“To err is human”

A passage from page 87 of Judge Arthur Engoron’s decision is getting considerable attetion. The passage begins a section of the ruling entitled “Refusal to Admit Error”:

The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, “To err is human, to forgive is divine.” Defendants apparently are of a different mind. After some four years of investigation and litigation, the only error (“inadvertent,” of course) that they acknowledge is the tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid. Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.

What Pope wrote, in An Essay on Criticism (1711), line 525:

[To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.]

Or with our capitalization and spelling: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” Or if one eschews the semicolon, “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” The first half, as errare humanum est , has been attributed to Seneca the Younger.

Pope added the contrast between the human and the divine. He didn’t include a second is. But to err is human, and I don’t think Judge Engoron was erring in any matter of greater consequence.

[Text of Pope’s poem from a Harvard Library photostat of An Essay on Criticism (1711).]

How to improve writing (no. 90)

In The New York Times, Lauren Oyler makes a case for semicolons. I was struck by this passage:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside.

Well, there can be. A downside, that is. I’d alter the punctuation of that last long sentence to give its first clause more weight and to join the next two more gracefully:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways. Semicolons are the rare instance in which you can, and there is absolutely no downside.

But semicolons as an instance? I want to revise a little more:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. There are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways. Semicolons let you do so, and there is absolutely no downside.

Or better still:

That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. There are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways. Semicolons let you do so, with no downside.

I’m still not sure what it means here to have it both ways, but I do know from semicolons. In a 2007 post titled How to punctuate more sentences, I wrote:

One caution: it’s easy to overuse the semicolon. As an undergraduate, I often used semicolons indiscriminately; I joined sentences together in long, unwieldy chains; my excitement about tying ideas together carried me away; as you can see in this example, the result is not reader-friendly.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts : All semicolon posts

[This post, which began as a way to call attention to this Times piece, has turned out to be no. 90 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

“The sentence of the year”

A sentence by Ed Yong, writing in The Atlantic about “How to Pandemic Defeated America”:

No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”

Roy Peter Clark: “If Yong has written the sentence of the year, and I believe he has, he can thank the semicolon.”

It is a great sentence. But reading it reminds me how rarely I now use the semicolon.

National Punctuation Day

Wait — what?

Oh!

There: done, almost.

It still needs a semicolon; that mark of punctuation, however, is one from which I feel ever more removed.

Related posts
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

[We all know that National Punctuation Day is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know. Nevertheless, I will honour National Punctuation Day in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.]

A colon followed by a dash

Is there a name for an older habit of punctation, the semicolon followed a dash? An entry in Webster’s Second made me wonder. I think the answer is no . But that’s a provisional think.

There is, however, a name, rarely used, for another older habit of punctuation, the colon followed by a dash. I associate that habit, always, with Willa Cather:

His daughter Kathleen, who had done several successful studies of him in water-colour, had once said:—“The thing that really makes Papa handsome is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his crown; it is quite the best thing about him.” The Professor’s House, 1925.

Of course she regretted Tennessee, though she would never admit it to Mrs. Rosen:—the old neighbours, the yard and garden she had worked in all her life, the apple trees she had planted, the lilac arbour, tall enough to walk in, which she had clipped and shaped so many years. “Old Mrs. Harris.” In Obscure Destinies, 1932.

When I searched for colon followed by a dash , Google returned this page, and I went straightaway to the Oxford English Dictionary.¹ The colon-and-dash is known as dog’s bollocks, or dog’s ballocks. The OED labels it Brit. coarse slang and rare :

Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.

The only citation is from the third (1949) edition of Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English : “Dog’s ballocks , the typographical colon-dash (:—).”

The OED gives a later meaning, c. 1986 (with the ): ”the very best, the acme of excellence.” An OED citation: “Yeah, Jon Bon Jovi is the dog’s bollocks.” Someone had fun getting that in the Dictionary.

The OED is also the dog’s bollocks, especially now that I know that it’s possible to search for text in definitions. But Willa Cather is not the dog’s bollocks. She is just the very best, the acme of excellence, especially in The Professor’s House. James Schuyler: “Willa Cather alone is worth / The price of admission to the horrors of civilization.”

¹ The page at the link gets it wrong: dog’s bollocks, not the dog’s bollocks, is the typographical slang.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)

Ending a sentence with it

A thoughtful student asked today about an alleged rule of writing: “Don’t end a sentence with it.” Whoever thought up the rule probably didn’t see the comedy in that sentence. I’ve been told of other such rules: many students come to college believing that they must never begin a sentence with and, but, or because. The it-rule though is new to me. I suspect that it is not widespread: Garner’s Modern American Usage makes no mention of it, not in its entry about it, not in its entry about superstitions.

I did find the following comment, in Richard Lauchman’s 25 Hiccoughs of Guidance that Ruin Writing Style:

How did this one ever get started? When I was in school, no one ever bothered to tell me that ending a sentence with “it” was wrong. I’ve never been able to learn the basis for this advice. It makes no sense to me.

But what I can report is that many people have heard this “rule” and thus shy away from writing We have received your proposal and will notify you after we review it. Instead, of course, they feel compelled to write We have received your proposal and will notify you after it has been reviewed. If they have managed to evade the superstition about repeating words but have been exposed to the idea that pronouns are taboo, they write Subject proposal has been received by this office, and notification will follow after said proposal has undergone review. When we read this sort of thing, we have no one to blame but ourselves. After all, for it we asked.

Reader, are you familiar with this rule? Have you heard of it?

*

February 23, 2015: Here’s more evidence, if anyone needs it, that it is acceptable to end a sentence with it. From Joseph M. Williams’s Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (New York: Longman, 2003):

A sentence can end flatly if you repeat at its end a word used just a few words before, because the voice we hear in our mind’s ear drops off at the end of the sentence. You can hear that drop if you read aloud this sentence and the previous two sentences. To avoid that kind the flatness, rewrite or use a pronoun instead of repeating the word at the end of the sentence. For example:

A sentence will seem to end flatly if you use a word at its end that you used just a few words before, because when you repeat that word, your voice drops. Instead of repeating the noun, use a pronoun. The reader will at least hear emphasis on the word just before it.

[The words drops, pronoun, and before are in bold to mark emphasis.]

Not only is it acceptable to end a sentence with it : doing so can be the right thing to do.

The passage is missing from the 2010 tenth edition of the much longer Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. It may be missing from the 2013 eleventh edition too. No matter: it was and is acceptable to end a sentence with it.

[“Don’t end a sentence with it”: granted, it here doesn’t function in relation to an antecedent. But still. Lauchman Group offers writing workshops for people in the world of work.]

*

January 19, 2016: I found my way to an influential source for this non-rule: Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners. With an Appendix, Containing Rules and Observations for Promoting Perspicuity in Speaking and Writing (1795). Murray (1745–1826) was a lawyer who in retirement began writing books of grammatical instruction, with extraordinary success: Bryan Garner notes that in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, Murray’s books sold more than fifteen and a half million copies.

Murray’s advice about writing is at times remarkably congenial. Here is an observation that might have inspired William Strunk’s exhortation to “Omit needless words”:


[The first rule promoting the strength of a sentence, is, to prune it of all redundant words and members.

It is a general maxim, that any words which do not add some importance to the meaning of a sentence, always injure it. Care should therefore be exercised with respect to synonymous words, expletives, circumlocutions, tautologies, the expression of unnecessary circumstances. The attention becomes remiss, when words are multiplied without a corresponding multiplication of ideas.]

But at other times Murray’s advice is less helpful. Here is the rule against ending a sentence with it:


[The fifth rule for the strength of sentences is, to avoid concluding them with an adverb, a preposition, or any inconsiderable word .]

An example follows:


[Even the pronoun it , should, if possible, be avoided in the conclusion: especially when it is joined with some of the prepositions; as, with it , in it , to it . We shall be sensible of this of the following sentence. “There is not, in my opinion, a more pleasing and triumphant consideration in religion, than this, of the perpetual progress which the soul makes toward the perfection of its nature, without ever arriving at a period in it . How much more agreeable the sentence, if it had been so constructed as to close with the word period !]

“Should, if possible, be avoided in the conclusion”: the rule is not absolute, and as David Crystal points out, Murray ends a sentence with it just two pages later. It must have been unavoidable, he might have said. In the sample sentence above, though, the problem lies not in the word it but in “words which do not add some importance to the meaning of a sentence”: in it , an unnecessary phrase, needless words. There was and is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with it , or with an adverb, or with a preposition. She threw the ball and I caught it. We danced gracefully. Where did that noise come from?

How strange and sad that a warning — not a prohibition — issued in 1795 should still haunt writers. In the last three months, at least 500 people have wondered or worried enough to visit this post.

[I found my way to Murray’s warning while reading David Crystal’s The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (2006): “To maintain the ‘strength’ of sentences, [Murray] says, we must ‘avoid concluding them with an adverb, a preposition, or any inconsiderable word’ — by which he means (from the examples he gives) pronouns such as it .” I have reproduced the more legible text of Murray’s An English Grammar: Comprehending the Principles and Rules of the Language, Illustrated by Appropriate Exercises, and a Key to the Exercises (1808). In both English Grammar and An English Grammar, the rule appears in a discussion of sentence strength (“a disposition and management of the several words and members, as shall bring out the sense to the best advantage.” For the third passage, the earlier English Grammar has a semicolon after conclusion and the word more before especially .]

Five more punctuation marks in literature

Following yesterday’s post on punctuation marks in literature, five more, in order of increasing favoritism:

5. The forward slash (or solidus) that takes the place of the apostrophe in Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn: “I/ll see ya tomorrow.”

4. The apostrophes in line nine of William Shakespeare’s sonnet 116: “Love’s not time’s fool,” even if one of them is a later addition. The 1609 Quarto: “Lou’s not Times foole.”

3. The ellipsis that marks silences in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

‘Hal?’

‘. . .’

‘Hey Hal?’

4. The exclamation point that ends Rae Armantrout’s “Dusk”: “I’m not like that!”

5. The comma in the final line of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 6: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” Or rather, that comma — not semicolon — as it figures in Margaret Edson’s play Wit. See here.

My top ten, in order of increasing favoritism: Selby, Shakespeare, Pound, Faulkner, Wallace, Joyce, Armantrout, Dickinson, Sterne, Edson.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

[I’m aware of the charge that the apostrophe is a matter of spelling not punctuation. But I still think of it as punctuation. I’ve read somewhere that Wallace picked up the ellipsis from Manuel Puig. The Playbill for Wit read W;t: a beautiful touch of you-know-what.]

Review: How to Not Write Bad

Ben Yagoda. How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. New York: Riverhead Books, 2013. xiii + 175 pages. $15 paper.

I am always looking for new and better books to use when I teach prose writing to college juniors and seniors. Thus I found my way to Ben Yagoda’s How to Not Write Bad. Its premise — that novice writers can improve greatly by learning what not to do in their prose — is sound. But the book is a disappointment.

I found an examination copy of the book in the mailbox one morning last month, right before meeting this semester's writing class. Feeling the show-and-tell spirit, I brought the book to class and opened at random to page 52 and a discussion of the semicolon. I read the first two sentences aloud:

My initial thought is to limit this entry to one sentence: “If you feel like using a semicolon, lie down until the urge goes away.”

That is because when my students utilize this piece of punctuation, a substantial majority of them utilize it incorrectly.

My students winced, at least some of them. I winced too. We winced for the same reasons: the condescending tone, the ponderous diction. Utilize ? My students know better. And substantial majority ? Why not most ? What’s especially puzzling: elsewhere in this book, as I was to discover, Yagoda advises against such ponderousness. He even recommends use for utilize. It may be that the diction in the sentences I’ve quoted is meant as a joke, but the joke, if there is one, will likely be lost on a reader who wants to understand the use of the semicolon, a mark of punctuation that many teachers of writing would say is not so much misused in student writing as merely absent.

Yagoda's brief treatment of the semicolon is not likely to be of much use to such a reader. The passage continues:

[W]hile it is tempting to outlaw semicolons and just move on, that would be too easy. For one thing, there is a particular circumstance when a semicolon absolutely has to be used. This is a series of three or more items, one or more of which contain a comma.

It’s an odd presentation that begins with this relatively exotic matter before discussing the semicolon's use in joining complete sentences. And why particular circumstance? Why absolutely ? Elsewhere in the book, Yagoda says of particular that it “usually adds nothing to a thought except four syllables.” And he says that absolutely and similar qualifiers make a writer sound “mealymouthed.”

On to the primary use of the semicolon:

A semicolon can be used to connect two independent clauses if the clauses aren't already linked by conjunctions (and, but, although, etc.).

This advice is highly misleading, because it fails to distinguish between coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet) and subordinating conjunctions (such as although, because, whenever): the latter cannot introduce independent clauses. Yagoda leaves unmentioned the words that often signal semicolon territory: conjunctive adverbs (such as however, nevertheless, therefore) and transitional phrases (as a result, even so, in fact). Thus his presentation of the semicolon is grammatically confused and alarmingly incomplete. And a brief discussion of comma splices a few pages earlier in the book gives no indication that however is a word often found somewhere to the right of a semicolon. To the contrary: the sample sentences in that section of the book carry the unintended implication that because however is not a conjunction, it plays no part in joining sentences:

Tuition will go up again next year, however, it will be the smallest increase in five years. [Given as wrong.]

Tuition will go up again next year. However, it will be the smallest increase in five years. [Given as correct.]

Tuition will go up again next year, but it will be the smallest increase in five years. [Given as correct.]

The sentence that’s conspicuously missing:

Tuition will go up again next year; however, it will be the smallest increase in five years.

Or better:

Tuition will go up again next year; the increase, however, will be the smallest in five years.

The problems in my randomly chosen passage are present throughout the book. The writing is breezy and often condescending: “I certify this is an actual student sentence,” Yagoda writes of one especially bad sentence. How great to be the sap who’s responsible. Yagoda’s presentation of the word mindfulness (the idea of the mindful writer runs through the book) would not pass muster in an essay for freshman comp:

A word you see a lot nowadays is mindfulness. I confess I don’t know exactly what it means; something having to do with meditation and/or yoga, I believe. But the concept can definitely, and profitably, be adapted to writing.

Has Yagoda not heard of Thich Nhat Hanh? Or even Wikipedia? But also: why does he give mindfulness a pass and not count it with deal breaker, difference maker, and meme as a contemporary cliché? Try a Google search: mindful asset planning, browsing, cooking, driving, exercise, facilitation. Mindfulness is everywhere. I am lost.

And why does Yagoda clutter his sentences with empty prose additives like definitely (“definitely, and profitably, be adapted”)? Again and again, his writing violates the book’s precepts, not wittily but clumsily, as if neither writer nor editor was paying attention. Words that Yagoda prohibits — actually and the previously mentioned particular — turn up in his sentences often (actually, twelve times; particular, seventeen). The words definitely and simply (which are not on the hit list but should be) turn up five and seven times respectively. The book cautions against clichés, yet there are many: “bad boys” to “smoke out,” “clean bill of health,” “thunderous applause,” “train-wreck,” even a reference to a sentence “riddled” with clichés. Right before advising against unnecessary quotation marks (air quotes or scare quotes), Yagoda uses them: “eventually, you will streamline the process and ‘hear’ yourself write.” He uses such quotation marks elsewhere too: “selected and processed by an editor, and then ‘published.’”

What’s worse is that some of this book’s advice about writing is unhelpful or mistaken. At one point Yagoda recommends quotation marks for titles (“Gone with the Wind”), but elsewhere in the book he recommends italics for titles of “books and other compositions.” (Sample sentences in How to Not Write Bad are always in italics, which would make for maddening complications in showing the use of italics with titles.) Yagoda’s advice about the Oxford or serial comma — “choose a style you like, and stick with it” — ignores the overwhelming support for this comma in American English. Says Garner’s Modern American Usage ,

Although newspaper journalists typically omit the serial comma as a ‘space-saving’ device, virtually all writing authorities outside that field recommend keeping it.

In other words, it’s a question you shouldn’t be deciding for yourself. Yagoda’s presentation of skunked usage casts the possessive followed by a gerund (“I don’t like your talking about the senator in that tone”) as a mistake, but “you talking” is the problem, as the sample sentences make clear. And concerning the use of the word this alone (a pervasive problem in student writing), Yagoda blithely advises substituting the word that : “it can be slipped in,” he says, “without doing any damage. You didn’t hear it from me.” Such advice won’t do.

As with Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, the real difficulties of writing good prose come in for little attention. Trying to figure out the writing conventions that apply in a field? Read “the best practitioners” and “maybe even copy down some of their sentences and paragraphs. Eventually you’ll get a feel for the expectations.” Tangled syntax? Just be mindful:

If, every time you put down a sentence, you go over it unhurriedly, you’ll learn to pick up on any ambiguities or confusion. To fix them, just shuffle and reshuffle the elements of the sentence, as if you were putting together a bouquet of flowers.

And three pages from the end of the book, we’re told that the “key issues” we now must consider are “cadence or rhythm, variety, novelty, consistency, and transitions.” In the word of many a Brooklynite before me: Sheesh.

Though this book is marketed for use in writing courses, its design alone makes it an unlikely choice for that purpose. Yagoda suggests that a teacher direct a student to “the appropriate entry in the book” to solve a writing problem. But finding, say, II.B.4.d. will be easy for neither teacher nor student: the book has no chapter headings, no index, and only a sketchy table of contents. Section II.B.4., for instance, has five parts, a. through e., none of which are identified by page number or topic in the table of contents. It’s not surprising that Yagoda himself gets lost in this maze, directing the reader to the non-existent II.I.C.2., and referring to II.C.2.d. when he means II.D.2. Imagine the fun I’ve had working out the details of this paragraph.

How to Not Write Bad comes highly recommended, with Cynthia Ozick on the front cover and an unnamed Atlantic reviewer on the back, touting the book as appropriate for the “syntax-obsessed reader and writer” and “copy, grammar, and writing nerds.” But there is little that such readers will learn from this book. And for the student who wants to become a better writer, there are books far more helpful and trust-inspiring. They would include Claire Cook’s Line by Line, Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing, and Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences. I remain on the lookout for books as good or better.

[Are college juniors and seniors “novice writers”? In most cases, yes. Their writing experience is limited. “Empty prose additives” is a lovely phrase I’ve borrowed from Claire Cook.]

Dark Punctuation

“What the punctuational physicists at Cerne Abbas did was to shoot colons directly through the midpoint of the space between two words. Exactly as predicted, this not only split the colon into two semi-colons, but caused the words to collapse into one another”: Dark Punctuation revealed.

[Psst: It’s semicolon not semi-colon. I added the hyphen for years before discovering my mistake.]

How to improve writing (no. 44)

[Mark Trail, May 8, 2013.]

When Mark Trail and Wes Thompson went off in a plane to “look at sheep,” leaving “the girls” (Mark’s wife Cherry, Wes’s wife Shelley) alone at camp, trouble was sure to follow. Trouble, one might say, was in the air : the plane crashed, and Mark and Wes have been stuck in the mountains for many days’ worth of comics.

Trouble is also in this panel’s dialogue, in the form of the clunky however that begins Wes’s sentence. In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White offer good advice: “Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is ‘nevertheless.’ The word usually serves better when not in first position.” That sounds like a matter of style. But Strunk and White then confuse matters by seeming to suggest a prohibition: “When however comes first, it means ‘in whatever way’ or ‘to whatever extent.’”

Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage takes up however with greater clarity:

It seems everyone has heard that sentences should not begin with this word — not, that is, when a contrast is intended. But doing so isn't a grammatical error; it’s merely a stylistic lapse, the word But or Yet ordinarily being much preferable. . . . The reason is that However — three syllables followed by a comma — is a ponderous way of introducing a contrast, and it leads to unemphatic sentences.

And re: today’s Mark Trail, I’d add that no one talks like that, especially not with a broken foot. I have revised the panel to eliminate the ponderous however and add a bit more drama:


[Mark Trail revised, May 8, 2013.]

How I wish I could travel back to student days and remove howevers from the beginnings of my sentences. But it’s what I was taught as an element of intelligent writing: independent clause – semicolon – conjunctive adverb, any conjunctive adverb – comma – independent clause. O ponderousness!

“Let’s go,” by the way, is an instance of the hortatory subjunctive.

Related reading
Other How to improve writing posts
Other Mark Trail posts

[This post is no. 44 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. Cherry made tea this past Monday.]

Robert Frost mug

[Only $15.95. Good grief.]

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has the distinction of being celebrated by large numbers of people who have no idea what it’s saying. Why does an elementary school have its students sign and sing the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” at a spring concert? Cluelessness. Why do people want Frost’s poem on a mug or poster or plaque? See answer to previous question.

Reading “The Road Not Taken” with even modest attention reveals the poem to be more complicated and compelling than any platitude about going one’s own way and never looking back:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Beginning with its title, the poem is about nothing but looking back: its speaker even begins to rehearse his story once again in the final stanza before breaking off to offer the evidence-defying declaration that he “took the one less traveled by.” Look back at what he’s told us: the two roads looked equally appealing; one looked grassier than the other; they looked equally worn; that morning they were both covered in leaves than no one had walked on. Where there is no difference, there is no basis for a meaningful choice. And the difference a choice makes cannot be gauged when one has no idea of where an alternative may have led. If “way leads on to way,” the two roads might even meet again in the future: and who would know?

What the poem shows us is a traveler who would have preferred not to have to choose, who retells his story (like the Ancient Mariner), who travels to an unknown end (“somewhere ages and ages hence”), and who is determined to impose meaning on one moment of experience. If the speaker will be retelling his story with a “sigh,” it’s far from clear that the difference he claims for his choice — if there was a choice, if there is a difference — is for the better. But in Frost’s universe, any meaning is better than none. Or as another Frost poem puts it:

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

And speaking of things boughten, you can also buy the poem’s first stanza as a poster ending with a semicolon. Good grief.

[Elaine and I heard “Y.M.C.A.” sung by elementary-school kids some years ago. Not wanting to embarrass anyone, we kept our mouths shut.]

An interview with a semicolon

“ I feel angry; I feel hurt; I feel betrayed”: from an interview with a semicolon.

Related posts
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences
Paul Collins on the semicolon

Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style

Christopher Lasch. Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. Ed. Stewart Weaver. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 121 pages. $18.95.

I am grading papers with the usual sense of futility. . . . Every year the illiteracy gets worse.

Christopher Lasch, in a letter to his father, May 1985

O you who teach: there is bitter consolation in knowing that you are not alone, in knowing that even, say, Christopher Lasch (professor at the University of Rochester, eminent cultural historian, author of The Culture of Narcissism) felt the futility of grading student writing. Many instructors hide from that feeling, dispensing cheery grades and wishful comments in the margins (“Take more care!”). But Lasch, in early 1983, began work on a style sheet for his students’ use. What set him to this task: the poor writing of his graduate students and their failure to improve after exposure to William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style. By October 1985 the style sheet had grown into a small guide to writing, typed and duplicated for distribution to students in Rochester’s history department.

Lasch’s final revised typescript is the source for Plain Style, which might be the most streamlined guide to writing now available: just seventy-seven printed pages, with chapters on “Elementary Principles of Literary Construction” (commentary on a short essay by Randolph Bourne), “Conventions Governing Punctuation, Capitalization, Typography, and Footnotes,” and “Characteristics of Bad Writing,” followed by lists of misused words, mispronounced names and words (“Neet′-chuh, not Neetsch or Neet-chee”), and proofreaders’ marks.

Plain Style invites comparison to The Elements of Style: both books began as in-house publications for student use; both number their principles and rules (allowing for brief marginal corrections); both issue confident, no-nonsense directives:

Strunk (revised by White) on interesting: “An unconvincing word; avoid it as a means of introduction. Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.”

Lasch on life style: “The appeal of this tired but now ubiquitous phrase probably lies in its suggestion that life is largely a matter of style. Find something else to say about life.”

You may want to dismiss these sorts of prohibitions as the grumblings of curmudgeons, but any competent teacher would call attention to “It is interesting to note that” or “Agamemnon’s lifestyle” in student writing. There is nothing curmudgeonly about suggesting that a writer show rather than tell or that a writer avoid trite (and anachronistic) phrasing. If you labor in the realm of what Lasch calls “downright unreadable sentences,” you already understand that teaching students to become better writers is often a matter of teaching what not to do: don’t write “It is interesting to note that”; don’t use “a famous quote”; don’t begin with “In this essay I will discuss.” Or as teachers end up writing in the margin, Avoid.

Plain Style is a worthy successor to The Elements of Style (a book not nearly as bad as its detractors suggest, though in many ways dated). Lasch values strong verbs, distrusts abstractions and the passive voice, and hates blather and cant. The sentences and passages illustrating his points are wonderfully varied and assume a reader with a lively range of cultural reference: Aaron Burr, Candide, Steve and Cyndy Garvey, Antonio Gramsci, Pauline Kael, Beatrix Potter’s Mr. McGregor, George Orwell, Talcott Parsons, and William Faulkner’s Snopeses all make at least one appearance. Lasch’s guidance is hardly exhaustive: the brief paragraph on the semicolon, for instance, is not likely to cure comma splices. And complications sometimes grow beyond what’s helpful: the discussion of conventions governing quotation marks might create confusion where none had existed.

Is Plain Style enough? No, but no one book is enough to solve writing problems. The Elements of Style is dated; Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is not especially helpful on thesis statements; Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is at times bewildering (and, always, a typographical horror). Plain Style is beautifully designed and well written, and the soundness of its prose makes a strong case for the soundness of its advice. Lasch of course knew that one book was not enough:

We learn to write well, if we ever do, by reading good prose, paying close attention to our own words, revising relentlessly, and recalling the connections between written and spoken language.

Close attention to one’s words, a healthy (not paralyzing) self-consciousness, is what Plain Style seeks to foster in its reader.

Plain Style includes a lengthy introduction by Stewart Weaver, who places this guide to writing in the context of Lasch’s intellectual development and interest in the political implications of language. Professor Weaver tells me that Plain Style is still given free to the Rochester history department’s incoming graduate students.

Paul Collins on the semicolon

Perusing telegraph manuals reveals that Morse code is to the semicolon what weedkiller is to the dandelion. Punctuation was charged at the same rate as words, and their high price — trans-Atlantic cables originally cost a still-shocking $5 per word — meant that short, punchy lines with minimal punctuation were necessary among businessmen and journalists.

Read the rest:

Has Modern Life Killed the Semicolon? (Slate)

Related posts
France debates le point-virgule
A semicolon in the news

France debates le point-virgule

Not a belated April Fool's joke:

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. . . .

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that — in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur — "the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought."

Read all about it: The end of the line? (Guardian)

Related posts
Paul Collins on the semicolon
A semicolon in the news

LETS PLAY TWO

My friend Stefan Hagemann sends news of a missing apostrophe, missing from a statue honoring Chicago Cub Ernie Banks. The exhortation on the statue's base — "LETS PLAY TWO" — comes from Banks' catchphrase: "It's a beautiful day for a ballgame. Let's play two."

Sculptor Lou Cella: "I'm the sculptor; I'm not a writer. I just read it the way I heard it in my head."

Cella's added an apostrophe, in the right place too.

(Thanks, Stefan!)

Related posts
A semicolon in the news
Spelling in the news (Eistein, Michaelangelo, and Shakespere)

A semicolon in the news

A semicolon on a New York City subway sign is in the news; read about it here:

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location (New York Times)

(Reading this article has made me realize that semicolon has no hyphen. I have been misspelling — or better, mispunctuating — this word for years.)

Related posts
France debates le point-virgule
Paul Collins on the semicolon

How to punctuate more sentences

A few more guidelines for using punctuation:

The semicolon is a good choice when sentences are clearly related, when they seem to go together, when a period would create a too emphatic stop between sentences. Alas, there's no rule to determine whether sentences are related in a way that makes a semicolon a good choice. Making this decision seems to me a matter of acquired intuition.

The presence of a connecting word or phrase (such as nevertheless, therefore, thus, even so, in contrast) is a good sign that you're in semicolon territory. But longish sentences, even if they're clearly related, are likely to be easier for a reader to take in if they're separated by a period.

One caution: it's easy to overuse the semicolon. As an undergraduate, I often used semicolons indiscriminately; I joined sentences together in long, unwieldy chains; my excitement about tying ideas together carried me away; as you can see in this example, the result is not reader-friendly.

When one or more commas appear within items in a series, semicolons should separate the items:

The menu offered limited choices: egg and bacon; egg, sausage, and bacon; egg and Spam; egg, bacon, and Spam; and egg, bacon, sausage, and Spam.

*

The dash is a very useful element of punctuation, as it allows for greater condensation in the presentation of ideas. The dash is appropriate in setting off an element that strongly interrupts the movement of a sentence. For instance:

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman — the one oblique and elliptical, the other expansive and declamatory — might be said to have invented modern American poetry.

Three instruments — clarinet, muted trumpet, and muted trombone — create the unusual tone colors of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo."

The most important thing to remember about punctuation: it's a matter of conventions, shared agreements that help bring clarity to written communication. If you don't agree this sentence unpunctuated difficult to read can serve as a last attempt to persuade.

If you do agree, that last sentence — unpunctuated, difficult to read — can serve to confirm what you already understand.

Related post
How to punctuate a sentence

How to punctuate a sentence

Nothing that follows is meant to substitute for the nuanced explanations found in what's usually called a writing handbook, the sort of book that college students purchase in a first-semester writing course. These five rules though have the virtue of being manageable, which is difficult to say of a 1,000-page book. In each paragraph that follows, the sentences illustrate the punctuation rule involved. Note that I'm avoiding almost all grammatical terminology. Instead, I'm emphasizing a small number of sentence patterns.

Rule one
If your sentence begins with an introductory element, put a comma after it. Even if it's a short element, put a comma after it. In time, you'll be putting this comma in without having to think about it.

Rule two
Any element, big or small, that interrupts the movement of a sentence should be set off with commas. This sentence, like the first, also has an element set off with commas. An extra element at the end of the sentence should also be set off with a comma, as I'm showing here.

Rule three
Items in a series should be separated with commas. What do I mean by "items in a series"? Wine, women, and song. Life, love, and laughter. John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

(There's no consensus about using a comma before the final item — the so-called "Oxford comma" or "serial comma." Keeping that comma seems to me the better choice, simplifying, in one small way, the problems of punctuation. If you always put the comma in, you avoid problems with ambiguous or tricky sentences in which the comma's absence might blur the meaning of your words.)

Rule four
Complete sentences that are joined by a coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet) need a comma before the coordinating conjunction. That might seem obvious, but this comma frequently gets left out. Putting it in makes a sentence more readable, and any reader appreciates that.

Rule five
Complete sentences that are joined without a coordinating conjunction need a semicolon instead of a comma; the semicolon shows the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. Semicolons are often followed by a connecting word or phrase; however, a connecting word or phrase is not necessary. Sentences joined with only a comma are called comma splices; they're among the most common errors that come up in college writing.

(Note: In the next-to-last sentence in the previous paragraph, there's a comma after however because it's an introductory element in the second sentence. A semicolon followed by however is a familiar device when writers link ideas. A better way to manage however, however, is to place the word within a sentence: "Semicolons are often followed by a connecting word or phrase; a connecting word or phrase, however, is not necessary." In this revised sentence, rule two explains the commas.)

Fixing comma splices requires familiarity with two recurring sentence patterns. The first involves a complete sentence, a semicolon, and another complete sentence:

[complete sentence]; [complete sentence].

Some examples:

Your argument is persuasive; it addresses every objection I had.

His research paper is plagiarized; he is going to fail the class.

The novel is a relatively recent literary form; it's not nearly as old as epic poetry and lyric poetry.

The second pattern to look for involves a complete sentence, a semicolon, a connecting word or phrase, a comma, and another complete sentence:

[complete sentence]; [word or phrase], [complete sentence].

(Again, the comma after the connecting word or phrase is appropriate as that word or phrase is an introductory element in the second sentence.)

Some examples:

I decided not to take the job; instead, I'm going to graduate school.

The proposal is flawed; thus, we're sending it back for revision.

She did well in the class; in fact, she did much better than she had expected.

How can you tell whether you have two complete sentences or one sentence with an additional element at its end? With an additional element (something less than a sentence in itself), the parts of the sentence can be switched and still make sense:

I'll go to work, even though I'm sick.

Even though I'm sick, I'll go to work.

But with a second complete sentence and a word or phrase such as instead, thus, or in fact, the parts cannot be switched and still make sense.

A complication: when you can switch parts, a comma will sometimes be necessary and sometimes not. The best way to judge is to consider whether the element at the end is necessary to the meaning or something extra. Consider these examples:

Why did you bring an umbrella?

I brought an umbrella because I thought it would rain.

*

What did you bring?

I brought an umbrella, because I thought it would rain.

In the first exchange, the words “because I thought it would rain” are crucial to the meaning. In the second exchange, they’re not.

I think of this kind of comma as analogous to seasoning — sometimes you need it; sometimes you don't. (And at this point, very few people are likely to be thinking about the choice in terms of outright error.)

These are the basics of punctuating sentences with commas and semicolons. I know from working with many students that any writer can get better when it comes to punctuation. The key is the ability to recognize a handful of familiar patterns. Look for the patterns in your sentences, and you too can get better. With some practice, you'll be able to see the parts of your sentences falling into place, and punctuating correctly will become, believe it or not, a habit, one that you'll be happy to have acquired.

Colons, by the way, function as arrows or pointers: see what I mean?

Related post
How to punctuate more sentences

How to improve writing (no. 12 in a series)

It's sad to see a sentence such as this one on official letterhead, in a letter soliciting donations:

Many people assume X covers all the expenses for Y however, the reality is - it cannot.

That's a fused sentence or run-on sentence, two sentences run together with no punctuation between them. Add a comma before however and you get a comma splice, another serious sentence problem. (In formal writing, a comma works to join sentences only if it's followed by a co-ordinating conjunction -- and, but, for, nor, or, so, or yet.) A semicolon, the mark of punctuation often found before such words as however, nevertheless, and therefore, is what’s needed here.

But the writer here has made other mistakes, more difficult to name. Consider the awkwardness of a corrected sentence:

Many people assume X covers all the expenses for Y; however, the reality is - it cannot.

Part of the problem is that three nouns -- expenses, Y, and reality -- fall between it and X, its antecdent. Another problem is the awkward use of a hyphen (which should be a dash anyway) in a very short sentence: "however, the reality is - it cannot." A third problem involves tone: noting what "Many people assume" might be at least slightly insulting. Are you, reader, one of those who labor under this mistaken assumption? A fourth problem: the semicolon-however combination begins to feel mighty ponderous, like the work of a student striving for an unneeded formality of expression.

A better way to make this pitch might go as follows:

It would be great if X could cover the cost of Y. But it can't.

Notice how much more direct the revision is -- from 16 words to 15, from 28 syllables to 16 (half-price!). And now the writer sounds less like someone writing a ponderous essay and more like someone attempting to persuade an audience.

This post is one in a very occasional series devoted to improving stray bits of prose.

» Previous "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)