Don’t Use Weak Verbs

If you can, avoid using “make,” “do,” and any form of “to be” in your writing. Those verbs are ambiguous, and ambiguity is the enemy of good writing. Except in poetry and lies.

Here’s an example with “make.”

I admit, the choices aren’t graceful.

• Manufacture them fast enough
• Engineer them to go fast enough

But what matters is that you not be ambiguous!

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A malaprop is when you have the meaning right but the pronunciation wrong. I don’t think a malaprop requires the mispronunciation to be an actual word. (In which case I know a member of my local home government who makes a lot of malaprops. But I digress.)

Anyway, the toaster gives the guy his revenge…

Wouldn’t you know it; I ran into a comic about malaprops!

Quiz: Can you tell what the correct words are? I counted six malaprops…

Two of my rules about good writing are to be clear and correct, the latter partly meaning to follow the rules of grammar and spelling. We call these rules the mechanics. I even proofread my emails and seldom abbreviate even my grocery lists (ahem, whenever I write one).

I even have a sixth rule, to write for your readership, and here I must depart a bit from correctness. There’s a place for variation in writing style. On the one extreme, we have passages like the Olive Leaf Petition I mentioned two posts ago, addressed to King George III, and on the other extreme, well, I’ll let this 9 to 5 comic speak for itself, and for me:

Sigh, I hate to say it, but he has a point.

I generally write these posts in advance, so sometimes another comic comes along that also makes my point. Case in, um, point:

Good old Bob Thaves, the master of puns. Here’s his latest:

Now a too-simple quiz: Why are those two letters an F and an E?

By the way, most asterisks have five or six pedals, not eight. They are called pedals, right?

English doesn’t use accents, officially, though we do have the diaresis (dee-AIR-a-sis) , which has fallen into disuse. Technically, you use the diaresis when you have a pair of vowels that could be interpreted as a digraph (both vowels making one sound such as the “oa” in “boat), but they need to be pronounced separately. “Coöperate” is the old way of spelling co-operate. Another one is “naïve,” which, I think, you see somewhat more often.

Then we have loan words, words borrowed from another language, and they bring their accents with them. The example of this that comes to mind immediately is the word for a document summarizing your work history, intended you get you an interview. It’s résumé. You really need to use those accents, because English has a perfectly good word spelled without the accents. Fortunately the two words don’t generally appear in the same context. (ahem) The comic below could be an example of both words together; his résumé resumes below the repair.

So how do you make accents?

• You can find one someplace and do a copy and paste.
• You can look up the ASCII code (google it). To use the ASCII code, hold down the Alt key while you type the (Latin-1) numbers on the numeric keypad. I don’t have a Mac, but apparently you hold down Option-Shift while you enter the (Roman) number.
• There’s a browser extension named Accent Grid for Chrome in the Chrome Web Store that shows a 4×4 grid of accented characters that you copy and paste into your document. You can change the choice of characters that appear by going to Settings and entering the html code for the character.
• Many applications have their own keystroke combinations for some of these, too.
• Memorize a few that you use a lot. The lowercase e with an acute accent, for example, is Alt-0233. In Word you can also do Ctrl-Alt-e.