The Final Touch

photo © 2008 Paul Swansen | more info (via: Wylio)
A line from a news arti­cle I read today at the New York Times blog for Kin­dle (and, yes, I know I said I wouldn’t reveal sources when I turn writ­ing errors into teach­ing moments, but some­how I think the Times is big enough to take it from li’l ol’ me; I won’t name the author, though):

“Mr. Blago­je­vich, a Demo­c­rat whose for­mer aides say once saw him­self as a pres­i­den­tial con­tender some day, was found guilty…”

To be fair to the writer, this is a really tricky con­struc­tion. I had to reread it a few times to even sort out whether it was incor­rect or not. But, alas, Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, I knoooooowwwwww… I’ve been remiss about blog­ging for waaaaaay too long! This is how I’ve always been with jour­nal­ing, too — off again, on again, always hav­ing a hard time keep­ing at it faith­fully. I like jour­nal­ing — the idea of it, that is — the con­cept of record­ing my thoughts to look back on later, espe­cially thoughts about faith and life, prayer con­cerns that I can see answered in ret­ro­spect, ques­tions I’m pon­der­ing, that sort of thing. But the only time I’ve kept at it steadily has been when I was trav­el­ing. I faith­fully recorded my expe­ri­ences in Nor­way daily for two weeks the sum­mer before my junior year in col­lege. No, two weeks isn’t much to brag about, but then I also faith­fully jour­naled (maybe not every day, but reg­u­larly) through­out my five months in Spain dur­ing the spring of my junior year in col­lege. That, I think, was the last time I faith­fully kept a jour­nal. So, no big sur­prise here that think­ing of some­thing to write about and mak­ing a point to do it every few days for the sake of my blog does not come eas­ily to me. So, my apolo­gies. But since I’m here now…

I’ve decided to start some­thing new and make a series of it — maybe a once-a-week sort of thing; we’ll see. As a copy edi­tor, and a fanat­i­cal one at that — one who can’t turn off her proof­read­ing brain, even after the client-based work is done for the day — I am often not just annoyed but appalled by the errors I see “out there.” Now, because my aim here is not to shame any­one — and since, after all, I wouldn’t have much of a free­lance edit­ing career if every­one had the gift of excel­lent writ­ing skills — and because whereas I have strong writ­ing skills, oth­ers have busi­ness or math or sci­ence or par­ent­ing skills I will never have — I will not reveal the iden­tity of a writer, busi­ness, book, etc. with whom/which an error is asso­ci­ated. What I want to do is to turn these fre­quent nerve-shredding nui­sances into some­thing pos­i­tive. So, every few posts, I plan to use a real-life sen­tence or phrase or some other snip­pet of writ­ing I’ve seen as a demon­stra­tion of what the cor­rect con­struct should be and why.

So, here goes. This is a com­mon error in ordi­nary, casual con­ver­sa­tion as well as in writing:

“It con­tains a story about my hus­band and I!” No. “It con­tains a story about my hus­band and ME.” Why “me” instead of “I”? Here’s a help­ful trick: Take the prepo­si­tional phrase (“about my hus­band and…”) and omit the object of the prepo­si­tion that is not the pro­noun in ques­tion. Get rid of it so you can focus only on the pro­noun. Now try it both ways: “It con­tains a story about I” or “It con­tains a story about me.” Clearly, even in casual con­ver­sa­tion, we would say “me.” So, too, should you choose “me” — an object pro­noun, it’s called, whereas “I” is a sub­ject pro­noun — when there is another object in the phrase as well: “It con­tains a story about my hus­band and me!”

Another post sooner than later… I promise!

Oh, and if you see an erro­neous gram­mar or punc­tu­a­tion con­struc­tion “out there,” please men­tion it in a com­ment below. I’ll do my best to explain what’s right and what’s wrong, and why.

‘I’m so con­fused!’ Photo by brain­loc on Stock​.Xchng​.com

For some rea­son, a lot of peo­ple are con­fused about when to use “it’s” (with the apos­tro­phe) and when to use “its” (with­out the apos­tro­phe). One of them is a con­trac­tion, the other a possessive.

If nuances of good writ­ing make you feel some­thing like the fel­low in the pic­ture above, you are not alone! But take heart! I’m about to lend a help­ing hand.

Some­one sug­gested to me that maybe the con­fu­sion comes about because it has been so ingrained in us that pos­ses­sives use apos­tro­phes, so we tend to assume “it’s” is the pos­ses­sive. Well, per­haps. But don’t for­get words like these, which are pos­ses­sives with­out apos­tro­phes: hers, his, yours, ours, mine, theirs. All these words are called pos­ses­sive pro­nouns. And guess what?! So is its! There is no apos­tro­phe in any of them! Look at the fol­low­ing examples:

“Did you take her books or ours?”

“Nei­ther. I took his books. You don’t have yours?”

“I only have one of mine. All I found of my math book was its jacket, so Jim and Lana let me bor­row theirs.”

“Its” is the pos­ses­sive pro­noun replac­ing “the book’s”: “the book’s jacket” = “its jacket.”

But notice the dif­fer­ence here:“It’s time to get to school.” In this sen­tence, “it’s” is called a con­trac­tion because it “con­tracts” or pulls together the two words “it” and “is.” The fol­low­ing con­trac­tions are also famil­iar to you — and note their apos­tro­phes: don’t, won’t, can’t, doesn’t, weren’t, aren’t, and more. Remem­ber­ing these con­trac­tions will, I hope, help you to remem­ber that “it is” also calls for an apos­tro­phe when con­tracted (or, as I like to say, smushed) into “it’s.”

One final point: NEVER EVER is it cor­rect to write its’. Never!!

Was this punc­tu­a­tion tip help­ful? I’d love to be your GPS (that is, gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion, and spelling) nav­i­ga­tor for other quan­daries you’d like assis­tance with. The first five peo­ple to post ques­tions which are cho­sen as the topic of future posts will each be awarded 15 min­utes of proof­read­ing as a free gift from me (that’s a $5 — $10 value or more, depend­ing on the pro­fes­sional and the type of work needed) as my thanks!

Do you have an ad, a let­ter, a blog post, a resume you’d like proof­read? I look for­ward to your ques­tions and sharing!

I was so proud of my sixth-grader-to-be the other day when he read a post­card giv­ing direc­tions to camp and noted a mis­spelling. “They mis­spelled ‘through,’” he said after barely a glance at the card. “What,” I inquired, “did they spell it t-h-r-u?” But as I was about to explain that infor­mal spelling to him, he said, “No, they used the wrong form: t-h-r-e-w.” Sure enough, there it was: some­thing to the effect of going “threw” some lit­tle town to get to the camp.

This is the sort of error busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions who com­mu­ni­cate with the pub­lic really want to avoid in order to retain cred­i­bil­ity and pro­fes­sion­al­ism in the eyes of their clients. It’s a mis­take that might come of sim­ply not know­ing the dif­fer­ence between “through” and “threw” or because, as can hap­pen to any of us, as you’re typ­ing the mes­sage, three other things are going on in the office at the same time — maybe one of which is your coworker telling how her son threw a great pitch at tee-ball, and your mind picked up on that use of the word and it got dropped into your mes­sage. It hap­pens to the best of us!

Look for a good proof­reader and pass every ounce of pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion past him or her before it goes pub­lic. A brief post­card would take a proofer 15 min­utes or less — and you’d pay a small fee for a great return!

By the way, “threw” is the past tense of “throw”; “through” (infor­mally “thru”) is the prepo­si­tion for going into and then out of some­thing.

Thought I’d pass along Bob Greene’s CNNOpin­ion arti­cle “Typos — no big deal? Think again,” which was first passed on to me by a sis­ter copy­ed­i­tor (thanks, Steph!). At the very least, Julia Louis-Dreyfus must be glad there are a few spelling-and-punctuation stick­lers like us around! Not to men­tion the pro­fes­sion­als who carved her name in stone!

You don’t have to be writ­ing a book to need a proof­reader. Pro­fes­sional business-people who come off look­ing as pro­fes­sional, cred­i­ble, and intel­li­gent as they are, sim­ply because they went to the trou­ble of hav­ing their cor­re­spon­dence or adver­tis­ing proof­read before it went pub­lic, know this. It may cost you a lit­tle bit to hire a pro­fes­sional proofreader/copyeditor, but it surely costs less than hav­ing to redo a star on the Hol­ly­wood Walk of Fame or los­ing cus­tomers or clients who won­der, if you can’t fig­ure out the right form of “then/than,” will you know how to pro­vide the type of ser­vice that is right for them?

There are two mis­takes I see so com­monly in writ­ing — even in the writ­ing of very good writ­ers! — so I’d like to try to help sort them out. They have to do with mak­ing “peo­ple” and “each other” possessive.

The ten­dency is to write “peo­ples’ ” and “each oth­ers’.” For example:

1. Many peo­ples’ tal­ents are kept hid­den due to mod­esty. (wrong)

2. We glanced at each oth­ers’ out­fits and laughed to dis­cover we looked like twins. (wrong)

The think­ing (I think) in a writer’s mind is that we’re deal­ing with plu­rals so we need the typ­i­cal way of mak­ing a plural pos­ses­sive — which is, most often, adding an apos­tro­phe after an already-present “s.” The mis­take, how­ever, comes in treat­ing “peo­ple” and “each other” as sin­gu­lar, adding the “s” for the plural, and then adding the apos­tro­phe for the possessive.

Since “peo­ple” is already plural (just like “men,” “women,” and “chil­dren”), you need to add an “apostrophe-s,” NOT an “s-apostrophe.” The cor­rect form for sen­tence #1 is “people’s.” (Don’t be fooled by the other, though less com­mon, use of “peo­ples” as the plural form, indi­cat­ing sev­eral dis­tinct group­ings, nation­al­i­ties, or cul­tures of peo­ple, in which case the “s-apostrophe” (adding just an apos­tro­phe where the “s” is already present) would indeed be cor­rect: The Native Amer­i­can peo­ples’ cul­tures are so fascinating.

Now, as for mak­ing “each other” pos­ses­sive: The think­ing (I think) is that “each” is sin­gu­lar — and indeed it is. That’s why we say Each of the bats has a crack in it, NOT Each of the bats have a crack in it (nor, as is some­times seen, “in them”); since “each” is a sin­gu­lar sub­ject, the verb must match and be sin­gu­lar as well. But when “each other” is used, we are actu­ally talk­ing about two indi­vid­u­als, so it’s already a plural. No addi­tional “s” is needed to make it plural before adding the apos­tro­phe to make it pos­ses­sive. Instead, we add “apostrophe-s” as we would to any plural word not end­ing in “s” (like, again, “men,” “women,” “chil­dren,” which are made pos­ses­sive as “men’s,” “women’s,” “children’s” — never mind the fact that signs in most depart­ment stores leave off the apostrophes).

The cor­rected sen­tences then read as fol­lows:
3. Many people’s tal­ents are kept hid­den due to mod­esty. (right)

4. We glanced at each other’s out­fits and laughed to dis­cover we looked like twins. (right)

(I’m sure it only adds to the con­fu­sion when pro­grams like MS Word show “other’s” as a spelling error. Pay no atten­tion! — the soft­ware is wrong!! — doubt­less designed by peo­ple very tal­ented in mat­ters tech­ni­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal but not in mat­ters gram­mat­i­cal!)

I hope this expla­na­tion helps. Let me know if the usage is still not clear or if you have other spe­cific gram­mar ques­tions I can assist with.