, to show how we string words together into complex sentences in speech. I’m not gonna bore you with talk of independent clauses and all, but the big thing to remember is that a comma serves to link parts of a sentence when you combine those separate parts with a conjunction like: and, but, or, nor, and so on. So most of the time, you’ll want to use a comma with and or but or yet or so, or even or. “Mulder wanted to visit Scully in the hospital, but he was stuck on the alien operating table, and it looked like he’d be here a while.” Even if you’re not sure, sound it out — the comma goes where a slight pause or hesitation in speech goes, so if you think you’d give that slight pause, then you’ll probably want the comma. To make it more confusing, short phrases don’t necessarily require commas — “the bleached blonde is cute but sort of scary.” It takes practice to get the hang of this, and I realize many people just can’t sound it out— they won’t be able to hear it at all. Getting a good, well-edited book (or piece of fanfic) can help you learn to do this, though. And all of this presupposes AE, because in BE, they frequently leave off that comma before a conjunction that joins two parts of a sentence.

Another serious problem area I see a lot is the introductory phrase. In that bad example I cited above, the introductory phrase is just the word “well,” but it can be a much longer phrase. We have a natural, very slight pause in speech after introductory phrases, so you’re pretty safe to guess “yup, comma here” even if you’re not sure. “When you meet, tell Michael the code phrase or he’ll shoot you.” “Later on, we’re going to the Bronze to dance.” Most importantly, use it after a greeting — if I can impart nothing else to anyone, I want to impart this — use a freaking comma after a greeting or acknowledgement: “Hey, Buffy, want some blood?” “Come in, Angel, Wes is expecting you.” “Yo, Gunn, where’s your posse?” Please, I beg of you — it’s not Hi Mulder or Hello Scully or So Mr. Skinner. I weep for the commas!

Sometimes, though, what trips people up here is that you don’t always need a comma when the rest of the sentence is closely linked with that intro phrase — “I won’t be joining the CTU because my application was rejected by Jack Bauer.” It’s a tricky thing to understand, but sometimes that reading aloud thing can really help you. And in BE, they don’t often use the comma after an intro phrase as much as we do, so that adds to confusion. There’s tons of subsets to this rule, but like I said — pages and pages and pages. The Harbrace College Handbook, Diana Hacker’s Writer’s Reference... there’s gajillions of good books and probably lots of web sites that will explain more about commas than you want to know.

Last week, a couple people mentioned the serial comma, and some didn’t know what that was. Commas are used to separate items in a series. The serial comma refers to how it’s used when all items in a series have the comma after them, rather than all the items but the last that’s joined with a conjunction. So you’d have: “Blair had long hair, big eyes, short legs, and round glasses” with a serial comma (that last comma there after legs), but without the serial comma (most commonly used in BE and in many newspaper/periodical style guides) it would be long hair, big eyes, short legs and round glasses. I have peculiarly strong feelings about serial commas — I think they can aid in understanding, and indeed, even style guides that prohibit them recognize that if the serial comma will aid in understanding, then it should be used. So why people insist on not using it no matter what the circumstances, I do not get. But I see this all the time on my editing list, where the BE speakers will not budge that they do not use it under any circumstances. That’s the hardest part of my job — explaining to people that style guides are style GUIDES, not laws that can never be broken or else you'll be taken outside and executed with a double-tap to the back of the head. Even if your style guide says “don’t use,” like my company’s does, when you get a really long, complex series of things, you’ll want that serial comma to help readers out. To me, it’s asinine to make things harder for the reader — it’s not about your fucking style laws, it’s about the reader: our jobs as writers and editors is to make everything clear and understandable and elegant, not to blindly follow some dumbass “rule” that isn’t even a grammar rule, but a style choice. Grrrr.

So for a long, complex series, even if you’re a BE writer, that last comma may be a godsend to a reader. As well, if there’s even a slight possibility of misunderstanding, use it — lawyers frequently use the serial comma because it can make a legal difference. An example commonly cited (that’s probably apocryphal) is “I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” Does this mean his parents are Ayn Rand and God, or is he dedicating to all three of them? It’s open to interpretation, but throw in that last comma and there is no interpretation. (Someone mentioned one that they saw in a TV guide thing, which I liked tremendously, that said: “Tonight’s guests include Desmond Tutu, an elderly somethingorother and a dildo collector.” Which, you know, could easily confuse someone into thinking Mr. Tutu was the elderly somethingorother as well as a dildo collector. While he could just be one, perhaps that’s a confusion you might wish to avoid. Most of the Brits chimed in with, “I understood perfectly that there were three distinct people involved,” but I thought that was just stubbornly obtuse.) The serial comma never hurt anyone, it often can help (and can be crucial to technical or legal documentation), so why be stubbornly obtuse? Why not just use it if there’s any potential misunderstanding? Do. Not. Get it.

I won’t get into the last big thing commas do, which is set off elements that seem kinda parenthetical, because most people don’t have too much trouble with this — stuff like “Some people, according to Angel, just can’t be saved.” When you do this, the commas travel in pairs, but usually if you can write a basic sentence, you can handle this one. What people don’t get — but something I’m seeing way less of — is what’s called a comma splice, where there’s punctuation but no conjunction, or a fused sentence (run-on sentence) where there’s no punctuation at all. Don’t just stick a comma in the middle of a sentence because you think it might sound like it should be there — not “The stakes were sharp, he feared them greatly” but “The stakes were sharp, and he feared them greatly.” If you really want to be the serious punctuator, use a semicolon there: “The stakes were sharp; he feared them greatly.” A run-on would be where you didn’t use any punctuation at all — “Xander sent her a valentine she sent it back unopened breaking his heart.” That would be better separated into two sentences with periods, or with a semicolon, or with a comma and then “and.” Of course, BE doesn’t even really have the concept of a comma splice, so a lot of this is peculiar to AE — keep that in consideration if you’re betaing, because not all of this stuff applies if you’re working across the pond.

BE uses commas far less often than AE, but in recent years I’ve seen study results that say reading level comprehension has been decreasing in the UK, and sometimes I wonder if some of the stylistic things we use, such as lots of commas, might not start showing up there as well to aid reader comprehension. Could be interesting to watch. Commas are probably the most flexible and helpful pieces of punctuation you can find, but that may be why they’re so misunderstood — familiarity breeds contempt. You can find whole chapters about them in most usage books, but when in doubt, read something aloud, see how it sounds, and that might help you decide where to throw in a comma — or take one out. Myself, I go through these periods where I follow different styles — almost all of my X-Files fic, I was in my British style is better phase, and I wasn’t using commas half as much, driving my American betas nuts. Now I’m back to a middle ground, but who knows? Maybe I’ll adopt the no punctuation style and save them all for someone else, so there won’t be a worldwide comma shortage.

Current Music: Fluke - "Atom Bomb"

Okay, I was surprised by how many of you responded in comments and e-mail that you wanted to see a usage/language “column.” I tried to think of a nice safe first entry, something like the myth of till/’til/until, but the more I thought, the more I realized it had to be about the single thing I spend most of my time fixing and explaining, that inevitably bogs down my class discussion: the possessive apostrophe. I’m flinchy about this topic, because I got seriously scorched on a list once for bringing this up as an example of why I think it’s so hard to teach “right” and “wrong.” Not flamed, but basically told to shut the fuck up because no one cares. So, still flinchy...

And I thought

tiashome might have had a good point about making this language/writing thingie a different LJ or community even — if people think they’d prefer I take this elsewhere, let me know. God knows I have enough codes for a different journal — maybe I could call it editrixie or something. I'm going to focus on fanfic for these, because that's what we're here for, so examples mostly come from fandom if I can think of them.

Anyways. English, because it is bizarre, has some very mixed up rules, and the apostrophe to indicate possession is one that always causes confusion (and madness — if you want, I can tell you a story

alexfandra once told me about a co-worker of hers who ended up under psychiatric observation because she went nuts trying to fix signs that misused the apostrophe). To start with, we have pronouns (words that stand in for proper nouns and names), which, if we want to show possession, never take an apostrophe in front of the s: yours, ours, hers, his, theirs, its (of course, this shouldn’t be confused with it’s, meaning it is. That one trips up so many people, but a basic rule is: if it belongs to something, then use its, if you’re saying it is, use it’s). Stick an apostrophe in front of the s, like your’s, and everyone writes you off as a doofus. All this seems logical until you get into the next part, which is that all other words, when you want to show possession, take an apostrophe and an s (except, of course, the ones that don’t). So, like, no wonder people are confused — it’s frickin’ confusing!

Basically, any time you want to show possession by someone or something, you’ve got this: The witch’s spell, the vid’s use of clips, Buffy's stake, the fic’s plot, the immortal’s sword, Vin’s rifle... and so on and so forth. You can say to yourself, okay, so if it’s a pronoun, then there’s no apostrophe s, but if it’s a real noun or a name, then yay! apostrophe s. (And that thing someone told you once that objects can’t possess anything, so you can’t say “the table’s legs were crooked”? It’s crap, so ignore it.)

But wait! There’s more! Just to make it more confusing to the average Jane, we get the problem of those pesky names ending in s, and the plurals, which also end in s, so then what do we do? Well, in American English (AE), we screw it up, in British English and most standard English-speaking publishing style conventions, we make it seem deceptively simple, but there’s confusion still reigning.

In the rest of the English-speaking world, a name ending in s gets the apostrophe s — so you’ve got Giles’s car, Methos's apartment, Chris’s horse. (Frenchie guys do too, especially because the s is silent -- Roy Dupuis's hair, DeCartes's writing.) Many style guides make an exception for historical or religious names — Moses’ tablets, Jesus’ crucifixion — apparently because somehow the double ess sound is... I dunno. Not cool for historical or religious figures? Who knows. A lot of people don’t subscribe to this special treatment; I’m one of them. Maybe I’m too much of a heathen to care. But a gajillion years ago, newspapers and other periodicals in America adopted a convention of leaving off the ‘s for names ending in s, as part of their space-saving efforts (also omitted the serial comma and other things, if you've ever seen an old paper, you know how crammed they were). It’s now standard Associated Press style, and used by many periodicals such as Time, daily newspapers, and so on. Publishers of books and journals and suchlike didn’t really adopt this stylistic rule, though it’s really an individual thing. But here’s the weird part — I’ve been researching this for a while, trying to find out where along the line this periodical stylistic convention started being taught as a “correct” grammar rule in American schools, and I can’t find it. I’m still really curious about it, because it seems so weird to me that out of all the English-speaking countries, we adopted a rule and teach it as correct, which was developed entirely for specific other needs. It’s now taught as right in schools from elementary/primary on up to university level.

So now, most of my work involves fixing this, because most style guides I use require the possessive s for names and words ending in s. I have to explain to people of my generation and below that if they check a grammar handbook or publisher’s style guide, they’ll find my change supported, and they are always surprised — as I was when I found out that what I’d been taught wasn’t necessarily “correct.” And it creeps up in the weirdest places: I laughed my ass off when twice on Buffy, I could tell that the script had been written Giles’ — because the actors read the lines like that. They didn’t say Gilezes, which is how it comes out in speech, they made a hard stop after the first s, because clearly it had been written that way in the script, and that’s what they thought they should say. Most of us just don’t really talk that way. We say Gilezes car or Chrisses gun, so why, in AE, we’re being taught in school to write it differently, I do not know. I would love to find out the history on this. It’s sort of like the metric system, I guess — we just have to do it different in America, even if we look like dorks.

And then... the whole thing gets weirder. The dreaded plural possessive and apostrophe — but this one’s actually a bit easier, I think, once you get past those first two problems I discussed. Mostly? You do the ’ thing and leave it at that if you’re dealing with plurals — the witches’ conference commences at midnight, the editors’ group got rowdy with their red pens, the Mounties’ union voted Fraser out. There are lots of potential pitfalls and some strange little sub-rules around these I won't bore you with, but most of the time you’re pretty safe with the apostrophe after that plural s and nothing else. Yeah, you can get kinda freaky, like say, you have a bunch of Mulder clones (Mulders), and you’re trying to indicate that a group of them possessed some guns, but why torture yourself? Write the hell around it — the guns used by the Mulders were found in the sewer. You get the drift. Same goes for plurals like families — we visted the Scullys’ house and they all came for dinner (though you’d go to Dana Scully’s apartment), but the Gileses invited us to their house to meet their son, Rupert, and his fiancée, the Calendars’ daughter, Jenny. Seriously — when in doubt, look it up. Go to www.bartleby.com if you don’t have a decent basic book on language, and use their resources. Your readers will thank you for it.

Oh, and a strange little side note: the possessive of who isn’t who’s. The word you’re looking for is whose: Duncan asked, “Whose book is this?” and Amanda replied, “I think it’s Methos's.”

Like I said, English is a freaky language. And this one thing, especially in AE, really trips people up. When I get the chance to beta fiction, I always point this weird s’ or s’s issue to people, and let them make up their own mind about whether they want to use the method most of the world uses, or use the one they were mostly likely taught in school and are familiar with. But one thing I do want to point out — whichever way you choose, be consistent. Don’t randomly throw in Wes’ and then a few paragraphs later, use Wes’s. Keep your eyes peeled if you’re writing or beta-ing.