From the Bad Advice Files

Someone sent me a link to a blog post about hyphenated compound adjectives in which the rules were completely mangled because the author didn't distinguish between adjectives and adverbs. (I'm not going to link to that original post because my purpose is not to embarrass or harass that author, but to state the correct rule.) This is one of those things that causes a crapton of confusion, so I thought it would make sense to review the rule. (Related posts: how to identify compound adjectives, squinting modifiers)

First, you have to know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

Adjectives modify nouns in a way that describes an attribute of the noun.

Adverbs modify adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs in a way that describes a relation or degree of time, degree, manner, and similar qualities.

So:

inflated balloon
(inflated is an attribute of the noun balloon, so inflated is an adjective -- technically, a past participle functioning as an adjective)

partially inflated balloon
(partially is a degree of inflated, so partially is an adverb modifying an adjective)

If you were to hyphenate that,
partially-inflated balloon,
you would be wrong.

This is considered an "exception" to the rule regarding hyphenation of compound adjectives, but that's something of a misnomer. This could never be a compound adjective because it's half-adjective, half-adverb. A similar "exception" involves whether to hyphenate a preposition used as an adverb, such as:

Please check out at the check-out counter.

The first "out" is an adverb modifying the verb "check." The second "out" is part of a compound adjective modifying "counter."

One place where the rule is in flux regards the use of comparative or superlative compounds. The old rule is that you never hyphenate a comparative or superlative adverb modifying an adjective. This is probably easiest to see if we stick to good/well, better, best as our example because that will ignore the -ly comparatives and superlatives.

better built car
best dressed woman
well read man
a good, simple dinner (good is an adjective modifying a noun)
a well prepared dinner (well is an adverb modifying an adjective)
the best cooked dinner (best is a superlative modifying an adjectival past participle)

That's the old rule. Lately, we've seen people hyphenating these usages, but to my eye, it looks strange. Maybe this is because my eye knows the difference between adjectives and adverbs, and my eye knows that you don't hyphenate an adverb to an adjective, but whatever. Rules change.

What are compound adjectives? When two adjectives operate together as a unit to modify a noun. For example,

long-term solution

Solution is the noun. Long and term operate together to create a single unit of meaning. This isn't an arbitrary rule because it can have an impact on meaning. Compare:

The large appliance factory is closing.
The large-appliance factory is closing.

In the first, an appliance factory which is large is closing.
In the second, a factory which makes large appliances is closing.

Okay, so, that probably doesn't un-confuse anybody. As I said, this is not an easy concept to grasp, and even seasoned copy editors sometimes quibble over particulars, especially in the case of squinting modifiers (see link at the top of this post). But I thought it was worth at least trying to un-confuse things. :)

Theresa

Solving a Sentence

Some time ago, we looked at a tricky sentence -- evocative and beautiful, but not perfectly balanced -- and I asked for feedback from all of you on how you might edit it. Or if you would edit it. Here's the sentence again:

But it felt so good to be out in the open land, sunlight pouring on her head and arms, bees buzzing in the anemone, the scent of pine tickling her nostrils.

I have to start by saying, again, that this is a good, evocative sentence, but bits of it nag my eyes when I read it. In the original post, I broke the sentence down, or started to, anyway , which I think I ought to re-post here:

But it felt so good to be out in the open land,
(1) sunlight pouring on her head and arms,
(2) bees buzzing in the anemone,
(3) the scent of pine tickling her nostrils.

If you've been reading this blog for any stretch of time, it probably won't surprise to you learn that my eye first snagged on the present participial phrases. (If you aren't familiar with our long rants against PPPs, I'll just suggest you read this post and this post. And maybe this one, which is long but excellent.) Whenever I see a PPP, my eye immediately searches out the sentence for the noun modified by the PPP. In this case, pouring modified sunlight, buzzing modifies bees, ticking modifies scent. So that's all fine.

But something about that sentence still made me pause, so I went to the next check. What did that list of three modify? Open land. And the series lines up in neat order after open land, so that seemed to work just fine.

And yet, I wasn't satisfied. So, if we can see that everything is in the proper order, the next check has us look at the relationships between the parts. And this is where I started to dither, and it's also where I get to touch on another old rant. You see, all those little words that we think of as mostly invisible -- the conjunctions, the relative pronouns, the prepositions, and the like -- are crucial for creating relationships between the "idea" words in a sentence. We could have a list of idea words:

sports car, zoomed, grocery store

And not know the relationship between the parts. There's a world of difference between,

The sports car zoomed to the grocery store.

and

The sports car zoomed through the grocery store.

Right? Changing one word, one tiny little preposition, changes the entire meaning of that sentence because it changes the relationship between the parts. When we skip those relationship words (as when we substitute a semicolon for a conjunction), we might still be getting the right words down, but we sacrifice our ability to control the reader's interpretation of the relationship between the parts.

Sometimes the ambiguity is exactly what we want, as in Alicia's favorite semicolon from Auden:

I thought love would last forever; I was wrong.

He could have said,

I thought love would last forever, AND I was wrong.

Or,

I thought love would last forever, BUT I was wrong.

Either of those would signal a slightly different shade of meaning, but in this case, the semicolon creates an ambiguity that works strongly for the sentence -- because it could be BUT, it could be AND, or it could even be both or neither. The nature of the relationship between those clauses is ambiguous for a purpose, and the ambiguity actually adds meaning to the poem.

But that's another issue, and frankly, it's a rare semicolon that adds more than it detracts. And this sample sentence is not about semicolons, but about the way we glue pieces together with tiny words. And in this case, I think we need some glue. It's not technically necessary, but it would add clarity and precision. Maybe something like,

But it felt so good to be out in the open land with sunlight pouring on her head and arms, bees buzzing in the anemone, and the scent of pine tickling her nostrils.

Adding two words -- the preposition with and the conjunction and -- converts that series into a prepositional phrase with a compound object. Note, too, that now we can get rid of the comma after land, which was previously used to signal the ellipsis. (Ellipsis = missing word = the preposition with)

Or maybe we want to make it adverbial.

But it felt so good to be out in the open land when the sunlight poured on her head and arms, bees buzzed in the anemone, and the scent of pine tickled her nostrils.

Now we have a compound adverbial clause, and notice that we can again eliminate the comma after land. We also can shift the form of the verbs in the clauses to past participles, which always read a little more easily. Of course, now the clause signals something different about the nature of the relationship between the main clause and the dependent clause. Where before we had a preposition indicating something about the nature of the land, now we have a temporal adverb indicating something about the moment in time spent on the land. It's a different relationship between the parts.

There might be other ways to solve that sentence, too, and shore up the relationship between the parts. Or it might be that the author will choose to leave the relationship ambiguous. Worked for Auden, right? In any case, it's a good sentence, and it's a good example of how to tinker with pieces using those little relationship words.

Theresa

Quick Tip for Hyphens and Adjectives

This just came up in correspondence with an author, and I thought I would share it here.

There's a quick and dirty test for knowing whether you need to hyphenate adjectives. Let's say, for example, you're pondering the phrase,

mind blowing images

and debating the hyphen between mind and blowing. In order to decide, just split apart the pieces and see if it still makes sense:

mind images
blowing images

Er, not so much. You really need to link mind and blowing because these two words form one conceptual unit, so you need a hyphen. Contrast this with,

tall cold beer

which can be split into

tall beer
cold beer

and still make sense. In that case, no hyphen is needed.

This isn't an all-purpose rule. There are exceptions, such as

beautifully made gown

because the -ly adverb used in this compound way never requires a hyphen. And then there are borderline cases, such as

ruby red gown

in which ruby modifies red, but can also be said to modify gown. These are sometimes called squinting modifiers -- modifiers which can be read to modify two different pieces -- and are held by purists to be evidence of imprecise writing. If you want to eliminate the squint, hyphenate ruby and red. Alternately, choose either ruby or red to modify gown. But, honestly, this is one of those areas of style and grammar in which reasonable minds can differ. You might choose one method and find that your copy editor changes it on you.

Theresa

Don't undercut the drama

I actually like underwriting, where you strip your prose of the more heavy-handed indicators of emotion and drama. You say, "Her anger," not "Her blazing anger," or you let the character's body express the emotion. Or you might use irony-- He got it. She was slightly pissed.

But remember the big moments should probably FEEL big. Not exaggerated, but as big as they are. You might achieve this by underwriting (I -love- it when a moment POWs with subtle language). However, there's a danger here. This underwriting at dramatic moments should be intentional (or effective, at least). You don't want to undercut by accident.

There are two ways you might accidentally undercut the drama of a big scene. One is placement. For example, usually the most intense emotional scene is positioned right before a big turning point scene, like the crisis. You want to work up to this, with a series of scenes building up the tension, then the Big Emotion, and then the Big Reaction. No burying it in the middle of the book between two low-key scenes. And reaction is essential. You don't want the reader thinking, well, the hero seems utterly unchanged, so it must not have been dramatic after all.

The other way to undercut drama is to use dismissive and undramatic language. Sometimes, of course, this can be effective-- if you do it well. But generally, if the hero is spurned by the woman he's loved desperately, or the heroine is defeated by a hated rival, or he finally comes clean on something he's been hiding, or she learns the truth about her parents... your prose should reflect the power of the event. This isn't the time to resort to cliche:
The jar was empty.
All those crumpled dollar bills, collected in twoyears of waiting tables on the midnight diner shift, meager tips from the drunks and the derelicts and the disappointed, were gone. Stolen.
Oh, well, win some, lose some.

Just as bad would be:
She was pretty unhappy.

Dramatic writing doesn't have to mean lots of pounding adjectives and high-strung verbs. Let the body show the emotion. What would be a good action or sequence of action to show her despair at finding two years of savings gone? She replaces the jar on the shelf. Then what does her body do?

Alicia

Another mark of the amateur

Someone asked for us to list what we see in submissions that we think of (cruelly) as "marks of an amateur."

A lot of introductory participial phrases, that's something that seems to correlate to "new writer" for me.

Here's another. Gushing. I'm thinking not of where, in the query letter, you tell me how wonderful I am (gush away then :), but rather in the story, where the writer amplifies in an overly positive way--

Like:
She was astoundingly beautiful.
The keychain was the most wonderfully perfect gift he'd ever received.
The chair was incredibly richly detailed.
The road was wonderfully pretty.

She was incredibly beautiful.

He was amazingly smart.

The problem is usually in the modifier/modified combination. This doesn't mean you shouldn't use modifiers-- I love 'em-- but be careful of redundant combos:

voraciously hungry

excruciatingly painful

enormously large

But you know, I could probably live with those, because I see that the writer has a vocabulary. But whenever I see "incredibly" in a sentence? Well, it means NOTHING. It's just an intensifier, and more annoying than, well, "more" or "very" (which are, after all, common words that mean exactly what they're meant to mean in the sentence-- intensification). "Incredibly" means 1) nothing, 2) not what you want it to mean in front of that other word. (It means "unbelievably," another empty intensifier.)

You don't want to sound like a pre-teen girl talking about how much she loves one of the Jonas Brothers, do you?

"Incredibly delicious..." This makes me think about how "delicious" used to be enough. You know, when I was growing up, a dish of vanilla ice cream was about as far as our little imaginations could reach. But that wasn't delicious enough, and now this is what you can order (for $7) for dessert: A brownie sundae, with brownie, hot fudge sauce, chocolate chips, marshmallow creme, whipped cream, oh, and vanilla ice cream. Definitely "incredibly delicious".

(Speaking of definitely... a couple semesters ago I had a raft of papers come in that kept using the word "defiantly" -- "I was defiantly glad that Mom and Dad adopted my little brother." "History is defiantly the major for future videogame writers." Whoa. I mean, that led to some interesting ideas... defiantly glad, huh? Mom and Dad punished you for being glad? Or? Then I realized that they'd all misspelled "definitely" the same way-- definately-- and spellcheck had corrected that to "defiantly". :)

Consider a "show" here so you don't have to "tell" so much.

Even raising his hand for the bill set off waves of pain through his shoulder.

He was so grateful he sat down and wrote his mother a thank-you note.

If we "see" the amazingly incredible whatever, we'll believe it more. After all, Helen wasn't termed "amazingly beautiful." Rather she had a face that launched a thousand ships.

Try to show the amazingness in some action or some comparison. Don't gush-- show us.

Alicia

Summing up participles? Other thoughts?

So, because I'm teaching a class on pacing and have gotten to the "prose" part, I think this might be a good opportunity to summarize what we all discussed about PPPs and such.

Jami mentioned that she thought maybe eliminating most of the PPPs could lead to the kind of "fresh, crisp" voice the editors keep asking for. Hmm. Good thought. There is nothing as "crisp" as the declarative SVO sentence, as it succinctly and immediately identifies the causer of the action, the action, and the recipient. Too many unadorned SVO sentences can feel choppy, but this should be the default, as it's so efficient in conveying information.

With that SVO (or just SV, for sentences that describe a condition with non-transitive -- no object-- verbs, like "I wept") as the main clause, you can build other types of sentences. But what's really important, really meaningful, is in a main clause, an independent clause, which can if need be be spun off as its own sentence-- for emphasis, for clarity.

But you can also build on that simple clear statement, adding whatever is needed to deepen the emotion, focus the description, hint at some complication. The kernel of meaning will still be there, however, and the reader will find it if you don't gild up the sentence too much.

I suspect that the more we put in front of the subject, the more arcane the sentence becomes and the more prone to errors. Readers are more likely to be confused at the start of the sentence because they don't have the accumulation of meaning yet. Later in the sentence, an extra phrase or qualifier won't confuse, because the reader knows the main point of the sentence and can put that all into context.

So what should go in front of the main clause? Well, someone-- who was that?-- was mentioning that "inflection" might go first-- that's what tells the reader how to read something. This is really important with dialogue-- we might read the line of speech differently if we know Joan shouted it rather than Pete whispering it.

Something else that might go well at the start of the sentence is some connective referring back, a transition like "Of course" or even a dependent clause like "Although he knew the truth--" That will help provide continuity between sentences (and it's really helpful in smoothing a paragraph break).

A setting or time marker, especially if it's short, can be essential to understanding not just this sentence but how it connects to the rest of the scene: "Across town..." or "The next day..."

And let's say you want to vary the openings of sentences-- do it in a meaningful way, with an element that adds to the reader's understanding and doesn't confuse.

So what else can we say about sentences? What have you found that works? I keep wanting to make a point about sentences and paragraphs-- that if you paragraph well, you'll resist the impulse for the long complicated sentences because you won't think you need to put everything in before the period. So often with these intro PPPs, I kept wondering-- why not do two sentences? When I read these 26-word sentences, with action, reaction, setting, and thought, I wonder, why not make a whole paragraph of this?

How we speak is not a reliable guide to how we should write, but that's something to consider. The reader will naturally consider sentence patterns that replicate the rhythms of conversation (even if the diction is more formal and all the "uhhs" are deleted :) more "authentic" and "real". That's not where you necessarily want to end up, but that might be where you want to start. Does this sound natural? The more conversational our voice is, the deeper our POV, the closer to character voice the narrative is-- the more we want to sound sort of like speech.

What do you all think? What suggestions do you have for revising sentences, especially the start of the sentence?

Alicia

The Last Piece of Theory on Present Participial Phrases

You're probably sick to death of listening to all the talk about the routine abuse of present participial phrases. Trust me, it could be worse. If we posted about this every time we rejected a sub for having too many of these errors, we'd have to rename the blog -ingtorrent.

But in all our talk about these pesky phrases, it occurs to me that we've never given you the final piece of theory. We explained that these phrases are adjective phrases. We talked about the nature of modifiers and how present participial phrases sometimes indicated weakness in the sentence's main clause. And, most recently, Alicia talked about using present participial phrases to signal concurrent actions.

Maybe you've already read these posts and drawn the conclusion I'm about to present. But just in case, and just so we're all clear on how these different bits of advice and theory work together, let's take a look at why these phrases must be concurrent and relevant to the main clause.

In the simple sentence,

The orange cat leaped onto the windowsill

we can all see that orange modifies cat. The cat's orange quality exists at the moment of leaping. In fact, we can assume the cat is orange at all times, barring unfortunate accidents with dye pots. Easy enough so far. But what happens when we replace that simple adjective with a present participle used as an adjective?

The hissing cat leaped onto the windowsill.

The act of hissing still describes the cat, and the act of hissing is still concurrent with the main action verb. Hissing is a state of being that exists during the totality of the leap. Hissing is not a discrete action all on its own. Or, I should say, it's not presented as such. If it were, it would be presented differently, perhaps,

The cat hissed and leaped onto the windowsill.

Then we would be describing a compound action (hissed and leaped) instead of describing a state of being (hissing) of a noun (cat) at the moment an action (leaped) occurs.

You with me so far? Verbs are actions. Adjectives describe qualities or states of being of a noun. And -- this is the main point -- the description of the noun must be simultaneous with the action. If the hissing and leaping occurred in sequence, one first and then the next, you would have to separate them in the sentence, perhaps with an adverb,

The cat hissed and then leaped onto the windowsill.

(Then is an adverb modifying leaped.)

Or you might shift the hissing into an adverb phrase,

After hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.
While hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

These phrases are adverbial in nature because they describe the time elements involved with the actions. They don't qualify the essential nature of the cat. They qualify the timeline. Because adverbs modify verbs, right? Verbs usually lay out the timeline for prose actions, so any time you need to clarify sequencing, you might need adverbs or adverb phrases. And these adverb phrases are not the same as,

Hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

Because this doesn't tell us diddly-squat about the sequencing. All we've done in this sentence is elaborate on an adjective (which modifies a noun, not a verb). (Forgive me if this sounds like harping. I'm trying to make this as clear as I can, and this seems to require some repetition of concepts.)

Remember that in the sentence,

The hissing cat leaped onto the windowsill.

the adjective hissing modified the noun cat. All we have done here is add a prepositional phrase to provide more information about the hissing. It's not just any hissing. It's hissing at a dog. But it still describes the essential nature of the cat.

The hissing at the dog cat leaped onto the windowsill.

This sentence is structurally awkward for a whole lot of reasons we won't get into here. But leaving aside all that awkwardness (and the punctuation issue, also a separate matter), the point is that hissing still modifies cat, and at the dog still modifies hissing, and modifiers still go next to the words they modify. You could use punctuation to get around the awkwardness,

The hissing-at-the-dog cat leaped onto the windowsill.

Or you could shift the phrase into an introductory position,

Hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

The cat's hissing-at-the-dog nature exists at the moment of the leap. And this is why present participial phrases, which are adjectival in nature, are simultaneous with the main actions of the sentence.

When Alicia was talking about causal and other connections between the present participial phrase and the main verb, I think she was mainly trying to make a point about relevance. We could describe the cat in lots of different ways.

Staring with its blue eyes and hissing at the dog, the cat leaped onto the windowsill.

Now there's a craptastic phrase for you. I had to use one that talked about what the cat is doing with its eyes, because these are generally weak phrases, far less meaningful than dynamic actions like hissing and leaping. Using less meaningful (or even irrelevant) phrases will dilute the impact of the sentence. The cat may very well have staring blue eyes for the duration of the leap. But so what? The fact that it's eyes are blue doesn't give us important information about the actions underway. And the staring -- well, anyone who has been around a cat knows they are champion starers. They stare because they're bored, content, hungry, etc., etc. But hissing only happens in response to a threat, so hissing gives us a more clear description of the cat's state of being at the moment of the jump.

Do we all understand this? Any questions? Got any sample sentences with participial phrases you want us to tackle? Post them in the comments if you do.

Theresa,
tempted to bore us further with another similar post on past participial phrases

Since and Because

Here's a little nit that hardly ever gets picked any more. In popular parlance, since and because have become more or less interchangeable. However, they don't actually mean the same thing.

Since implies a temporal relationship between two factors. The item in the dependent since clause (or phrase -- since can be used in either) sets the moment at which the topic of the independent clause became true. It also describes an ongoing situation or event that has been roughly continuous from the moment of the since until the "present" of the main clause.

Since the day we met, I've been able to think of no other man but you.

In other words, something changed, and that change can be traced to the since moment, and that change has been constant from the moment of the since. You wouldn't write,
Because the day we met, I've been able to think of no other man but you.

Because implies a causative link between the independent and dependent clauses. The item in the dependent because clause led to the existence of the item in the independent (main) clause. Get it? Because = cause.

Because the temperature dropped below freezing, all my tomato plants died.

The temperature change led directly to the death of the tomato plants. The death of the tomato plants is a one-time event, not ongoing or evolving.

In the common tongue, people frequently say,
Since the temperature dropped below freezing, all my tomato plants died.

And loads of perfectly respectable, well-educated folks don't shudder at the horror of the botched adverb. I know, I know. Hard to believe. But there you have it. And those of us who know better -- which now includes you fine readers -- have to accept that the language changes over time.

So when is the difference between since and because relevant or irrelevant in your writing? My rule of thumb is to correct it outside the quotation marks. Inside quotation marks, the difference can be ignored unless the character would not ignore it. Lawyers, for example, with their obsessive addiction to causation and the types of links between things, understand the difference between since and because. They're trained in it. Their speech is more likely to reflect that training. So if you have a legal thriller under way, you might search your manuscript on the keyword since and fix it throughout. What other types of characters would preserve this difference?

I'm tempted to go on a mini-rant here about why precision in word choices is so crucial to good writing, but it's Monday morning, and who needs that on a Monday? None of us. So instead, I'll treat myself to a fresh cuppa and skip the rant.

January was bedlam for me this year. So glad it's February. It's lovely to have a moment to commune with the blog. :)

Theresa

Then, And Then

Sadly, today my Uncampaign Mismanager and I decided to throw in the towel on our attempts to buy the open Illinois Senate seat from almost-ex-Governor Blagojevich. I so wanted to be Senator and dedicate my mighty clout to repealing the sales tax on chocolate, and we were only $27,999.68 short of the half mil we figured it would cost us. But what are ya gonna do. We knew we were racing the clock to satisfy the Guv's wild greed, and we lost to some other guy with quicker cash. Oh, well. Looks like I'm destined to be an editor, after all.

So, with my short and doomed campaign behind us, and with the refunds nearly complete to those who so cheerfully donated their Monopoly money, poker chips, and Chuck E. Cheez tokens to Our Noble Cause, I will bury my disappointment in work.

We'll start with a quick peek at the word then, followed by a caution about rules.

Technically, the word then is not a conjunction. It can be used

• as an adverb (to clarify the time at which a verb occurs, as in, "Blagojevich extorted payola, got caught, and then was forced to resign.")
• as a noun (to refer to a specific time, as in, "Since then, Blagojevich has resorted to taking bribes from his family members to get a haircut.")
• or as an adjective ( as in, "the then Governor Blagojevich remained unaware of how permanent the damage to his reputation would be.")

Sometimes, we see writers skip conjunctions when using then before a final verb in a series.

She stopped, dropped, then rolled.

And I must admit, even though this sort of thing will always jump off the page for me, I sometimes let it slide. Emphasis on sometimes. What that means is that in the vast majority of cases, I will insert the conjunction for clarity and rhythm.

So, I was thinking about Alicia's posts on compound predicates with missing conjunctions, and it made me think of the rash of manuscripts lately with faulty then constructions in just about every other paragraph. And I thought I would post this reminder that then is not a conjuction, but there's a bigger point to be made about both Alicia's and my posts.

In responding to Alicia's post, several of you raised examples of highly regarded authors who occasionally drop the conjunctions in compound predicates. I'm sure you can all find examples of authors who use then as an adverb without a conjunction, too. They're out there. I know it, and Alicia knows it, and you all know it, too.

So here's the thing. We say, here's the general rule. And we're right. And you say, but so-and-so breaks it. And you're right. But it's not enough to know the rule, and know that it can be broken. We have to also understand the effect to be created by breaking the rule in different circumstances or in different ways.

Because that's where precision lies. When a word is used with forethought and deliberation in an unexpected way, when a faulty construction is left to lie on the page like a painted whore, when a rule is quietly broken or forcefully shattered, then is a precise effect being caused upon the reader.

When you chain predicate verbs without a conjunction, you can create an impression of speed, or chaos, or actions that build in sequence to a pinnacle. The effect may vary from usage to usage, because this sort of thing is case specific. When you insert a then into such a chain, you might gain control over the sequence of events without sacrificing the effect of the dropped conjunction. So there are times when these things work, and I believe Alicia also recognized valid exceptions to the rules.

What we've been seeing lately, though, is a conjunction dropped for no apparent reason. There is no sense of a meticulous author controlling her prose by artfully breaking a rule. There is, instead, a sense of abandon. And not in a good way. It's not being done here and there for precise effects, but four or five times per page, almost like a nervous stutter in the written speech. The overall impression is one of sloppiness and disrespect for the language.

The next time you notice a published work breaking a rule, I want you to do two things. First, take a moment to congratulate yourself for recognizing the breach. You've worked hard to gain the knowledge and sharp eye that allowed you to do so, and that's a good thing.

Second, I want you to step back from the page for a moment. Appraise it as neutrally as possible. Ask yourself, why is the rule being broken here? Why here and not there? What effect is being created? Try rearranging the words to "fix" the prose, and see how the effect changes. Take the time to figure it out. It will be worth it in the end.

Theresa

Prepositions, ending with

Alicia here-
Notice that Theresa writes all that great info about the conference, and I'm fixated on single words. I have always thought of myself as a "big picture" type person, but I'm re-imaging my self-image. I'm beginning to think I'm, horrors, a pedant. Or as Lynn Truss (Eats, Shoots, and Leaves-- fabulous book if you love punctuation -- actually, Theresa gave it to me!) would term it, I am a stickler.
Just a quick stickler note because I came across this issue lately --

The "rule" that you should never end a sentence with a preposition is really incompatible with the English language. English has a lot of predicates which are verb+preposition (just look at "look": look at, look over, look towards, look away from, look up, look down...) and so often when you end a sentence on one of these predicates (perfectly correct), you end up with a preposition as the last word of the sentence:

He glanced over.
She looked up.
He didn't know what this was about. (Was about is actually the full predicate there, I think.)
A preposition? Well, that's what the sentence ended with.

"Fixing" this often ends up with a sentence like Churchill's classic: "That is an impertinence up with which I will not put."

All due respect to Churchill, who knew exactly what to do with the English language... he's right. Fixing often makes for even more awkward sentences. But, well, if you can, rewrite it. Why? Because a preposition really not a great way to end a sentence. The last word of a sentence, like the first, should ideally have some power, and a preposition is always going to be a bit lame, because it's a "position" word, not a noun or verb (which carry, respectively, concreteness and vitality). Also, you're bound to run into a reader (or an editor) who knows the rule but not the exceptions, and so thinks you're wrong even if you're not. (I don't do that much, but I recklessly use "hopefully" as a sentence adverb-- Hopefully, the picnic won't be rained out-- and always when I'm with my father-in-law, who regards "hopefully" as a barbarism akin to cannibalism and hence looks upon me with suspicion now, especially when I ask him to pass the mustard.)

Anyway, whenever you break a "rule," stop and see if you can recast the sentence to avoid it. (If the "wrong" way is the best way, you'll learn that by trying and failing to recast it.) Just experiment. The original sentence won't fly away if you try a few others. It'll wait patiently for you to come abjectly back and beg forgiveness. :)

Here's the sentence, very simple, that started me on this (context so it will make more sense-- this is about a young woman on her 4th marriage, and the dilemma is, should the heroine attend the wedding and give yet another present to the oft-bride, and I'm modifying the original to make the point while disguising it, so I apologize for the clumsiness-- it wasn't so awkward to start with):
She might have fewer weddings if she didn't think of them as fun parties she got lots of presents at.

Easy to fix, once you decide that you're going to get rid of that awkward ending prep:
She might have fewer weddings if she didn't think of them as fun parties where she got lots of presents.

Not that prepositions can NEVER end sentences (as I ranted during that semicolon argument I mean debate, never say never). But while I will fight to the death for your right to do that when it works, usually there's a better way to cast the sentence.
Alicia