The Subversive Copy Editor Blog

Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Creative Writing

People sometimes worry about honoring the personal pronouns of those who don’t identify with the gender binary. They’re concerned that using (for instance) “they/them” in place of “he/him” or “she/her” will be complicated or confusing. Some aren’t sure about the grammar (“They are” or “They is”?).

Overcoming entrenched speech habits to use the right pronoun consistently takes practice. But in writing, it’s easier. Plenty of creative writers use “they/them” pronouns (among others) for nonbinary characters.

The Chicago Way

CMOS 5.48 is clear: “When referring specifically to a person who does not identify with a gender-specific pronoun . . . they and its forms are often preferred. (They used in this sense was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year for 2015.) Like singular you, singular they takes a plural verb.”

Pronouns in Action

In this scene from Mason Deaver’s I Wish You All the Best (New York: PUSH, 2019), the narrator, Ben, uses his friend Mariam’s “they/them” pronouns:

When I finally mustered the courage to come out to someone, it was Mariam. That was a super awkward night. In fact, I made a Twitter account just to talk to them. But they worked me through it. . . . Hell, they’re one of the few people who I let call me Benji. (34)

There’s no ambiguity here: all the “they” pronouns refer to Mariam. And as you can see, “they” as a singular works the same way as “they” as a plural: talk to them, they worked, they’re (they are) one.

Although someone might argue that it’s confusing to use the same word to refer to a singular entity in one place and a plural entity in another, the pronouns “you” and “your” work in exactly that way. In this passage, Ben and Mariam are texting (singular “you”):

Mariam: Listen I have to go get ready for a meeting. But I’ll message you the second I’m out. I love you Benji. So much. <3

Me: Love you too. (33)

And in this line, Ben addresses his parents (plural “you”):

“Hey, I wanted to talk to you two about something,” I say, my voice really dry. (6)

In both instances, “you” is perfectly understandable. When there’s a chance of confusion over who is being addressed, it’s second nature for a writer to insert a hint, such as the word “two” in the line above.

NOTE: The pronouns “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine” and “you,” “your,” and “yours” (s. and pl.) are not gender-specific and so are used in the conventional way regardless of the speaker’s identity.

Mixing It Up

A person who requests the courtesy of being addressed by nonbinary pronouns normally extends the same courtesy, using others’ gendered or ungendered pronouns.

Although Deaver’s narrator Ben uses “they” in reference to Mariam, he uses “he,” “she,” and “they” (plural) when talking about his brother-in-law Thomas, his sister Hannah, and his parents:

Thomas said to help myself to food, but I don’t think he realizes just how awkward that’ll be. (33)

“In here,” I say, but I don’t think she hears me. (34)

I know my parents, they know me, they deserve to know this thing about me as well.
    And I want to tell them, I really, really do. (3)

Of course, it’s common in fiction for a single paragraph to contain pronouns that refer to more than one character. In this passage from River of Teeth (New York: Tor.com, 2017), look how seamlessly Sarah Gailey uses “they” and “their” and even “themself” to refer to the agender character Hero, while retaining the use of “he” and “his” for the male character Houndstooth.

Houndstooth speaks:

“Hero.” He seemed to be rolling their name across his tongue. Hero caught themself staring and looked away. “Hero, I’m supposed to get you to accept this job. I accepted this job with the understanding that I would have a demolitions expert on board.”
    Hero sipped their sweet tea and watched Houndstooth fiddle with his hat. “I’ll need some convincing. So. Convince me.” They tried not to blink while they said it, knowing that it sounded for all the world like a line. (35)

While it’s true that in rare cases using “they” (or “you”) for both singular and plural can lead to confusion, that problem arises with all pronouns, including “he,” “she,” and “it.” How often have you been bewildered by a blur of “she did this” and “she said that” in a passage featuring two women, not sure which character was meant?

Sometimes it’s actually easier to keep track of characters in a scene when one identifies with a gender and the other doesn’t. In the scene above, where only Hero is pegged with “they” or “their,” we always know who’s who.

Deaver’s narration shows the same ease when using “they/them” for Mariam and “he/him” for Ben’s boyfriend. In the last sentence, there’s no doubt which person “he” refers to. If both Mariam and the boyfriend identified as male, the sentence might require editing for clarity:

When Mariam asked me to help them with a new project they’re starting, there was no way I was going to turn them down. . . . All while providing a little emotional support for my boyfriend, while he spends long nights writing papers and drinking way too much coffee. Of course, he has to live in the dorms for the first year, but Mariam and I have worked something out. (319)

Alternatives to Singular “They”

While “they” has surely emerged as the leading alternative to “he” and “she,” other pronouns are in use.* Rebecca Roanhorse uses “xe” and “xir” as the nominative and objective pronouns for the Priest of Knives Iktan in Black Sun (New York: Saga Press, 2020), while using “she” and “her” for the Sun Priest Naranpa:

Xe shrugged, a small lift of one shoulder, but it was the most doubt she [Naranpa] had ever seen xir show. Iktan might not admit it to her, but the assassination attempt today had rattled xir. (64)

The distinct personal pronouns leave no doubt as to who was rattled.

TIP: Expanding specificity in pronoun use to include neopronouns can only add to the richness, variety, and authenticity of character types in fiction. But that’s not to suggest that a pronoun is enough to identify and give life to a believable character—regardless of their identity.

Resources

Baron, Dennis. What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She. New York: Liveright, 2020.

National Council of Teachers of English. “Statement on Gender and Language.”

Sakurai, Shige. MyPronouns.org: Resources on Personal Pronouns.

Yin, Karen. Conscious Style Guide. “Gender, Sex, and Sexuality.”

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* Most are singular and take singular verbs. For a list, see “Gender Neutrality in Languages with Gendered Third-Person Pronouns,” Wikipedia.

This post originally appeared at The Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on April 20, 2021, © University of Chicago.

 

Jack Hart Talks about Wordcraft

Today I’m interviewing Jack Hart for Fiction+ at The Chicago Manual of Style’s Shop Talk blog:

Jack Hart has spent five decades helping writers succeed, working shoulder-to-shoulder with journalists in newsrooms both big and small and with students at five universities. Writers who’ve worked with him have written national best sellers and won prizes that include five Pulitzers and a slew of other national awards.

Hart is the author of Storycraft, now in its second edition, and the newly published Wordcraft, both available from the University of Chicago Press.

(Continue reading)

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Photo of Jack Hart courtesy Peking University Press.

 

Very Long Sentences in Fiction

I’m blogging today for Fiction+ at The Chicago Manual of Style’s Shop Talk blog:

Recently, I was listening to the audiobook of James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, and at some point it struck me that we’d been in the middle of a sentence for quite a while. But it wasn’t just long—it was lyrical and purposeful. Pretty early on in the sentence, I began to realize it wasn’t primarily about an annual infestation of ants.

(Continue reading)

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“Funny Dachshund,” by Victoria Borodinova, courtesy Public Domain Pictures.net.

 

 

How Grammar “Goofs” Work in Creative Writing

I’ve written before to caution copyeditors against scrubbing voice and character out of fiction manuscripts by adhering too closely to a style manual.

Each novel or story is unique, of course. Some feature dialect and colloquialisms, and others pretty much stick to formal English as laid out in The Chicago Manual of Style. Many, many novels and stories mix it up, using formal English for the narrative while their characters speak in a more casual idiom. Keeping all those voices straight is one of the primary tasks of a writer; monitoring and protecting those distinctions is a primary task of an editor.

To make good writing and editing choices, it’s helpful to know what’s considered standard or formal in the first place, not in order to apply that knowledge indiscriminately, but to use it to create or edit narration and dialogue that’s consistently natural, real, and believable. That’s where a good dictionary and style guide come in. They help us determine what’s “grammatical” so we can choose when to reject it for the best effect.

To see how these intentional grammar “goofs” work in creative writing, let’s look at a few issues commonly faced by writers.

Less/fewer

CMOS 5.250 tells us to use “less” for singular mass nouns or amounts (less salt), and “fewer” for plural count nouns (fewer calories).

But “less” in place of “fewer” is well entrenched in common parlance. We all know someone who’s shocked and offended by signs like “10 items or less,” but the expression reflects the way people talk. From a quick Google search of the phrase “less votes”:

“Less votes than there should be, not more”—Fox 17, West Michigan, December 8, 2020

“20,000 less votes than third party Senate candidates.”—K5 News, Seattle, November 12, 2020

“[A] difference of 2,000 votes or less.”—NBC News, November 5, 2020

“Less votes than voters.”—Yahoo! Sports, December 8, 2020

In fact, the “less/fewer” difference is a relatively new invention in English grammar. As Merriam-Webster.com explains, after more than a thousand years of no such distinction, some guy named Robert Baker expressed a personal preference for using “fewer” for plural count nouns, and it stuck. (Yes, there were “influencers” two hundred years ago.)

Using “less” when “fewer” is strictly correct is exactly the kind of grammar that works in an informal narrative register or in the mouth of a speaking character.

None is/none are

Although you might have learned that “none” is always singular, it may, in fact, take either a singular or a plural verb (see CMOS 5.250). Here’s a little variety I found within a single novel:

None of them . . . question this valuation. None of them wonder what things might be like. (Susan Choi, Trust Exercise, 39)

None of these couplings was news. (Choi, 119)

Follow your ear when you come to a verb after “none.” CMOS notes that when a plural noun follows “none” (like “couplings” in the second example), a singular verb (like “was”) can sound stilted. If stilted is what you’re aiming for, that’s good. Either way, if your choice is later challenged by a reader or editor, reconsider that choice on its merits. Don’t fall for the “it’s a rule” argument.

Between/among

Writers and editors get into trouble with “between” and “among” if they were taught to use the former with relationships involving two objects (“a choice between death and dishonor”), and the latter with those involving more than two (“honor among thieves”). But that old rule is too often taught in an oversimplified way. CMOS 5.250 explains:

Between has long been recognized as being perfectly appropriate for more than two objects if multiple one-to-one relationships are understood from the context {trade between members of the European Union}.

So if “The pact among Jill, Nan, and Chris went sour” makes you squirm, your instincts are good: “between” works better. To pick the right phrase, you have to know the grammar and know your narrator and characters well enough to choose what’s right for them.

TIP: A related issue: “Between you and me” is technically correct, but the overcorrection “between you and I” has become popular. Which would your character say?

He or she/they

As a substitute for forms of the generic “he” or the awkward “he or she,” the singular “they, them, their” has a long and well-established pedigree over hundreds of years of classical English literature. Referring to pronouns like “anyone” and “everyone” (“Does anyone want their pizza reheated?”), this usage is so widely accepted that the alternatives are almost always worse. To think of this as a brand-new development in English or as a political issue is misguided.*

Who/whom

Perfect grammar that sounds hoity-toity is a problem when a narrator or speaker is meant to be more down-to-earth.

“Who should I talk to about getting paid for the balance?”
“What balance? I’m sorry, who did you say you were?” (Laila Lalami, The Other Americans, 107)

In the first sentence above, formal grammar dictates “whom” as the object of the preposition “to” (“Whom should I talk to”; “I should talk to whom”). But how many of us ever use “whom” to begin a sentence? If we’re being precise, or snooty, or angry, we might. Otherwise, “who” is more natural, and that works best for this character.

In the second sentence, “who” is standard, formal English with a linking verb like “were” (“you did say you were who”). Overcorrecting to “whom” might have been a choice for this context if the writer wanted the speaker to sound huffy and overbearing.

Take care, however: “whom” isn’t always posh talk! Even in casual speech, there’s plenty of room for “whom,” most commonly as the object of a preposition:

“Hmara,” he called her, a word he reserved for the television anchors with whom he argued during the eight o’clock news. (Lalami, 18)

“Better for whom? It’s not better for me.” (Lalami, 115)

Conclusion: The choice of “who” or “whom” must take into account both the level of formality needed at the moment, and whether that particular use of “whom” is considered formal. (See CMOS 5.66.) The more a writer or editor knows about the nuances of English usage, the better equipped they are to create believable characters and a consistent narrative voice.

FUN FACT: Back in the heyday of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s sketch comedy show Laugh-In, Lily Tomlin’s signature line in her skits as Ernestine the telephone operator was “Is this the party to whom I am speaking?” The question is nonsensical, but the grammar is perfect.

As/like

Sticklers love to pounce on what they see as the misuse of “like” when “as” or “as if” is correct. CMOS 5.185 gives this example: “He ran like he was really scared.” CMOS’s verdict? “Increasingly today in ordinary speech, like displaces as or as if as a conjunction to connect clauses. . . . Although like as a conjunction has been considered nonstandard since the seventeenth century, today it is common in dialectal and colloquial usage.”

In other words, for a colloquial vibe, we like “like.”

Sneaked/snuck, pleaded/pled, hanged/hung, etc.

The “standard” past and past participle forms of many verbs have been regularly ignored in everyday conversation in favor of “nonstandard” alternatives: “They snuck out of the tent.” “They pled for their lives.” “They were to be hung at dawn.” Breaches are so common that style manuals and dictionaries increasingly accept the alternative forms as standard, if not formal.

But like most of grammar, nothing is set in stone. For instance, CMOS 5.250 says, “Reserve snuck for dialect and tongue-in-cheek usages,” while Merriam-Webster.com’s usage guide is more permissive: “The past and past participle snuck has risen to the status of standard and to approximate equality with sneaked.” The two authorities disagree similarly on the issue of “pleaded/pled” and “hanged/hung.”

This is good news! It confirms that English is fluid and changing, that there’s not always a single right way to say something, and that in most cases writers and editors can trust their instincts and not come to harm.

But to ensure that characters sound authentically and consistently grammatical or ungrammatical, keep a good dictionary and style guide at hand.

Sources

Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise: A Novel. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2020.

Lalami, Laila. The Other Americans: A Novel. New York: Vintage Books, 2020.

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* Pronoun use for individuals is a different subject entirely. For an excellent overview, read Katy Steinmetz, “People Have Invented More Than 200 Gender-Neutral Pronouns: Here’s Why ‘They’ Is Here to Stay,” Time.com, January 17, 2020.

Photo of signs by Gerd Altmann courtesy Pixabay; modified.

This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on March 9, 2021, © University of Chicago.

Commas between Adjectives in Creative Writing

Do you sometimes dither over whether to put a comma between two or more adjectives?

a polished, spherical stone or a polished spherical stone?

a nice, big check or a nice big check?

Although the guidelines for deciding at CMOS 5.91 and CMOS 6.36–37 work well for any kind of writing, there are times when creative writers prefer to ignore them.

The Chicago Way

CMOS 5.91 says to use a comma if the adjectives are “coordinate adjectives,” and CMOS 6.36 offers a couple of ways to determine whether they are. Ask yourself two questions:

(1) Does “and” work well between the adjectives?

a polished and spherical stone (yes)

a nice and big check (no)

(2) Would the adjectives make sense in reverse order?

a spherical, polished stone (yes)

a big, nice check (no)

If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then the adjectives are coordinate and take a comma (or “and”):

A polished, spherical stone or a polished and spherical stone

a nice big check

Another way to test for coordinate adjectives is to consider whether the noun forms a unit of meaning with one or more of the adjectives:

a faulty hot plate (yes: “hot plate” is a unit)

an unused rolling pin (yes: “rolling pin” is a unit)

a humorous, flattering remark (no: “remark” stands alone)

If the answer is yes, then the adjectives are not coordinate, and the comma is omitted.

Cautions

• Adjective-noun units of meaning might extend to include other coordinate adjective pairs that normally take a comma: “an ancient, faulty hot plate”; “a dusty, unused rolling pin.”
• An adjective-noun unit of meaning can consist of more than two words, in which case the whole string can survive without commas: “a lucrative freelance job contract”; “the lavish swim-up buffet offerings.”
• A string of adjectives might cause a writer to get carried away and accidentally put a comma before the noun. In the following example, there’s no comma before “murmuration”:

A wondrous, swirling, honking murmuration filled the sky.

TIP: Normally, coordinate adjectives that appear after the noun they modify are separated by “and” rather than a comma.

It was a ridiculous, brazen gesture.

The gesture was ridiculous and brazen.

Of course, that rule begs to be broken. Opening a book at random from my shelf, Amy Timberlake’s Skunk and Badger, I didn’t have to read far to find “You sprayed. Everyone knows that skunk spray is despicable, deplorable, vile” (90).

When a Comma Intrudes

There are times when a comma between adjectives is “correct” but just doesn’t seem right. It slows things down or draws attention to itself. The difference is a subtle one that careful writers value.

Consider the last sentence in this passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (125):

All night now the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour. Work all day for money, fight all night for love. The rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants.

It’s clear from the passage that in general Hurston is fine with using commas. Although coordinate adjectives aren’t plentiful in this work, I found some with commas (“fresh, new taste” [63] and “loud-talking, staggering men” [142]), and others without (“fresh young darkness” [6], “poor broken creature” [179], and “white silken couch” [180]).

So why not write “the rich, black earth”? Perhaps because a comma would invite us to linger on its richness and blackness—qualities of the soil that Hurston took pains to describe two pages earlier. The point in this sentence is less about that soil and more about its being encrusted on the bodies of workers deprived of bathtubs. Neither version is inherently better on its own, but each is exactly right for a particular context or character’s voice.

TIP: Per CMOS 6.37, repeated adjectives normally take a comma between them: “Many, many people have enjoyed the book.” But especially in dialogue, leaving out the comma helps convey tone of voice.

“But that was a long, long time ago!”

“But that was a long long time ago!”

The first version reads as emphatic; depending on context, the second one could sound rushed or even flippant.

What about Consistency?

It’s easy to find examples of writers who generally observe comma rules but make a consistent exception for coordinate adjectives. On a single page in The Bar Harbor Formation, for instance, Ann Rutherfurd Austin demonstrates her preference, writing “dusty ornate frames,” “dirty cotton innards,” and “sickly pale green streamers”* (129) in a novel that otherwise seems to be punctuated in a (mostly) conventional way.

It’s also easy to find novels (or creative nonfiction) in which the commas separating coordinate adjectives appear to have been decided case by case, not according to a rule, like the examples above from Their Eyes Were Watching God. Also from random dipping into books on my shelves:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot: “handsomer, better children” (251) and “a white soft living substance” (252)

Death at Hull House, by Frances McNamara: “a tall, imposing woman print setter” (100) and “an empty filthy sweatshop” (154)

American Pie, by Pascale Le Draoulec: “the small unassuming house” (19) and “a small, honest bakery” (150)

At this point, many writers will be wondering if they’re the only ones who wing it when it comes to commas, writing intuitively with the idea that an editor will sort out any difficulties later. Believe me, you’re not alone. If the coordinate adjectives in a novel are unrelentingly adorned with commas, you can bet it’s because a copyeditor cast an eye over it, following a style manual like CMOS.

On the other hand, a seeming lack of consistency doesn’t necessarily mean poor copyediting. Good editors are sensitive to context and can recognize when the presence or absence of a comma makes a difference worth a small breach of convention.

Sources

Austin, Ann Rutherfurd. The Bar Harbor Formation. Thomaston, ME: Indie Author Books, 2018.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.

Le Draoulec, Pascale. American Pie: Slices of Life (and Pie) from America’s Back Roads. New York: Perennial, 2003.

McNamara, Frances. Death at Hull House. Chicago: Allium Press, 2009.

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* The dilemma over hyphenating phrases like “pale-green” is a topic for another day.

Photo of amethyst quartz courtesy of Pixabay.

This post originally appeared at The Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on February 9, 2021, © University of Chicago.

Style and Grammar in Promotional Copy

Anyone familiar with the grammar and style rules and guidelines in CMOS knows they come with a lot of qualifiers: normally, in most cases, in running text, in regular prose, depending on the context—I could go on and on. In life, very few rules are meant to cover every situation. The same is true in CMOS.

This is especially so when it comes to writing and editing marketing copy, something more and more authors are doing for themselves. Indie authors often design their own book covers and ads and write their own press releases. A few weeks ago we looked at the liberties we take when writing or editing blurbs. This week we’ll consider more visual types of promotion.

Form versus Function

In publishing, book covers, posters, and ads depend on eye appeal for their effectiveness, and sometimes graphic design ends up clashing with formal editing rules. Chicago style for referring to a book title and subtitle (CMOS 8.164 and 8.168) is to use headline caps, italicize the whole thing, and put a colon after the title, like this: Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Writers. Titles that happen to be sentences (I Capture the Castle) don’t take a period at the end unless they fall at the end of a sentence: “The teacher assigned I Capture the Castle.”

But how often do you see a colon on the cover of a book? Or an italic title, or one with everything in Chicago-style headline caps? Even CMOS recognizes that there’s no point in legislating display styles (CMOS 8.157 and 8.165). Graphic designers play with punctuation and capitalization; they spell out numbers or they don’t; they mix fonts and styles. Instead of using a period or a comma, they signal transitions and pauses with line breaks, color, or any number of visual techniques.

On this cover for the short-story anthology Shades of Black, there’s no colon after the title; the title is all lowercase in a mix of black and white type; and the subtitle is in title case in smaller yellow type (click on this or any book cover in this post to enlarge):

The subtitle of Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal has lots of commas, but this cover design by Sarahmay Wilkinson substitutes line breaks and checkbox bullet points for commas:

The freedom available to graphic designers is made obvious by the extreme variation we often see in different editions of the same book. In these two cover designs for Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, the blurb from a Times review receives two very different treatments:

         

Neither is standard running-text style: In the design on the left, the quotation is presented in small, all-caps type in the upper-left corner. In the other design (by David Pearson), the blurb takes up half the cover in huge, stylized type with mixed capitalization. Both include the colon; neither ends with a period. Which is more effective? You’d have to take a poll.

Of course, about the time a copyeditor learns that punctuation is omitted in display because it’s intrusive and clunky, a designer might be wondering, “What rule can I break next?”

These three books show playful styling of a title:

         

On the cover of David Shields’s The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, designed by Keenan (“cover lettering by Ruby, Ella, Richard, Loulla and Albert”), capitalization is mixed, some words are bolded, and the title ends with a period to convey, the author told me in an email, “the finality of death.” The title on Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière’s This Is Not the End of the Book fills both front and back of the dust jacket in huge type, the word “not” is italic, and the sentence-cased title ends with a semicolon—clearly no finality there.

The jacket for This Could Hurt by Jillian Medoff, designed by Joanne O’Neill, features three empty checkboxes to the left of the stacked three-word title, something like the boxes Wilkinson chose for the Maum cover we saw above. Wilkinson used them to convey a subtitle’s intended pauses and to suggest a series of tasks. However, O’Neill’s checkbox bullets are more subversive, bringing an emphasis to each word that is not inherent in the title, the unchecked boxes portending one blow after another.

It seems there’s no limit to graphic-designer hijinks. Here’s a cover where the reader is left to guess the complete title of the book (The Crow’s Vow, by Susan Briscoe):

It would be fun to know what kinds of discussion all these covers and jackets inspired during production. Did the editors and copyeditors jump on board with the designs right away? Were the writers’ opinions sought and regarded? Whatever the case, these are the kinds of issues writers and editors should expect to negotiate with an open mind. Insisting on “correctness” for its own sake would be counterproductive.

Made You Look

Some of the most famous ad campaigns in history went beyond messing with punctuation to break with standard grammar. I don’t have to remind you of “Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should” or the “Got Milk?” campaign.

Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” slogan, credited to art director Craig Tanimoto at the advertising agency Chiat\Day,* caused a storm of consternation. But why? No one in the 1957 movie Funny Face objects to the “Think Pink” ad campaign, although it’s grammatically the same: an imperative verb followed by an adjective.

The “Think Pink” musical number from the movie Funny Face.

Is it because the adverb “differently” (unlike “pinkly”) exists and is commonly paired with “think” that we assume the use of the adjective breaks a rule? If Apple had decided on “Imagine different” or “Picture different,” or if they had used quotation marks,

Think “different.”

the usage wouldn’t have startled us. But then, startling us was the point. In the past, such rule-breaking slogans scandalized grammar sticklers and whipped up publicity—if not actual sales—beyond their creators’ dreams. Today, commands like “Spread the Happy” and “Let’s Beauty Together” somehow don’t muster the same wow power. I’m not worried. I’m confident marketing copywriters and graphic designers can come up with ever more amusing ways to inspire us to click and buy.

How Much Is Too Much?

Consumers can have strong reactions—positive and negative—to rule-breaking. A 2013 survey showed that poor grammar and spelling were the top turnoffs to advertising consumers over the age of twenty-four.† Thus marketers and editors must always weigh the attention-getting benefits of an unconventional approach against the publisher’s greater mission and reputation.

In this regard, the primary goals of marketers and editors are not always compatible. While the marketer wants to capture attention, the editor must protect the integrity of the text, stepping in when a promotional detail causes trouble for readers. An editor might rightly object to omitting a hyphen that’s needed for sense or point out a line break that leaves the wrong words grouped. In all-lowercase text, an editor might push for capping a proper name that could be mistaken for a common noun if lowercased.

Always, the tastes and habits of the consumer/reader/buyer will help drive the decision. A campaign succeeds when it disrupts expectations enough to delight and not enough to annoy.

Caveat

Although ad copy may be creative and rule-breaking, copy for submission queries, pitches, cover letters, and press kits that go out to editors, journalists, agents, reviewers, and producers is more akin to copy for a business letter. Such materials are usually written more sedately, with careful attention to grammar and styling consistency. They signal that the sender is a responsible person worthy of a contract. That’s not to say voice and creativity have no place in these documents—just that clarity and conciseness are more important.

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* Patrick Hanlon, “Meet the Man Who Saved Apple,” Forbes, December 6, 2015.

† Those under twenty-four were most bothered by a failure to update often enough. “What Customers Hate about Your Social Media Channels,” Disruptive Communications, August 7, 2013.

Top image of bullhorn with shopping cart (modified for post), courtesy Wallpaper Flare.

Book covers and dust jackets: Courtney Maum, Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book (New York: Catapult, 2020); Shades of Black, ed. Eleanor Taylor Bland (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2004); Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Picador, 2007); Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (London: Pan Macmillan, 2010); David Shields, The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York: Vintage, 2009); Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, This Is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, trans. Polly McLean (London: Harvill Secker, 2011); Jillian Medoff, This Could Hurt (New York: HarperCollins, 2018); and Susan Briscoe, The Crow’s Vow (Montreal: Signal Editions, 2010).

“Think different” logo for Apple Computer Inc., Rob Janoff (stylized apple) and Craig Tanimoto (text), 1997, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Detail of film still featuring Suzy Parker from Funny Face, directed by Stanley Donen (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1957), 0:05:19, Amazon Prime Video.

Fiction+ posts at Shop Talk reflect the opinions of its authors and not necessarily those of The Chicago Manual of Style or the University of Chicago Press.

This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on August 11, 2020, © University of Chicago.

 

“Had had”? Flashbacks and the Past Perfect

Novelists are sometimes urged to eliminate the past-perfect tense from their sentences, and copyeditors are sometimes trained to search out those auxiliary “hads” and lop them off from their verbs. What exactly is the past perfect? And what’s wrong with using it?

The Past-Perfect (Pluperfect) Tense

According to CMOS 5.133, “The past-perfect (or pluperfect) tense is formed by using had with the principal verb’s past participle (had walked) (had drunk). It refers to an act, state, or condition that was completed before another specified or implicit past time or past action (the engineer had driven the train to the roundhouse before we arrived) (by the time we stopped to check the map, the rain had begun falling) (the movie had already ended).”

In short, the past perfect creates a flashback.

Flashback as a Literary Device

Flashback is a useful device in storytelling, a way to catch readers up on an event that happened before the story in progress. Sometimes it’s a simple, one-verb digression that readers may barely register as a flashback; other times the trip to the past may expand to whole paragraphs, pages, or even chapters.

Although flashbacks can expose inefficient plotting when they’re used badly (“Finally, she faced her enemy—luckily, she had studied karate many years ago”), they have long been exploited for effect, even when used extensively. Think of Scheherazade’s nested yarns in One Thousand and One Nights, or the frequent digressions Gabriel García Márquez uses to layer the past with the present and future in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Whatever a writer’s motive for employing flashback, there are reasons to minimize use of the past-perfect tense, as well as some ways to get around it.

Had This, Had That, Had Had

When readers are immersed in a story that’s interrupted by a detour to the past, we can’t help feeling suspended and slightly anxious not to forget where we are. It’s as if we’re being asked to put a thumb on the page while the narrator flips back a few days or years or centuries to fill us in on something. The momentary unease isn’t resolved until the action returns to the present.

For readers trying to keep track of a story, the past-perfect “had” is an effective reminder that we’re still in flashback mode. However, the repetition of “had” gets annoying, especially if the pluperfect of the verb “to have” is in play, resulting in the unlovely “had had” (“Lee’s boss got credit for the invention, although Lee had had the idea first”).

Cheating the Past

The trick to writing an extended flashback without so much repetition is to start out with past-perfect verbs and then segue to the simple past for a while. This allows readers to relax into the story of the moment and stop worrying about the one we’ve temporarily left behind. Near the end of the flashback, slip back into the past perfect briefly as a reminder to the reader that the story has been wandering, and then return to the normal narrative past, with all the usual options for verbs.

Novelist Ha Jin does this gracefully in A Free Life (New York: Vintage International, 2009). In the following extract, bold font shows the past-perfect verbs. The first four start off the short flashback, then the pluperfect is dropped for a while, then it’s resumed with a single use (“had asked”) that serves as a transition back to the story Jin had left behind for a moment:

He was still unnerved by the lingering impact of the recession, which had lately forced another shop at the plaza out of business. The past summer his restaurant had made only $1,000 a month, and the Wus had had to withdraw money from their savings account to pay bills. Tammie had made much less than before too and complained a lot. Nan encouraged her to look for a more lucrative job elsewhere if she wanted, but she said things would come around, and she stayed. For that he was grateful. Although more people came to eat after the summer, the business wasn’t as good as it should have been. Pingping had asked Janet to let her make more necklaces and earrings, but the jewelry store was faltering too and couldn’t stock more inventory at the moment. What disconcerted the Wus most was that if someday they couldn’t come up with $1,000 for Mr. Wolfe at the end of a month, they might lose their home. (264–65)

The tactic shown in a nutshell in this extract also works for much longer flashbacks, so that the heart of the story from the past can be written in the same tense as the main story and merely framed by instances of the past perfect for the sake of introducing it and transitioning back.

As for the awkward “had had,” Jin’s works well enough. But when it doesn’t, there are alternatives. One is to simply find a different verb (“the Wus had been forced to withdraw money”). Or, when a pronoun is an option, contract the first “had” (“they’d had to withdraw money”).

Takeaways

The past perfect is a perfectly respectable tense, essential to clear writing and an excellent way to introduce a flashback of any length. Attempts to banish the pluperfect wholesale are misguided. But as with any repetition, too much is too much, and writers and copyeditors will do well to manage their pluperfects thoughtfully.

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This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on December 17, 2019, © University of Chicago.

Image of nested laptops by Tumisu (Pixabay).

Sure, You Got A’s in English—But Do You Know Where Commas Go?

A few months ago in a conference session, a group of novelists digressed into good-natured complaints about being copyedited. One writer drew a lot of laughs saying, “I mean, I got A’s in English! I know where the freaking commas go!”* Others nodded in recognition and comradery.

I bit my tongue. I really wanted to say—as gently as possible—I’m sorry dear, but you freaking don’t.

Commas Are Complicated

Teachers don’t always reveal the whole truth, even to their best students, that punctuation isn’t always a right-or-wrong kind of thing, or that different publishers have different comma rules, or that sometimes it’s only by fudging a rule that creative writing can begin to sing.

The fact is, among professional writers, even professors with PhDs in English welcome copyediting of their work. And copyeditors who don’t necessarily have degrees in English (cough cough) nonetheless find plenty of commas to adjust in submitted manuscripts.

Here’s another factor: odds are good that a writer was required as a student to cleave to the rules in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. For decades, it’s been the best-selling grammar and style reference in the US. The good news: even after a century, very little has changed in Elements with regard to using commas. The bad news: even following the latest edition (if you can figure out what it is)† won’t guarantee that a manuscript’s commas will suit all the major publishers.

For instance,

• Strunk & White (all editions, 1.2) advises adding a comma before “and” in a series (“red, white, and blue”). So does Chicago (per CMOS 6.19). But The Associated Press Stylebook (New York: Associated Press, 2019) does not (323).
• Strunk & White (all editions, 1.3) requires commas both before and after the abbreviation “etc.” Chicago no longer requires the second comma (per CMOS 6.20). According to AP Stylebook’s Ask the Editor feature, the 2019 Stylebook doesn’t address the issue.
• Originally, Strunk & White put a comma before “Jr.” and “Sr.” in a name (Hank Williams, Jr.), but the 3rd edition (New York: Macmillan, 1979) took it out (1.3), thus conforming to similar changes over time in Chicago (CMOS 6.43) and AP (158). This means that if you use an older edition of any of these manuals, you’ll be out of step with current recommendations.

Commas Are the Least of It

The above examples only begin to touch on reasons even valedictorians might find the comma rules they got right on the test being challenged by a copyeditor. Once we venture into quotation marks, hyphens, and semicolons—not to mention the galaxy of issues beyond punctuation—it’s easy to see why rules someone mastered in English comp years ago won’t always stand up against a copyeditor with an up-to-date style manual. And if by chance a young scholar also learned to be supremely confident and inflexible in their command of commas and perhaps even to despise or pity those who depart from the rules they happened to learn, well, it’s not hard to predict trouble at copyediting time.

Luckily for creative writers, good copyeditors are familiar with several style guides; they’re up to date on punctuation trends; and they know how to place a comma in those weird and tricky situations that might not have made it into the textbooks.‡ What’s more, experienced copyeditors understand the expressive power that commas pack by their presence or absence (a lesson that textbooks may choose to ignore), and sometimes with a minor tweak here or there, they can help a writer achieve the effect they’re aiming for.

Conclusion

Having your work edited can be a humbling experience. But copyeditors are there to help your commas shine. Next time you’re thinking that a few classes you took years ago armed you with everything you need to publish a professional-looking story, article, novel, or script, rejoice if you have the privilege of having a copyeditor review your work before you submit. You might learn something.

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* Apostrophe used in “A’s” for clarity (pace CMOS 7.65).

† In 2010, linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum wrangled the various editions of The Elements of Style into a neat list: “Strunk’s first privately published version of Elements was dated 1918. There followed a little-known commercial version in 1920, two radically rewritten and now forgotten editions coauthored by Edward Tenney in 1934 and 1935, and six editions of the White revision (1959, 1972, 1979, 2000, 2004, and 2009, the last being just a 50th-anniversary reissue of the 2000 edition).” (Pullum, “The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style,” English Today 102, vol. 26, no. 2 [June 2010], introduction.)

Since then, as various editions entered the public domain, versions have proliferated, including a free audiobook version by LibriVox described as “based on the public-domain text from 1918, which was originally uploaded to Wikibooks and wikified by Wikibooks:User:Lord Emsworth in 2003. In January 2006, Kernigh transwikied the text from Wikibooks:Elements of Style to Wikisource.”

‡ After all, Strunk & White barely scratches the surface on commas in its five or six little pages. For instance, does the serial comma rule apply when “and” is spelled “&”? Where do you put the comma at the end of a bracketed insertion? Do you need a comma between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions that appear next to each other when a dependent clause intervenes between two independent clauses? (Yes, that’s a thing.) You won’t find all the answers in The Elements of Style. But never fear: The Chicago Manual of Style has nearly twenty long pages of comma guidelines covering these issues and many more.

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This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on July 9, 2019, © University of Chicago. 

Photo: Graduation Cake Guy by David Goehring, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 

“Hazel and I’s puppy”? When Fiction Meets Bad Grammar

 

 

“Hazel and I’s Puppy. The. Cutest. Ever.”

In editing formal prose, we fix nonstandard English without hesitation. But in editing creative works, we often need to throw out the stylebook so a narrator or character in a novel or play can abuse grammar to good effect. The guideline is “believability”: would a character naturally use such a phrase, or would they speak more formally?

Creative writers toss in stock phrases like “he ain’t” or “I seen” to reveal something about a character’s education level or to show a preference for slang or dialect. Most writers can intuit immediately whether a character would naturally say “he ain’t” in a given situation. And most editors wouldn’t dream of standardizing it in those situations.

But the possessive “Hazel and I’s” is a little trickier, in that all kinds of people use it, even highly educated folks who wouldn’t dream of writing it in a job application or company report and rarely use expressions like “he ain’t” or “I seen” in conversation.* For that matter, when it comes to compound possessives, how many of us even know what’s technically correct? Hazel and my puppy? Hazel’s and my puppy? Hazel and my’s puppy? Her and my? Hers and my? All those constructions are as believable as “Hazel and I’s” in quoted conversation, among all kinds of characters.† But “Hazel and I’s” may sound best to people who think “me” sounds wrong in any compound. That is, it’s probably a hypercorrection—like using “whom” when “who” is actually correct.

Recently I saw the possessive “I’s” in the New York Times, where actor Elisabeth Moss was quoted referring to “Gayle and I’s journey into the music.” The interview was styled as a Q&A, where direct quotations appear without quotation marks like dialogue in a play (brackets were as shown):

I know there was a syllabus, as well as an email chain of reference points. Was there anything in particular that grabbed you?

I think for me, watching a lot of old backstage, behind-the-scenes documentaries, just trying to get a feeling for that time. I was looking for something that I could emotionally connect to and feel that anger and that passion. [Agyness Deyn, who co-stars as Moss’s bandmate] was really instrumental in Gayle [Rankin, who rounds out the trio] and I’s journey into the music.

Newspaper guidelines normally don’t allow the editing of real-life quotations.‡ To eliminate iffy grammar from a Q&A, an editor can either (a) not use that line or (b) substitute different wording inside square brackets.

My point: If the New York Times is OK with quoting the possessive “I’s” in real-life dialogue from an educated, articulate speaker, then an editor of creative writing needn’t blink more than twice at it in a novel or short story. In current parlance, “Hazel and I’s puppy” will ring true in a wide variety of characters.

And in children’s literature? Should we model standard English in creative works for the little dears? Absolutely not. In fiction, poetry, and plays, children deserve the same respect for character and the same opportunity to lose oneself in believable dialogue that writers give to adult readers. Especially in works for young adults, the trick is to keep language fresh and real. Editors can help by flagging outdated or anachronistic expressions and limiting slang that teens might cringe at next year.

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* You haven’t heard this usage? My informal Twitter poll showed that 35 percent of my 414 closest friends occasionally hear “and I’s” used in this way, and 16 percent find it “pretty common.” At Facebook 61% of 273 voters said “Yes,” they hear it. You’ll probably hear it now that you’re aware of it.

† If you want to be grammatical—which is not the point of this post—“our puppy,” “the puppy she and I own,” and (per CMOS 5.22, “Joint and Separate Genitives”) “Hazel’s and my puppy” are all good solutions. “Her and my puppy,” while not incorrect, is ambiguous, since “her” can read as a nonpossessive objective—kind of like the “me” in “me and my shadow.” “Hazel and my puppy” doesn’t work for similar reasons; save it for two noun subjects: “Hazel and my puppy were the two best things to hit Centerville that year.” “Hers and my puppy” is flat-out incorrect. (We don’t write “hers puppy”; “hers” must follow a noun: “the puppy is hers,” “the puppy is mine and hers.”) When no pronouns are involved, a phrase like “Hazel and Azusa’s puppy” may be used with caution anywhere it won’t read as two items: “Hazel and Azusa’s puppy [one item] was a hit.” “My best friend adored [item 1] Hazel and [item 2] Azusa’s puppy.” Making both names possessive is normally reserved for separate rather than joint ownership: “Hazel’s and Azusa’s SAT scores.”

‡ In regular reporting (not a Q&A) it would be easy to paraphrase that line to avoid bracketed explanations and pluck out the pronoun: e.g., “Moss added that Agyness Deyn, who co-stars as Moss’s bandmate, was instrumental in guiding Moss and third bandmate Gayle Rankin’s journey into the music.”

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This post originally appeared at the Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on June 6, 2019, © University of Chicago.

Photo: Old English Sheepdog, by Meredith Bannan, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

 

Fiction+ for Creative Writers and Their Editors

Although I officially retired from my work at the Chicago Manual in December, I couldn’t say no to an opportunity to continue hanging around the CMOS Online Shop Talk blog when Russell Harper—the new editor—invited me to share a new corner of the blog with him called Fiction+. There we’ll focus on how to cope when Chicago style rules don’t quite seem to fit the creative context of a novel, story, poem, or play.

Russell kicked things off last week with a post on comma splices; today I interview Janet Burroway, author of the classic textbook Writing Fiction, a staple in creative writing classes that has just been issued in a new 10th edition.

If you’re interested in creative writing or editing, be sure to check out Fiction+. You can sign up for alerts if you want to be sure to catch new posts, and I’ll continue to give you a heads-up here.

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Photo: Woman Writing, by August Macke (1887–1914), courtesy Wikimedia Commons