A Grammar Lesson with Two Small Errors

This can be called a style issue, or maybe even a good taste issue, but it’s a readability issue.

Here’s the lesson. You probably won’t see the errors:

• First, you should put quotes around “Me” because you are referring to the word itself. Using italics is okay, too, depending on what your style guide says. The comic is funny because the cartoonist didn’t put the quotes around “me” in the first panel, leading you to think the horse was going to talk about himself, not the word.
• Second, that slash between “him” and “herself.” Use “or.” (Or use “and” if that’s appropriate.) Many people use the slash when they can’t decide which conjunction to use. Don’t be lazy! Decide!
• sigh. I may as well mention a third possible mistake. When you have two (or more) compound words and want to mention the second part only once, put a hyphen after that first separated part. Write “him- or herself.”

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I know, the technical term is concision, but only we geek tech writers and English teachers use that term. Anyway, the third rule of good expository writing is to be concise—no extra words.

So here’s an example of someone promulgating the idea of not being wordy, (or over-written, as the commenter says elsewhere). The passage is in the comments to a review of Toy Story 4 in the Washington Post. (Edited for conciseness and punctuation.) It starts with a quote from the review.

The disaster, in this case, is 2019’s Summer of Sequelae, as dismal a movie season as audiences can remember as one spinoff has followed the other with a graceless thud. Thankfully, “Toy Story 4” arrives just in time to redeem filmgoers’ faith, if not in humanity, then at least in the humaneness of inanimate creatures who have more heart, pluck and conscience in their plastic pinkies than most real-life adults. 

How about this:

The disaster in question seems to be the entire blockbuster season of 2019; a string of graceless thuds. Thankfully, “Toy Story 4” arrives just in time to redeem film-goers’ faith — if not in humanity, then at least in character.

I think the passage could be more concise than that, even:

The blockbusters of 2019 are a string of graceless thuds. “Toy Story 4” arrives in time to redeem the season.

or even

Toy Story 4 redeems a season of graceless thuds.

That’s not as colorful as the original, but this site promulgates expository writing, whose goal is to convey the content, not the writing style—perhaps drier than necessary for a movie review.

PS—I ran into another article about the movie. This was the last sentence:

In a summer of stupid sequels, ‘Toy Story 4’ is a visually dazzling delight

When we take a letter out of a word, we replace it with an apostrophe, and call the result a contraction. Here’s a contraction I don’t think I’ve run into. Last panel…

I suppose you can delete the “h” from “him” and replace it with an apostrophe…

Okay, so where does the apostrophe go?

Not before the “s,” not after the “s.” You remove it! This is another of those uncommon cases in English where you put the adjective after the noun, such as “court martial” and “attorney general.”

Can you think of any others?

If you have more than one, you have a plural, even if you have more than one of the same thing. Middle panel:

You can change this by changing the subject to “each.” So “…would you want to find each of them an good home?” Now “them” is the object of the the preposition and “each” is a nice singular to go with “a good home.

So be careful!