Grammar Hacks

A little dab’ll do ya.

And all dared to brave unknown terrors,
to do mighty deeds,
to boldly split infinitives
that no man had split before—
and thus was the Empire forged.
—Douglas Adams

I have a friend who loooooves grammar. Me, I like it, probably more than many. There is a satisfying rightness to it that answers every question if only you burrow deep enough, and how many things in life can you say that about? I’ll happily opine over the magnificence of semi-colons and why the Oxford comma not only is preferable but really should be the universal rule.

But do I looooove grammar? Of course not—nobody in her right mind does. I used to try to talk to grammar nerds about this topic and my eyes glazed over 90 seconds in. Maybe this is why my besotted friend teaches university Spanish and I cannot get much past Hola, me llama Anne, ¿como esta usted?

But Literacy Day is September 8, and although I could say a good deal about the state of literacy in the 2020s, most of it depressing, there’s not a lot about literacy to address in a newsletter about everyday writing.

So, we are going to talk about improving our everyday literacy; hence, grammar.

Please don’t stop reading. I promise to avoid words like predicate or polysyndeton. (Full disclosure: I had never run across the word polysyndeton until I started researching this article, and I hope never to do so again.) You don’t need to know fancy terms for rules; all you need to know is a handful of the rules. I’ll drop a few, and if you want to dig deeper, that’s what the links are for. Deal?

The website Grammarly, which you’d think would be pretty much the Everest of grammar websites, goes into the weeds pretty fast. I found it a little off-putting, especially if I were venturing into this intimidating world for the first time. It’s a fabulous resource for grammar-checking tools and for its encyclopedic coverage, but that’s not what we’re concerned with here, so the only thing I’ll offer from that resource is the link to it. Use it if you want to grammar-check something you’ve written—after you’ve written it.

Which leads me to the Golden Rule about grammar that I suggest you adopt: Don’t worry about it until you are done writing. Just get it down. The cleanup part is easy; it’s the composing that’s hard.

(This is also true of spelling. I am always flabbergasted when people tell me they could never be a writer because their spelling is terrible. People: spelling has no more to do with writing than stove installation has to do with great cooking. Spelling isn’t even a requirement for good editing—that’s what dictionaries are for.)

The Write Practice, on the other hand, offers excellent advice. I know this because I agree with everything it says. Below are its five quick suggested hacks with commentary. You can find examples backing up each tip plus more details here.

1. Use Semicolons.
They’re great. A semicolon is used when you are combining two closely related sentences.

2. Be Cautious With Commas.
There are about 400 rules for commas, so my advice: use them with caution. Consider using the Oxford comma. (Because my editor tells me to.)

3. Punctuation Stays Inside Quotations.
(Unless you live in the U.K.; then the punctuation stays outside.)

4. Avoid Adverbs.
Adverbs—words that end with “ly”—are passive and a cop-out. Also, if you avoid adverbs, you don’t need to learn all their complicated rules.

5. Keep it simple.
The biggest hack to getting grammar right is to keep it simple.

You don’t need to hear my opinions of the first two items above because I’ve already sprung them on you.

Number 3 can get tricky if you’re quoting within a quote; you need to use a double quote for the first part of the quote and a single quote for what’s being said within it. Again, the Brits do it exactly backwards, because that’s what Brits do.

So, if I were telling a story my Cousin Carolyn told me about my Aunt Jane, I would write: Then Carolyn said, “Every time he came over, Mom would say, ‘Well, Rusty Birnam, as I live and breathe,’ and he would always laugh.”

Conversely, if it were my Cousin Emma Hartsford-on-Briar speaking of her Mum Susannah Brontë, I would write: Then Emma said, ‘Every time he came over, Mum would say, “Dear me, Rusty, what have you gotten all over your shoes?”, and he would blush’.

I think the U.K. version looks horrible, but I suspect nobody in the U.K. cares what I think.

Number 4: It is not physically possible to say this too often. Drop the adverbs, and get pretty ruthless with the adjectives, too. Yes, great writers use them, but until you and I are at their level of greatness, we should not.

Number 5, Keep it Simple—for me best illustrated in my brief time on Earth by the writing of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carter, and William Carlos Williams—works for Life, too.

Inc.com, a site for learning public speaking skills, offers up seven tips, their topics listed below. The advice is not particularly well written, the guidance can get a bit jargony, and I find the selection of a few of the topics to be a little arbitrary—I don’t know many folks who have wrestled with “man/woman” vs. “male/female,” for example—but the principles behind most of these are good to understand. I’ve edited and installed bracketed bits here and there.

1. I vs. Me
Use I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they if the person is the subject of the verb: She and I ate lunch. You and he left on time.

Use me, you, him, her, it, us, you, them if the person [is the object of the verb]: Between you and me, it’s curtains for her and them.

2. Who vs. Whom
“Who” refers to a subject, while “whom” refers to an object.

[Try] rephrasing the statement as a question and then answering it with a complete sentence using “he” or “him.” If your answer is “him,” use “whom” in the original statement. If your answer is “he,” use who. 

3. That vs. Who, Whose, and Whom
“Who” is for people; “that” is for everything else.

4. Semicolon vs. comma
Editor’s note: This is an important topic, so I have included it as a topic. But since I disagree with everything this site says about it and how it says it, I suggest you instead use that of other resources such as this one, which advises, succinctly: “Semicolons connect main clauses, i.e., groups of words with a subject and verb that could function as a complete sentence on their own.” Or this one, which throws in em dashes and colons just for fun. See also Britannica for a longer but also straightforward and easy to understand discussion, or our old friend Grammarly.

5. Affect vs. Effect
In most cases, affect is a verb, and effect is a noun.

6. Try vs. Try And
Editor’s note: I don’t understand why people have trouble with this. It’s always “try”; it’s never “try and.” But if you need a tip on how to remember this, one is offered.

7. Male and Female vs. Man and Woman
The former are adjectives; the latter are nouns. I’m a woman; there are male and female students at my daughter’s school.

The “copy writers” section of Ink for All, a site to help you “optimize” content, offers a slightly longer list of grammar tips, some of which go into the weeds pretty fast, but a few good, plain-English guidelines, including the last one, already covered in the public speaking site above but another one of those that apparently cannot be reiterated too often:

• Subject and Verb Agreement
The subject must agree with the verb [regarding singular vs. plural]. He likes bread. We like pizza.

 • “Your” and “You’re”
“Your” is possessive: Your dress is getting wet.
“You’re” is a contraction of “you are”: You’re nice to me. (You are nice to me.)

• “I and Me”
“I” is the subject pronoun. “Me” is the object pronoun.
Matt and I went for a walk. [Right]
Matt and me went for a walk. [Wrong]

Editor’s note: I gave up on this one a long time ago; I also have given up on the common use today, including by those who ought to know better, of putting oneself ahead of others: “Me and Julio down by the school yard.” (Sounds great when Paul Simon sings it. Otherwise not so much.)

Rules of Grammar delivers an even dozen’s good old boring basics, with some baldly obvious rules and others that bear repeating.

Finally, last and best: fellow Substacker Lela Moore’s excellent letter on grammar and punctuation, The Standards Department, offers up terrific advice heavily coated in hilarity. The title of her most recent post is “What the $%&*# is a grawlix?” and her letter’s subtitle is “This newsletter is rated PG-13.” Maybe you’ve already found her, since I subscribe and I have her site posted on mine, but if you haven’t, check her out. Like semicolons, she’s great.

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Lagniappe: So, this all started with Literacy Day, which is September 8. I try to avoid politics in this letter, but this topic’s urgency in today’s environment pushes it beyond the political arena. Everybody ought to be able to read, and people ought to be able to decide for themselves what they read.

Please learn more about the origins of Literacy Day on this UNESCO page. Wiki offers info plus the names of writers who have been involved in the Writers for Literacy Initiative. You can explore activities here or learn what Save the Children is doing in its Literacy Boost program for the world’s kids.

Finally, for your consideration, two pieces of writing illustrating the beauty of simplicity.

A short story by Earnest Hemingway:
Baby shoes for sale; never worn.

A classic poem by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens