When “You” Means “Me”

The dinosaur is talking about himself the whole time, even though he switches from first person (me) in his first sentence, to second person (you) in the second sentence. He uses “you” in a generic sense, which I mentioned a while back.

What the dinosaur is saying would be smoother if he had stuck with either first person or second person the whole time. Try reading it to yourself each way. Which do you like better?

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that I consider conciseness to be an important part of good writing, particularly expository writing, (writing to explain things).

I don’t ordinarily let someone else do all the work, either, but I think this gives a good picture of not being concise, and it’s funny.

See my comment about being paid by the word a few posts back.

Over the years I’ve mentioned all four of these incorrect rules, both in the classroom and on this blog. Use the search box in the upper right to find several mentions of each bad rule.

What English language rules are incorrect?

Never split an infinitive
Never end a sentence with a preposition
Never use a double negative
The pronouns “them” and “they” are always plural, never singular

I had forgotten the source of these rules. I think he was mentioned once in my sophomore English class. But I have long known that these rules were bad. Anyway, here’s an essay from Quora on the subject. It was written by Franklin Veaux, published author and compulsive writer. Thank you, sir, for the reminder.

All four of these rules were made up by one person, Bishop Robert Lowth.

Lowth was a religious scholar who was obsessed with the “purity” and perfection of Latin. He had a big-time fetish for Latin grammar. He considered Latin the ideal language, and believed that English should be more like Latin.

In 1762, he published a book on English grammar that made up a whole bunch of new rules, including the four above. His sole rationale for many of these rules was simply to try to force English grammar to be closer to Latin grammar.

Those rules had never been part of English until he made them up, and outside of prescriptivist grammar taught in school, they never caught on. Today, English grammar experts have largely abandoned teaching any of them.

They aren’t expository writing! Even though people treat them as if they were. Headlines are marcom (marketing communications). We tech writers say that all marcom people are insane, and it’s true!

I’ve been meaning to write a post about headlines, and I ran into this comic on the subject , so here’s the post. First the comic:

Okay, here are several headlines on one topic in the rather uncontroversial field of astronomy:

• Our Galaxy is Destined for a Head-on Collision
• Galaxy collision to send solar system flying?
• ‘GREAT COLLISION’ COULD WAKE UP THE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE AT THE MILKY WAY’S CENTER
• Galactic collision could wake up Milky Way’s dormant black hole
• Black hole in middle of Milky Way could grow TENFOLD, scientists predict HUGE space crash
• Our Milky Way to Face Double-KO Punch in Two Galactic Collisions – Astronomers
• The Milky Way Could Crash Into Another Galaxy Billions of Years Earlier Than Predicted
• Catastrophic Galactic Collision Could Send Solar System Flying into Space

The actual topic sentence should be something like “Astronomers have recently increased their precision regarding the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

We are not in danger—the event is more than a billion years from now. Are the headlines true? Well, they’re all about side issues, not the main topic. Literally true, perhaps, but misleading!

A lot of us read only headlines, and for every topic I’ve checked into— politics, energy, global warming, environment, economics, private lives of famous people, you name it—both sides (all sides?) frequently distort what’s going on either to get you to click, or to convince you of their position if you don’t read in depth.

And don’t get me started on checking the source of the headline…

Here’s the rule:

Don’t trust headlines!

We have four kinds of horizontal lines in English typography. Everybody knows about the hyphen; you even have two keys for it on your keyboard, the minus key, and up toward the right end of the top row of keys. Speaking of that key, the slightly longer horizontal line above the hyphen is, counterintuitively, the underscore character. (If you want the underscore under letters, you have to use the underscore font style, Ctrl-u in MS Word.)

You might or might not know about the other two horizontal lines, the N-dash and the M-dash. (Alt-0150 and Alt-0151 respectively. Hold down the Alt key while you type the digits on the numeric keypad.)

• Use the N-dash to show a range; your work hours are 9–5, for example.
• Use the M-dash to show a break in thought. It’s like a strong parenthesis.

And here we come to the matter of style:

Don’t put spaces around your dashes.

Those spaces waste space. Here’s an otherwise good sentence with those bad spaces:

That year — 2014 — three young quantum gravity researchers came to an astonishing realization. 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-space-and-time-could-be-a-quantum-error-correcting-code-20190103

Yes, you can insert the spaces, but don’t.

PS—I just ran into an alternative to the M-dash in a place where I’m not used to seeing it: Professional writing. That alternative is two hyphens. Typing two hyphens is okay for casual writing, say, on a typewriter, but not in an ezine article. I suspect his editor was asleep n the job. Here’s the sentence:

Hope you stayed up late watching West Coast basketball (and/or the Masked Singer premiere) last night — otherwise you might’ve missed the quasi-surprise drop of this April’s entire Coachella lineup at 11:28 p.m. ET. 

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/festivals/8492113/coachella-2018-lineup-five-takeaways

Don’t do that, either.