Bad attraction

rogersgeorge on April 19th, 2012

The Writing Rag’s last post made a passing reference to attraction.

This is not the kind of attraction I'm talking about. (thx to Bob Rz on Deviant Art)

Grammatical attraction is when a word picks up a grammatical characteristic from a nearby word. I’m told this is permitted in Latin. However, it is generally frowned upon in English. The exception is when you have a compound phrase that uses “or” as the conjunction, you take the number (singular or plural) from the last word in the phrase. So you have something like “an apple or some grapes are enough to eat before supper, young man.” Or “A few grapes or an apple is enough…” Well-remembered quotes from my mother, long ago. With “and” as the conjunction, it’s always plural, by the way.

But attraction is a no-no when you get the number of a verb from a nearby prepositional object. In English, the subject and the verb must always agree, no matter how far apart they are. And for a quote that forces me to point out this error, from the March 2012 Scientific American, whose writing standards used to be impeccable, but seem to have slipped a bit, especially in their blogs (but I digress):

In Western democracies, consolidation of Internet service providers has put a shrinking number of corporate entities in control of growing shares of Internet traffic, giving companies such as Comcast and AT&T both the incentive and power to speed traffic served by their own media partners at the expense of competitors.

A small but dedicated community of digital activists are working on it.

(The “it” in the second sentence does not refer to what’s going on in the first sentence.) Look at the verbs. In the first sentence, they got it right. The subject is “consolidation,” a singular. The verb is “has put,” also singular. Good! They got it right in this long and complicated sentence. But look at the second sentence. The subject is “community,” a singular. And the verb? “Are working.” A plural! How did they get “A community are working?” By attraction to the plural object in the phrase “of digital activists.” I remember Mrs. Clemens in sixth grade warning us to be alert for this goof.

Don’t you make it.

P.S. I ran into this sentence the day after I posted this lesson. Can you find the mistake? I hope it jumps out at you.

An analysis of 1.95 billion cell phone calls and 489 million text messages reveal how men and women follow different relationship patterns during their lifetimes.

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And or or or and/or?

rogersgeorge on April 15th, 2012

I left the punctuation out of the title to get your attention. It should be this: “And” or “or” or “and/or”?

These two conjunctions sometimes give people problems, especially when either word makes sense. So here are a few guidelines.

“And” creates a plural. (The correct name for this kind of plural is compound.) Dick and Jane are siblings. Naturally, we have some exceptions. When a single thing has a compound name, we still use the singular. Research and Development is a new department at our company, which is named Swift & Co.

“Or” takes its number from the last item. Either ham or eggs are fine with me. Either eggs or ham is enough.  (Taking a grammatical feature based on the closest item is called attraction, by the way.)

Then we have the ugly formation “and/or.” I read that a town once legislated the word “andor,” but it didn’t catch on. Usually this pseudo-word is a testament to sloppy thinking. Ask yourself, “How much is necessary for this sentence to be true?” If one of the items is sufficient, even if they both can happen then use “or.” Most of the time this is the case.  If both things happening is genuinely a third item, then add “or both” to your sentence. Usually I find “and/or” in material written by amateur writers, so my handy example sentences are (ahem) protected by a confidentially agreement, so I’ll try to make something up:

If your tires have bald spots and/or start to hydroplane on wet pavement, it’s time to get new tires.

When the government is corrupt, the people can get restless and/or rebel.

Obviously either condition should be enough to make you start looking for a tire store. “Or” will do just fine. For that second sentence, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide.

All this about these conjunctions was stimulated by an interesting sentence I found in a book I’m reading, Pandora’s Seed by Spencer Wells. It’s about the results of the creation of agriculture on the current state of humanity. It ranges far wider than Jared Diamond’s essay on that topic, Humanity’s Worst Mistake.

There are two solutions to this problem: use less energy or find another source.

He should have used “and” instead of “or” here. Most of the time “or” connotes separation (XOR in Boolean algebra) but the beginning of the sentence clearly joins the two as both being a choice, and they aren’t mutually exclusive anyway, so this is better:

There are two solutions to this problem: use less energy and find another source.

Some of you might accuse me of nit picking, but the sentence jumped out at me. Remember, you want your readers to think about the content, not the writing.

I like to include a picture in these posts, so here’s a picture of the kind of seeds pictured on the cover of the book:

Interesting choice of seed, eh?

Yummy writing

rogersgeorge on April 13th, 2012

This post is a nice relaxing one—not too much grammar. It’s not yet time to post an example of outstanding writing, this being post number 168 (not 200), but I have an example of some pretty good writing to share with you. I confess that I’m a bit prejudiced because the writing is about several of my favorite non-writing topics: Local organic food, self-sufficiency, gardening, cooking, and (ahem) my wife. She has a friend, Rachel, who writes a local food blog called Rachel’s Table, which I suggest you go look at. Tell Rachel I sent you. Anyway, we had a few parsnips in our garden that had wintered over, and they came out a week or so ago as my wife prepped the beds for this season. My wife gave her one of the parsnips (and for effect, left it caked with dirt).

Enough preamble; here’s a picture of a parsnip plant:

Parsnip plant. Photo by Valerie George

I can’t resist saying something about the writing on the site. First, I found no actual grammatical mistakes or typos beyond a single missing comma and one tense I would have changed. Those are nit picks. The quality is far superior to a lot of Scientific American blog posts I’ve seen lately. Altogether, it’s a lighthearted, useful, and enjoyable read, and the photos are appropriate and useful.

One other point of interest: The third sentence of her post contains a nice example of hyperbole. Can you spot it?

A new copy editor

rogersgeorge on April 10th, 2012

It’s called EditMinion, and it’s a website. You copy some of your deathless prose into it, click Edit, and it displays a “report card,” including a markup of your text.

Now I’m a firm advocate of thinking about what you write, and of having other humans look at your writing as well. But I put some of this humble blog into EditMinion, and I got a high grade, so I have to like it at least a little. Just as with Microsoft’s grammar checker, running your creation through one of these things can be a good source of ideas, though you will most likely disagree with a lot of the program’s judgement calls. I don’t think they’ve invented software that can evaluate poetic license yet.  Automated editors tend to find things that share two characteristics: they find simple solecisms, and things that are so common you don’t notice them. That’s worth something. Here’s what the site looks like:

Here's the link. Give it a try!

Old instructions

rogersgeorge on April 7th, 2012

I’m not sure what approach to take on today’s topic.

Last week my brother (whom I hadn’t seen for maybe five years) and I visited the museum on the campus of the US Naval Academy. I was embarrassed at the poor quality of the writing  on many of the labels, but that’s a story for another post. One of the displays showed an instruction book for building a sailing ship. Here is a single sentence from the open page:

Some say the general method, which has been pitch’d upon by the greater number of shipwrights and others, and may be term’d shipwrights Hall Rule, is to take the length of the keel, measured from the back of the main post, to the fore-side of the stem, at the upper edge of the lower harping, by a perpendicular made from thence to the upper or lower edge of the keel, only 3/8 of the main breadth, from the outside of the plank of one side to the outside of the plank of the other side, at the broadest place of the ship, being set backward of aftward from the right angle made by such a perpendicular and base.

The intended readership was people in a skilled trade: shipwrights. No people with doctorates or fancy academic backgrounds here. The book contained illustrations, but not for this particular sentence. Think you could handle a whole book of this kind of writing? We built some pretty good sailing ships back then, too. Someone told me that the readership for The Federalist Papers, heavy reading forced on a few high school and college students, was New England farmers. I’m a bit concerned about the typical person’s reading and comprehension skills nowadays.

On the other hand, I celebrate that the technical writing trade has advanced to make even complex instructions (fairly) easy to understand, allowing people to concentrate on the task without having to spend a lot of effort deciphering the instructions. (One of my guidelines is that bad writing must not be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.) After all, we build some pretty good spaceships and computers.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.