Points of GrammarEvery Policy Wonk

and History Student should know….

Commas Matters• Remember this old internet joke? A

panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a sloppily produced wildlife manual, tosses it over his shoulder, and says, “I’m a panda! Look it up.” The waiter turns to the relevant entry: …..“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

• Comma IQ

A huge hotdog!

• A huge, hot dog!

The Apostrophe

[The apostrophe] started out with just one simple function: to show where letters had been left out. Up above, there is an apostrophe in the word that’s. It helps us see the shortened version of “that is.” ~ Lynn Truss

Your and You’re• Your= Possessive pronoun. “Tony found your

backpack.”• You’re= You are. “You’re sure about that?”

Its and It’s• All possessives are made with an apostrophe

EXCEPT (and this is a huge exception) for the possessive of the word it. Which is simply its.

• If you want to say “ it is” or “it has” the word you want is “it’s”.

The Possessive uses an Apostrophe.

But Plurals Never use an Apostrophe

• You found one shoe, but you need both shoes.

• Two busses went past before you caught the D-6.

Where did the Possessive Apostrophe come from?

Author Lynn Truss argues that it stands for a reflexive passive pronoun used in late Middle English-- something like “King Arthur, his book.” Such usages still exist in colloquial German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Afrikaans.

Others argue that Old and Middle English was an inflected language, like most of those languages you study, and it has a genitive case meaning that there was an “es” sound. English dropped its cases (except in pronouns), so as cases were dropped in and word order became more important English kept the apostrophe “s” as a possessive marker.

• Genitives in Early English

The verb “to be” and Pronouns are inflected.

• Pronouns are one of the few parts of the English grammatical system that are still inflected. That is, they change their forms based on the roles they are playing in a sentence.

• Pronouns are inflected for number (the difference between “I” and “we” or “he” or “she” and “they”) and for gender (“he” and “him” versus “she” and “her”) and also for subject and object function (“he” versus “him” and “she” versus “her”).

Ancient Egyptian Inflections

But just as in the Foreign Languages you Study, the Cases have to be Correct.

• The main area of mistakes that are common to student papers occur in the plural:

• You would say “Give the money to me.”, so if there are two of you it should be “Give the money to Alex or me.” NOT" To Alex or I” or To Alex or myself….

“Every student is entitled to their own opinion.”

• This sort of usage has become very common because saying “Every student is entitled to his own opinion ” leaves out women, and saying “Every student is entitled to his or her own opinion ” seems formal and too lengthy. So I’d suggest just changing the subject! “All students are entitled to their own opinions .”

From the Economist…

Their, There, They’re• Their= a plural possessive

pronoun: “Students will not need their books.”

• There= a place being referred to: “Don’t go there,” or “I long to be there.”

• They’re = short for they are. “I don’t think they’re ready for the exam.”

If you’re over 21….. Then and Than

Sentence Adverbs• Sentence adverbs can be “adverbs of time” like “yesterday,” “today,”

and “tomorrow,” or they can be more traditional-looking adverbs that are just applied to the entire sentence. And most adverbs can float all over the sentence, taking up pretty much any place the writer wants to place them.

• Honestly, I didn't do it• Fortunately, I have it right here.• Frankly, this whole paragraph needs work.• Luckily, the amount of sugar the recipe called for was in stock in the

pantry.• Clearly, the mail did not come today due to it being a national holiday.• Unfortunately, by the time she reached the bus stop, the bus had

already left.

Hopefully ~ the controversial Sentence Adverb

So why should anyone object to using hopefully as a sentence adverb? Perhaps because it can’t be placed anywhere in some sentences? Possibly because it’s a bit ambiguous:? Or possibly just because it’s just a relatively new usage? At any rate, you may have a boss who doesn’t like it, so avoid using it as a sentence adverb until you’ve heard the person in charge of your writing use it.

The Associated Press Stylebook attempts to ban the cheerful modifier: "Do not use [hopefully] to mean it is hoped, let us or we hope.”

The Subjunctive • The subjunctive is complicated, but we can be thankful

that it is not nearly as complicated in English as it is in other languages (especially Spanish!) The subjunctive in Modern English is used for things that might have happened, or have not yet happened but are not truly in the future.

Use the word “Might”, which implies subjunctive, when it’s important to convey that you are writing about something that did not happen, or could not have happened:

• “If Lincoln had lived, he might have divorced Mary Todd.”

• Clearly this DID NOT happen, so the word to use here is might! (Not “May”. Which implies possibility– even remote.)

•

“If I were you”~ The Subjunctive

This way of expressing the subjunctive seems to be rather more a US nicety than a British one.

We say the following: If I were you, I’d go to the storeWhy? It turns out that the “were” in “If I were you” is the last remnant of the Anglo-Saxon subjunctive, just lurking around in this one phrase. In Early English, when verbs were declined, there was a subjunctive form “weron”. So using the word “were” is not using the past tense (which seems strange) but using the one subjunctive verb that English has left.

The split infinitive• Grammarians some years ago

decided that since infinitives are one word in Latin, that somehow they should be treated as such in English. But English adverbs can go anywhere in a sentence, so this rule violates natural word order.

• Modern grammarians think the rule is silly, but if you have a boss who seems to care about the matter, write “to go boldly”, rather than “to boldly go”.

A gerund is just a verb turned into a noun:

• But that means that you need to treat the gerund as a noun. So because the verb is acting as a noun, you would say “His snoring during Sue’s history class made everyone laugh.” You would not say “Him snoring….”

The Dangling Participle• What’s wrong with this

sentence?• “Running down the alleyway,

the garbage can tripped her.”• Nothing if the cartoon on the

left is what the writer meant to say. But if what the writer meant was that a girl tripped on the garbage can while she was running, he or she needs to rephrase.

In other words, the “participial phrase” needs to modify the subject of the sentence.

Words Often Misspelled• Loose/lose~• A red panda is loose from the zoo!• “Please, don’t lose your graphing calculator,”

said his mother.

• You use commas to set something off that doesn’t have to be part of the sentence, or to separate two clauses.

• Because she had not remembered to bring her lunch, she was forced to buy pizza.

• Sue, who has been teaching at GDS for many years, sponsors both the Conservative Club and GDS Dems.

A Comma splice is a comma is used instead of a period. She forgot to attend class, she missed a quiz.

The distinction between “which” and “that”.

• Basically, if a clause is set off, use which. If a clause is part of the main sentence, use that.

• Cars that have hybrid technology get great gas mileage.

• The Tesla, which is expensive, gets 88 miles per gallon of gas.

Less for quantities, fewer for distinct items

If you can count it use fewer. If it’s impossible to count use less.

• That sandbox has less sand.

• That playground has fewer swings.

In Everyday Speech We say “of” when We Mean “have”

• But it is not right in formal prose: no “would of, should of, could of”. What you mean is “would have, should have, could have.”

It goes without saying the above phrase won’t work, either.

There is A Lot to avoid…..• Many of our every-day usages don’t work

well in formal prose:• “ A lot”, “Lots of” for example. Say many

or much. Also avoid “a ton” meaning a large quantity.

• Etc. This abbreviation strikes many readers as lazy. Give the example, they say!

• Firstly, secondly, thirdly, are not considered formal usages… They are fine when you talk.

• Kind of or sort of. These are OK in informal situations, but in formal academic prose, substitute somewhat, rather or slightly.

More usages to avoid…

• Irregardless: Not considered a good usage.• Suppose to, use to. The hard "d" sound in supposed to and used to

disappears in pronunciation, but it shouldn't disappear in spelling. "We used to do that" or "We were supposed to do it this way.”

Literally: Usually if you say it's "literally a jungle out there," you probably mean figuratively, so you're probably better off without either word.

What to do with Numbers…. • Generally whole numbers from zero through

nine should be written as words, and numbers from ten on up should be written as numerals.

• Use numerals, however, when the number modifies a unit of measure, time, proportion, etc.: 2 inches, 5-minute delay, 65 mph, 23 years old, page 23, 2 percent.

• Approximate figures — fractional or otherwise — may be written out as words: one half the students,, a third of the time, four times as often.

The Capitals• Proper nouns Specific persons and things:

George W. Bush, the White House, General Motors Corporation.

• Official Place names: Hartford, Connecticut, Africa, Lake Erie

• Names of newspapers and journals. Do not, however, capitalize the word the, even when it is part of the newspaper's title: the Hartford Courant. (italicize them as well!)

• Peoples, Races, nationalities, languages: Swedes, Swedish, African American, Jewish.

• Titles used with a name: President Obama, Senator McCain…..

• Some matters of capitalization are optional, BUT, you need to be consistent within your paper.