Archive for July, 2007
In an earlier posting, I discussed what elements need to be present for a sentence to be born in English. However, it’s a little misleading to say that a sentence is created whenever a subject, verb and completed thought come together.
This may sound silly, but you still need a period to make a completed grouping of words into a sentence. When you string together subject, verb and complete thought in English, what you really end up with is called an [tag]independent clause[/tag]. Add a period to an independent clause, and it becomes a sentence. However (and this is a pretty big however), a sentence normally contains more than just one independent clause. It may also contain dependent clauses, various phrases, parenthetical thoughts, and yes, even more independent clauses.
Consider these four independent clauses: | I got up | I took a shower | I ate breakfast | I went to work |. You could indeed convert each one of them into a sentence, but you’d sound like a doofus if you made every independent clause into a sentence. More likely, the speaker/writer in this case would start combining these four independent clauses. "I got up, took a shower, ate breakfast and went to work" would be one way to do this, but there are a slew of other possibilities.
Stay tuned. Tomorrow we’ll study those possibilities as I present the five rules for dealing with independent clauses in English.
When writing for the Web, you need to keep your audience in mind. People who read books will sit down and turn page after page to finish the task. Not so on the Web–visitors are impatient, and if they can’t quickly and easily find what they want on your site, they’ll hit the back button and get out of there.
One way to make your text appealing to visitors is by a process called chunking. In essence, chunking means to write everything in small chunks of two to four sentences. Even better, introduce each chunk with a descriptive title or headline in bold face.
Then, within the text you need to have appropriate keywords that are hotlinked to other pages within your site. Keep your visitors navigating on your site until thye find what they’re looking for. (Better hope you use the right keywords. LOL!)
Finally, cut out the bull–jargon and empty words that visitors can smell a mile away. If you want, download a copy of Bullfighter, which works with both Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to point out and eliminate “the bull” (jargon and meaningless words) in your writing. The software is free.
Waiting at home for an electrician, I turned on [tag]Fox News[/tag] because Food Channel was featuring [tag]Paula Deen[/tag] (not one of my favorites). The news was good: Dow Jones Average up 283 points, but the accompanying commentary wasn’t nearly so good. The anchorman said, in effect, "So the economy isn’t so sucky after all."
I don’t know if this represents a new low in televised news or whether I just haven’t been paying enough attention. I suppose we all have a definition of sucky that makes his commentary understandable, but whatever happened to the words bad and lousy? Has sucky supplanted them?
Enquiring minds don’t really want to know.
I’m a traditionalist or purist when it comes to this argument, but you’ll hear people argue both ways.
I feel that when you use a relative pronoun with people, it should be who or whom. Others feel that the universal that is perfectly okay. In fact, most people use that when speaking and writing. I use it in speech, but try to replace that with who or whom when writing.
Here’s what I’m referring to:
It was John who got the job.
It was John that got the job.
The second usage sounds ugly to me. Of course, in this sentence we could solve the problem by simply saying, “John got the job.” However, I still maintain that people deserve/demand who while animals and everything else call for that.
I used to start grammar lessons by asking students, "What’s the basic building block of English?" After getting answers like "the alphabet" and "words," I quickly changed the question. I was looking for someone to say, "The sentence is the basic building block of English," but I never did.
Anyway, whatever you consider the first component of English to be, my point is that the sentence that does the work of communicating for us. The question I begin teaching grammar with now is, "What are the three components of an English sentence?"
After some brainstorming and shouting answers out loud, the class will finally pinpoint the first two elements–the subject and the verb. Then it gets wild with guesses like "adjectives," "adverbs," and "pronouns," which continues even after I announce that the third element is not a part of speech.
So what is the third element comprising an English sentence?
You have to have a subject and verb, but they have to be used in a way that makes sense. The final element is that–the grouping of words has to convey meaning.
Seems logical enough, right? You can’t just put any old subject, say prison, with any old verb, say rains, and make a complete English sentence. "The prison rains" doesn’t convey meaning.
To repeat, then, the three necessary elements of an English sentence are having a subject, having a verb, and having meaning (making sense).
From time to time, I’ll return to my Building Blocks of English series. Next time I’ll discuss how to join and how to separate sentences correctly.
I came across this passage while reading the Los Angeles Times and became perplexed as to why the author (Ross Newhan) would use parentheses, to wit:
The [Tom] Seaver vineyard is among the smallest. He is growing cabernet (sauvignon) grapes on 3-1/2 acres of his 115-acre maze of bush, trees and spectacular vistas.
Okay, I used the brackets around Tom to indicate I added that word to the original text, but the author used the parentheses around sauvignon all by his lonesome. Why? Does he think people will think cabernet franc. If so, just use cabernet sauvignon without the parentheses.
Parentheses are used to de-emphasize words or phrases in the place of commas, which would be the normal un-de-emphasized usage. Dash marks are used to emphasize the word or phrase in a sentence. So why does Newham use a set of parens here?
Clearly, you can’t use commas or dashes in this construction. I think he meant brackets, but since he is the author, he couldn’t use brackets, and since the whole parentheses thing doesn’t make sense, oh, well, forget it. (Thank you, [tag]Alton Brown[/tag] for that profundity. Parentheses used correctly here.)
It’s a mystery and a misuse. And on top of that, the damn grape names need to be capitalized–Cabernet Sauvignon (why did I follow his misuse of the names?)!
Sometimes we sit down at the computer, or take pen and paper in hand, and we hit the proverbial block wall mentally. We just can’t write.
In a previous post on five tips for “perfect” English, I mentioned that [tag]writer’s block[/tag] often originates in our minds as we seek perfection on the first go-round. Just relaxing and lowering your standards will often cure writer’s block.
However, there are other techniques, and I found this site on “Overcoming Writer’s Block” to help you.
Can anyone read my title?
I can, but I know what I wrote. There’s this Web fad going around called "Flip Text," which is what you see above. To create [tag]Flip Text[/tag], you just go to this site.
Full Story »
Now, here’s a term I never use and seldom hear: spot on.
As for definition, it means "extremely accurate or descriptive." That much I can find in something called the Kernerman Multilingual English Dictionary, whatever that is.
However, the dictionary gives no origin for the phrase. Sounds British to me. Can anyone clarify?
First of all, you can’t write [tag]perfect English[/tag], so my first tip is don’t try to write perfect English. Try to write perfectly clear English instead.
So let’s look at my five tips, starting with the one I just mentioned:
- Don’t try to be perfect, cute, profound or anything else. Just try to be clear and simple. Sometimes just being simple will ensure clarity.
- Find someone who writes the way you’d like to write and copy that person. I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who quipped that anyone can plagiarize, but it takes a genius to copy. So be a genius and copy what works.
- Lower your expectations to the point where they don’t even exist. Another sage said (and I paraphrase), "There’s nothing you can’t achieve in writing if you just lower your standards low enough." In other words, turn off the inner critic that makes you think you have to perfect everything the first time you write it.
- Write it, leave it, and don’t come back to it for a couple of days. With a fresh set of eyes and a brain that’s no longer thinking Gollum-like things of your first draft–"My precious! My precious is perfect!"–you can then tear apart your first draft and dramatically improve it.
- If all else fails, drink a couple of martinis, beers or glasses of wine. Maybe that’ll lower your standards enough that you can write without trying to be perfect. If not, maybe it’ll loosen your tongue enough that you can meet someone interesting and commence a whole new journey in your life. I call that win-win.
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