Entirely Unnecessary

Lately I’ve been coming across writers misusing entire and entirely. They include it in a mistaken attempt to add emphasis or distinction to a noun, but it often acts as only an empty modifier. If you write that you could write an entire article about something or that you love an ingredient so much that you could bake an entire cake with it, that’s no stronger than simply writing an article or baking a cake. Removing entire doesn’t suggest that you’d be writing part of an article or making a piece of cake. Including the modifier doesn’t deepen the impact of the noun, and excluding it doesn’t minimize the noun. Better, in these cases, to trim it from your copy.

Odd Little Morsel

I encountered a rare occurence while editing the other day: a writer misspelled hors d’oeuvre. And, to be more accurate, the writer didn’t misspell it so much as mispunctuate it. She left off the apostrophe.

It’s a funny tic of the trade that I come across egregious misspellings of common words every day but a complex, foreign word like hors d’oeuvre—with its silent s, weird apostrophe, and vowel mash-up—is consistently correct. I guess it’s one of the few words that writers will take the time to look up. Good thing, too: if I drew it in a spelling bee, I have no doubt I’d get it wrong.

The Befuddling Case of the Frat Guy’s T-shirt

I was at the gym a while back when I spotted a guy wearing a fraternity T-shirt commemorating a nonprofit event his house had sponsored. It was a fundraiser for a battered-women’s shelter, and the tagline read Joining the fight against domestic abuse. I immediately thought the pairing of fight and domestic abuse was silly and unfortunate, which is to say that I laughed to myself. 

But since then I’ve come to doubt my initial reaction. Was that tag line indeed a case of tone-deaf writing? Would it have been more thoughtful and sensitive to select a milder verb than fight (effort or resistance, perhaps)? Or am I thinking too much? I wonder if anyone else had a response similar to mine, or if I sometimes get too lost in my own word universe.

So, then: thoughts? What say y’all?

2010 Bullets

On a rainy day fit for hibernation, The Writing Guide decides to wake up, stand unsteadily on its back legs, and forage once again for elements of bad writing. And if you think comparing a writing blog to a just-awoken grizzly bear constitutes bad writing, feel free to stick that in the comments section. Until then, here are some general points that have been on my mind lately:

• When referring to the highest-rated beef, the correct phrase is USDA prime, and not prime USDA. You want prime to modify the meat, not USDA. Otherwise that would suggest there are other, lower-quality USDAs out there.
• Why does Microsoft Word’s spell-check function insist that portobello is capitalized? I’ve never seen a capitalized reference, and it’s not based on a proper noun. Any ideas?
• Use a hyphen to draw a distinction between the word that means to find something or to get better (recover) and the word that means to cover something again (re-cover).
• I always thought it was redundant to use together after using connect. You don’t need to connect together the parts, just connect the parts.
• Even though the URL is todayshow.com and everyone on Earth calls it “The Today Show,” NBC’s morning show is just called Today. These are the things that drive me nuts.
• The phrase is for all intents and purposes, and not for all intensive purposes.

Curiouser and Curiouser

My vigilant girlfriend forwarded me Dan Neil’s take on the National Geographic Channel’s new ad campaign, which centers on the grammar-unfriendly tag Live Curious. I’ll let Mr. Neil explain why that’s wrong and how it doesn’t work. And I’ll congratulate him for taking NGC to task for creating a marketing campaign that hangs on confounding and empty phraseology. (“Live Curious” is only the beginning of the campaign’s problems.)

A lot of creatives who make a lot more money that I do have made it common practice to consider language as pliable as imagery. Consider all the word mash-ups (SportsCenter), nonsensical all-capitals (LIVESTRONG—also a word mash-up and, like Live Curious, an incorrect adverbial phrase; double bonus!), and plainly fabricated words (Accenture) that the world’s marketers throw at us. It’s to the point where words on a page or screen have been freed from the bonds of common sense.* In the hands of certain creatives, language becomes just another element to a logo, no different from colors, textures, and shapes.

I’m going to fight the urge to take a swipe at folks who work in dog-friendly environments outfitted with foosball tables and slides down to the cafeteria. Instead, I’ll close with this hopeful query: at what point will clean, grammatical English seem so different and eye-catching that it becomes the new old thing among marketers? When will it gain the vintage cachet of a Mad Men episode? Not too soon for me.

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*I may sound like a crab by using the phrase “common sense,” but break it down and you’ll see how it’s imperative to language. I’m referring to a sense or understanding that’s common to all of us. Like, the kind of thing I would think marketers and creatives aspire to achieve.

Prescriptivism vs. Descriptivism

Up in Yakima, Washington, my good friend The Indoorsman is shedding the bonds of prescriptivism for the bold rush of descriptivism. I’d explain the difference, but I’ll let him do that. (But here’s one way to think about it: do words have inherent usage rules, or do users get to form rules as we evolve?) Read his column, and then take a big guess as to where I come down in the debate.

Transportive Writing

The latest installment of Good Writing is a lesson in using active voice and parallel construction to paint vivid imagery. The scene it describes—of central Baghdad after two suicide bombings killed more than 150 people—is horrific. The L.A. Times’s account from Monday contains more than just a death toll, rundown of the infrastructure damage, and analysis of the political fallout. It also contains a paragraph that transports the reader directly to the scene:

The explosions ripped through traffic and buildings a block apart, hurling vehicles through the air, incinerating drivers and burning office workers at their desks. Blast walls erected for protection were pulverized. Mangled bodies and pieces of flesh lay strewn around the streets. Water spewed from a destroyed main and collected in blood-tinged pools.

In 53 words, the writers convey the raw damage. Notice that each sentence is constructed basically the same way: a subject takes an action, causing an effect. The active construction of the sentences (as opposed to passive construction, in which an action happens to a subject) and the rhythmic repetition throughout the paragraph grab the reader by the collar. There’s no escaping this imagery, even if we want to turn away.

Waddya Think?

I’m not aware of a rule about this, but doesn’t the phrase around the world make more sense than across the world? Seeing as the world is a sphere (and don’t let the Flat Earth Society tell you any different!) around seems more accurate than across, right? Or am I plunging too deep into the well of preciseness? Talk to me, readers.

Exclude the Includer

I’ll continue my series on small and often unnecessary words with a look at all. Writers will insert this word to signal to readers that every item listed is inclusive, but this is unnecessary when the context of the sentence makes the inclusiveness apparent. In the following sentences, we can delete all and still easily understand that none of the items listed would be excluded from their intended action:

• Revenue, expenses, profit and retained earnings are all looked at when creating a budget.
• Prepared in a frying pan, the dish features mushrooms, cheese, and arugula all rolled into fluffy eggs.
• Then letters of congratulations are sent to all the listed dentists.
• My specialists have all gone beyond the call in helping me provide my patients with truly excellent coordinated patient care.

Dreamy Writing

My former colleague Randall Roberts posted a gorgeous telling of a Saturday night–Sunday morning event at Hollywood Forever cemetery here in Los Angeles this weekend. Like every blog post, it could be polished here and there with a copyedit, but no matter: Randy paints a shimmering* image of a remarkable seven hours.

This is a great example of a writer not becoming overwhelmed by his subject. He easily could have lapsed into maudlin or overdetailed language. Instead he dances right along that line between properly conveying enthusiasm and slobbering all over a subject. It’s also a masterful illustration of tone matching content. The setting, the time of night and day, the music and film being showcased melted into a dreamy experience, and Randy’s words beautifully convey the scene.

*To borrow a word favored by another former colleague, Falling James.