Category: Grammar

An apostropheThanks to clickbait and social media, use of the apostrophe (or “sky comma”) is a lost art. The most common (and often ridiculed) error is, of course, your/you’re. When you’re typing at a million miles an hour and want the words down, it’s easy to “hear” a word and pick the wrong spelling. For all the jokes about your/you’re, it’s something a ninth grader doing a proofread of your manuscript can spot. Assuming that ninth grader doesn’t believe texting should be the basis of grammar. Spoiler alert: It shouldn’t. k thx bye!

For the most part, people get contractions right. “He’s,” “they’re,” and “can’t” are all common examples. Frequently, I do see the apostrophe left out of “can’t.” In a manuscript, I’ll flag it. That’s what I get paid to do, among other things. Reading it, it’s not the most egregious apostrophe error out there.

Where do we get it wrong? Possessives. People can’t seem to wrap their head around when an apostrophe should or should not use it to denote possession. After all, we use his/her/their for third person possession. Where’s the apostrophe? Pronouns, aside from being the most monumentally stupid thing for politicians to whine about, are their own thing with their own rules. No formal name or specific noun denotes the possessor. Except…

There’s that pesky pronoun “It.” “It’s” is not possessive but rather a contraction for “It is.” When, as a pronoun, “It” possesses something, then you write “its,” no apostrophe. The easiest way to remember it is pronouns don’t use apostrophes for possession: Mine, our, your, his, her, their, and its. 

Now, let’s talk about where people really grind my gears: Slapping an apostrophe in to indicate plural or omitting it to indicate possession. STOP DOING THAT!!!  You know I’m worked up about that if I use three exclamation points after a sentence. That, in and of itself, is extremely bad grammar. So hopefully, I made my point.

Every so often, I’ll see a sign as I’m driving along or even online where someone wrote something along the lines of “Drink’s and Sandwich’s.” One had it as “Johnnys Bar.”

If you needed more proof civilization is in decline, there it is. It’s “Johnny’s Bar” and “Drinks and Sandwiches.”

Worse, some people labor under the delusion that the apostrophe goes before every “s” at the end of a word, especially if it’s a plural. STOP DOING THAT!!!

Now, the question on everyone’s mind once they realize how easy apostrophes are: What if a name or noun ends in an “s”?

Well, as we say in SQL Server work, “It depends.” This is one where the style guides vary wildly. Are we going to Charles’ house or Charles’s house? The Chicago Manual of Style says “Charles’s house” while the AP and various British guides suggest “Charles’ house.” Even Jess Zafarris and Rob Watts of the Words Unraveled YouTube channel can’t agree. Rob himself, a former BBC reporter now living in Germany, says he’s been forced to change with every style guide his work requires. And if it’s “Charles’s,” do you pronounce that second “s”?

Here is TS’s guide to the sky comma when it comes to nouns ending in “s.” It’s possessive, so use “‘s” at the end. However, it’s an S, followed by an S. You don’t have to say it out loud. This is what I learned in school, what a potential agent told me to use (I laid down the law on the Oxford comma, but she was in agreement it’s mandatory. Get over it.), and ultimately, what the Chicago Manual uses.

 

My current project has em dashes in place of quotation mQuotation markarks, which is a challenge. Em dashes (or for the more pedantic, dialog dashes. Hate to burst your bubble, nitpickers, but the readers who pick up on this don’t care. Neither do I.) are generally used in Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, or French. I’m not sure why writers in English–any dialect of English–choose to do this, but then Cormac McCarthy dispensed with quotation punctuation altogether.

But having to adapt to a different style of quoting dialog underscores another issue: You still have to follow the rules of dialog. And to follow said rules, the reader has to know who’s talking and when. Even the great Lawrence Block, whose books taught me to write novels long before Stephen King graced us with On Writing, munged dialog once. If the greats do it, you need to watch out, too.

So, let’s review, shall we?

  • “Said” is an invisible word. It takes less than second for the reader to blow by a “said” phrase to pick up on whose talking.
  • That said, the old chestnut of not using any word but “said” (except maybe “asked”) needs to be put down like Old Yeller. (Um… Spoiler alert?) In an age of audio books, it is absolutely nerve-grating to hear “said” twenty-six times in a thirty-second passage. Yes, you can use mild alternatives like “shouted,” “mumbled,” even “intoned.” Just don’t get fancy with it. There’s a reason more old-school editors insist on “said/asked.” “‘Well,’ he queried” is still bad writing no matter how much you’re bored with “said.” </rant>
  • Action beats are your friend. You don’t have to tag every line of dialog. In fact, don’t. Dialog-heavy scenes have the disadvantage of encouraging “white rooms.” Two characters are talking. Where are they talking? What’s going on? Half the time, it’s just exposition, and exposition is death in our era of short attention spans. Sorry, but that’s the reality we’re working in today. Have your characters eat a salad or lift weights or knit a sweater. Anything to convey where the conversation takes place.
  • When exposition is unavoidable, put the Pope in a pool. This is one of my favorite storytelling tools from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. He talks about a movie where a bunch of cardinals have to set up the movie and can only do it through rambling dialog. So the screenwriter put an old man in a swimming pool listening to the cardinals. It takes the viewers a minute or two to figure out the guy swimming is the Pope. They get an infodump, but their attention is held because they’re forced to figure out who’s in the pool. (I loved that so much, I put a character named “Mr. Pope” in a swimming pool in one story. Then I killed him in that same pool in another story. Yes. As an author, I’m mean to my characters.)
  • Untagged dialog: No more than five lines before you insert a “said/asked/pontificated” (Don’t use that last one. The reader will throw your book in the trash, and for good reason) or an action beat. The reader needs to keep track of who’s talking. And so do you.
  • Tagging or adding beats: If two people are in the conversation, unless they are the same gender, get their names out quickly and stick with he/she/they*. Once you’ve established who and what they are, the reader can pretty much follow along. More than one person? Or two of the same gender? You’re going to need to drop names a little more often. 

*The common use of singular they today is not political. It’s the means by which I get to spike the football on a pedantic English teacher’s grave. My favorite English teacher, who just turned 90, would heartily approve.

Originally posted to Reaper Edits

Broken pencil while writing
1311784 by smengelsrud/pixabay.c
Copyright: CC0 Creative Commons

Ah, the lowly dash. And it’s many forms. We so love using them, especially Gen X and Millennial writers. We especially love our em dashes (— ). Nothing wrong with that, though I wish Cormac McCarthy had made peace with quotation marks before he died. Blood Meridian was brilliant but hard to read.

And yet, as I go through my latest editing project and look back on my previous one, I keep seeing a dash error that drives me to distraction. The previous project came from the pen of a guy who started doing this before I was born. (My first election was Reagan’s reelection bid, for perspective, when David Lee Roth sang for Van Halen on Ye Olde Victrola whilst we drove the ol’ La Salle to the Woolworth’s for a grape Nehi.*) Yet, I also received back the latest Jim Winter offering back from Dawn Barclay, my talented colleague at Down & Out Books. As I am Jim, I received a rude awakening. I do the same damn thing! What is this horrific atrocity in writing?

Grandpa Simpson yells at cloud.
Fox

Everyone, and I mean everyone, including your humble narrator, hyphenates adverbs. STOP THAT! (Pauses to go yell at both TS Hottle and Jim Winter and hopes wife doesn’t call the men with the butterfly nets and strait-jacket.)

What bugs me about Dawn’s horrific revelations is the next Winter book is a collection. Which means two-thirds of these stories were edited by someone else before I cleaned them up. Eek! That’s two editorial passes that missed that error. Strangely, I never get called out on em dashes. Once, when Second Wave was beta read, I did get a note on the difference between the em dash and the en dash and a hyphen.

  • Hyphens: Hyphens are used to join two words into the single idea. Most often, you see it in some last names, like Alec Walker-Jones. It also can join two adjectives, such as “music-obsessed.” Occasionally, it’s used with nouns, but not often. Technically, hyphens are not dashes. They are not to be used to join any word ending in –ly to another word. So, the phrase “criminally-wrong” is just “criminally wrong.”
  • En dashes: Sometimes used to join words the way hyphens sometimes do. Calling a hyphen an en dash in a number, time, or date range (200-300, 1939-1945, 3:00-3:45) is technically correct, which is often the best kind of correct. But never best-kind, because “best” is an adjective, which is like all those “-ly” words Stephen King tells you not to use yet frequently abuses.
  • Em dashes: Em dashes are the favorite punctuation mark of any writer born between 1964 and 1997. We love them! We use them in lieu of parentheses—though inside a sentence, they must be used in pairs—and to indicate someone’s speech has been interrup— Why the disdain for parentheses? Why not use ellipses(…)? Ellipses indicate trailing off. As for parentheses, believe me, when I first started writing, I was a serial parentheses abuser. Someone pointed out I wrote too many asides in my essays—which, by the way, can get annoying. (See what I did there?) As Microsoft Word improved, along with its alternatives and tools like Scrivener, grammar tools helpfully autocorrected the double hyphen (“–”) into an em dash. Em dashes may or may not be technically correct—still the best kind of correct, but not best-kind of correct, but they really do enhance readability. My tenth-grade English teacher may disagree, but my tenth-grade English teacher thought Led Zeppelin would give me a heart attack and Heinlein would rot my mind. (Jury’s out on the latter.) So, suck it, Clara.

So there you have it. Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.

*Do they still make Nehi?