Over the next several days, we’ll be showing you a few examples that we’ve spotted at the show, but to start things off… well, let’s kick out the jams and go with the “Oh come on, you can’t be serious” ebike. It called the BlackTrail, and with a top speed of 100 km/h (62 mph), it’s officially the world’s fastest electric bicycle – and probably the most awesome-looking, to boot.

The show is in the past, and the spotting was a group of single events. Simple past, folks. They spotted some examples at the show; nice and clean, easy to read.

How might they have used the “we have spotted” correctly? Let’s change the event to the present, so their spotting can be still going on. And let’s add the progressive to make the idea of continuing activity clear. Now they can write about some bikes that they have been spotting for us. See? now it’s correct—something that has been going on, and continues even now.

Here’s the bike, by the way. It doesn’t look all that impressive to me. Might be fun to ride, though.

I don't think he knows how to dress for bicycling, either

If you’re into electric bicycles (I use a human-powered one), you might like to follow the series. Here’s a link to the first article in the series, which they will be writing. (Oo! A future progressive!)

Mt. Sinabung, in Sumatra

This long-dormant volcano erupted August 29, much to everyone’s surprise. After all, when your local mountain sits quietly for four centuries, you don’t exactly expect things to start jumping. It was so unexpected, even the news media got their English wrong. You knew I was going to get around to grammar, somehow, right? Here’s the quote:

As of Sunday afternoon, 50 tons of rice and 12,000 face masks have been supplied to temporary shelters.

This was written on Monday. Sunday is in the past. Since the time frame is explicitly in the past, the over-excited writer (and the editor!) should have used the past perfect, “…had been supplied…” Re-read the sentence with “had.” It reads smoother, doesn’t it? Harrumpf.

Please don’t think I’m trivializing a fairly serious event for the residents of the area. I am, however, keeping my promise to include more pictures in this blog’s posts.

Click to go to Amazon

The peeve is hyphenated compound adjectives. Or rather non-hyphenated ones. When you combine two (or more) words to modify a noun, you hyphenate them so they stay together. If you don’t, the last of the words attaches to the noun, and you can get quite a different meaning.  (You can get away without the hyphen if the words form a common combination and there is no possibility of misunderstanding.)  So twenty-odd means approximately twenty, but an odd duck is a person with significant personality quirks. The hyphen or lack thereof tells your reader what you mean. So give the book a read for me, would you?

Speaking of grammar books, someone recently asked me about one that mentions uncommon verb forms, such as the periphrastic that forms the title of this post. I remember Mrs. Baird, my tenth grade English teacher, made us include “to be about to” in our verb declensions, and I haven’t seen it referred to since. Maybe it was the influence of the Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in her background. She was an odd duck…

Anyway, look for a Grammar that’s at least three inches thick. That should have it all those verb forms.

Enough of the technical stuff about non-English.

Use the past when something happened in the past, period, especially if you mention the time. Use the present perfect if the thing happened in the past and continued until now. Use the present perfect progressive if something started in the past and isn’t finished yet. And use the past perfect if something happened in the past, continued for a while, then ended in the past.

Here’s an example of how not to do it, from NASA (or one of their fans) no less. I apologize for not having a screen shot–I collected this error before the post about having more pictures. I’ll make it up to you later.

NASA has created an “Astrobiology Roadmap” in 2008 that outlines pathways for research and exploration…

This describes the creation of the roadmap as a single event, so they should have said, “NASA created etc.” The present tense for “outlines” is okay, because the map still outlines the pathways, even though they created the map a while back. (Yes, some would argue that the effect of the creation continues to the present, and I would grudgingly grant them their point.) The issue is clearer if the writer had said something like “Last year NASA created…” Clearly past tense, on that one, eh?

So:

Here’s a rule of thumb: Try using the simple past tense. if it works, use it. Don’t bother with the present perfect.

Here’s a good use of the present perfect: You’re a kid, and Auntie Mabel comes over for a visit, and she gushes

My how you’ve grown!

Growing is something that takes place over time, so the present perfect is appropriate. What do you say as you slam your textbook shut? “I have finished my homework!” What so you say at supper an hour later when your parents ask yo about your homework? “Yup, I finished it.”

Past perfect: it took a while and ended in the past.

I thought I had been a diligent student, but then I met Don.

Lara had never been to A large department store until she came to the US.

Progressive. That’s the tense with ‘ing. It means that the action is still happening, or was still happening when something else happened.

He was singing operatically to himself when I came home.

I had been singing for two hours when you came home.

I have been hoping that you don’t mind if I sing in private.

Of course you can think of piles of examples, good and bad, and you can be alert for them as you read. Maybe you have an example to share in the comments. If you think about it for several minutes, you will have been about to make a comment before you actually did so. (That’s future perfect periphrastic, which we won’t get into.)

And since I didn’t copy the web page I got the NASA sentence from, here’s another NASA photo:

These students had been weightless for almost a minute when this picture was taken

And for you guys who were hoping for a girlie picture, I created this link. It’s a picture of an astronette.

My idea: Maybe I should take screen shots of bad writing I find on the web and use them to illustrate my posts. Posts with illustrations would certainly be more colorful than what you’re getting now, and maybe I’d get more than two readers (me and my daughter).

What do you think?

I suppose I could look for bad writing near girlie pictures. But then no one would read the articles.

Girlie picture.

… fitted with provision for a padlock to protect against any unauthorized tampering.

Two useless words here.  Find them before reading on.

“Unauthorized” is easy to remove. Tampering, by definition, is unauthorized, so you don’t need to say it. You also don’t need “any.” Take “any” out.  See? The meaning is the same. So our padlock is to protect against tampering, period.

Less work to read, better signal-to-noise ratio. Your readers will love you.

I cropped the heading and deleted the phone number to protect the guilty.

Here’s the first bad sentence:

We are a company that has been in business for over fifteen years making some wonderful home improvements to your biggest investment, your home.

It’s not true! He hasn’t touched my home! (ahem, well, actually, he did, and he did a fine job. But he’s not referring to me on his site, right?) And he certainly hasn’t been working on my home for 15 years. The whole sentence needs rewriting. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fix this poor, misshapen attempt at trying to sound experienced and competent.

Actually, that was the second bad sentence. He’s been in business for more than fifteen years. (I quibble. “Over” is common, but “more than” is better.)

Here’s another bad sentence.

The bottom photos display some of our work by just clicking the tabs below.

Who’s going to click the tabs? He says it’s the photos. Did you notice that moment of confusion when you read the sentence? That’s what you don’t want to happen when someone reads your writing.

The word “just”—it’s fluff (see previous post). Kill it.

The site has another problem, too. The tabs are independent from the pictures. You don’t even get a tab for each picture. And though the pictures have links under them (not underlined—they don’t look like links), they aren’t mentioned. He does mention the pictures, but clicking them has no effect.

That’s some of the top half of the first page. I could go on, but I won’t. This is enough curmudgeonly ranting for one post.

His web developer needs better writing and user interface skills, but the owner of the site is a very good, scrupulously honest, outstandingly capable builder. If you live in Delaware and need some work done to your house, drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch with him. He’ll take good care of you. Just don’t ask him to write anything.

Fluff can appear so many ways in writing, the concept is best taught by example. Lots of examples, so expect to see more posts on this subject in the future. (I suppose the last three words of that sentence qualify as fluff, since they don’t change the meaning. When else would you expect to see more posts but in the future?)

Speaking of time, here’s an example of fluff that refers to the past:

[the customer] has a previous history of experience with our product.

Can you identify the fluff? Yup, history is always previous, so strike “previous.”

Here’s the best rule I can think of regarding fluff: If deleting it doesn’t change the meaning, delete it. You end up with concise, smooth prose that people love to read.

I invite you to comment with an example of fluff that you love to hate.

A homophone is a word that sounds exactly like another word, but is spelled differently and has a different meaning. Such as blue, the color, and blew, past tense of blow. Another famous example is there, their, and they’re. Puhleeze—get those right! Because the spelling is different, a wrong homonym is easy to spot, so it’s a really good way to betray your lack of grasp of English.

Here’s one from the article:

“So, without further adieu…”

He meant “without further ado.”  Adieu means farewell, and ado means, well, commotion. “Adieu” is even harder to spell than “ado.” And he had the title of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing to guide him. I’m not sure why he went to all that work just to get it wrong.

Here’s the other:

“We have to make due for the moment with concept and design sketches seen here…” (BMW wouldn’t let him photograph the motorcycle.)

It’s “make do.” Both due and do have many meanings, but the correct word here is “do.”

I will say that it is an impressive motorcycle.

Bonus: If the words are spelled the same but have different origins, they are homographs (row a boat, lined up in a row), and if they are spelled the same but pronounced differently, they are heteronyms. (—a tear in some fabric, and a tear running down your cheek). Yes, you can have overlap. Depends on which dictionary you use, and who your English teacher was.

“…to allow scientists to examine the creature for clues of how it may have died.”

Can you tell what’s wrong with this sentence?

“Clues” implies indefiniteness, and so does “may” (which is incorrect for two other reasons which I’ll get to in a moment). So we have a redundancy—an unnecessary repetition.

Now to decide which to remove, the “clues” or the “may.”

For one thing, they called it a carcass in the headline, and said “dead animal” elsewhere in the caption. The animal is clearly dead—no “may have died” here. Furthermore, they might not figure out why the animal died, so “clues” is appropriate.

So let’s go with “…to allow marine biologists to look for clues to how the creature died.”

Two more goodies from this sentence:

• First, note the change to a more specific term than “scientists.” Better writing.
• Second, use “might” to express doubt, not “may.” Save “may” for permission.

You may now go forth and write better.

The post mentions two errors to watch out for and avoid: Be careful to get your prepositions right, and use vivid words, not blah ones.

I hinted at a third lesson. (I said I had looked at a sentence after not seeing it for a couple days.)

PROOFREAD!!!

If I had set the original message aside and looked at it after a couple days (enough time to forget what I had written), I would have noticed the ambiguity and fixed it. Proofreading right after you write something is a good habit—it helps you fix the typos and obvious errors. But if you can put some time between your writing and your final check before you hit Send, you’ll notice and fix the subtle errors.

Your readers will thank you for it.

“Thought you’d like to know I quoted something on your site today.”

(Give me poetic license for leaving off the first person singular subject, okay?)

Everything is grammatical, but what is on that site? My first reading of the sentence after not looking at it for several days told me I claimed to have visited that person’s site and written something there. But I hadn’t. I did the writing on my site (The post on parallelism, below, to be exact.) I had quoted something from his site on my site. The sentence would have been better if I had included both prepositional phrases:

“I thought you’d like to know that I quoted something from your site on my site today.” Still not super good, but better.

The most natural reading of that original sentence is to have the “on your site” modify the verb “quoted,” and herein lies another lesson. Normally a prepositional phrase appears right after the word it modifies. Why do we want to jump over “something” to make the preposition modify the verb?  Because “something” is so bland. It could be Mark Twain, Socrates, an ephemeris, the newspaper, anything. In fact, the word is so general, you wonder what’s the point of the sentence saying that I went to his site and quoted something. Rah rah, big deal.

So let’s get rid of that pointless word and replace it with something oops a word more vivid: Mistake. Or solecism (mistake in grammar). Or goof. Now we have:

“I thought you’d like to know that I quoted a mistake on your site today.”

I didn’t say anything about me or where I wrote the quote, but now the reaction is, “What? A mistake on my site? And he quoted it? Who is this guy? An antivaxer? (inside joke) A reporter? My old English teacher?

Now it’s clear, and it has some punch. I can tell who I am and where I wrote in another sentence, which I did.

One last thing—I didn’t say what the mistake was. That was on purpose. A rule regarding certain types of writing is to avoid repeating yourself, and I had already described the mistake here on my site, so I pointed him to my article. I saved some repetition, and he could decide whether to go find out what the mistake was—I wasn’t forcing him to read my opinion.

By the way—he visited here and fixed the error. Mission accomplished, even though I made a mistake.

Sometimes part of a sentence is compound, such as when you write two verbs for one subject. Tommy jumped and ran. No problem so far, right? Those verbs are both third person singular past indicative. (Remember all that from seventh grade?)

Even if you don’t remember all that, the point is that both verbs are that way.  That’s parallelism. The rule in English is that when you have a compound part of a sentence, the parts of the compound construction should be parallel.  You wouldn’t say, “Tommy jumped and running.”

When the sentences get longer, you have to be more careful, because the lack of parallelism is easier to miss. Here’s a sentence from a professional writer whose work I enjoy. He’s writing about himself, in the third person, and I suppose we can forgive him for this small solecism—he’s an astronomer.

“He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.”

So—do you see the compound verb? fights, and whoops! praising. He should get rid of the excessive “as well as” and use plain old “and.” then the parallelism is easier to see and get right:

“He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science and praises the wonder of real science.”

Sometimes you can play fast and loose with parallelism, but when you want to write most clearly, keep it simple. Stay parallel.

See if you can spot some misplaced verb forms. Share one with us in the comments.