The Subversive Copy Editor Blog

When Friends Find Grammar “Errors” in Your Novel

Creative writers sometimes mangle grammar on purpose or get creative with punctuation. At the drafting stage, we keep a dictionary and style manual at hand. When slips are unintended, we count on our copyeditors to catch them.

But at some point, most of us get advice on punctuation or grammar from a friend, relative, or strangers on social media. Sometimes friends or beta readers read our draft and point out what they believe to be errors.

The problem is, they’re often wrong.

Three Reasons

Just because someone loves us doesn’t mean they won’t go to the mat for a grammar rule they believe is true. Online “friends” are even less likely to budge. Last month I saw a Facebook post where all seventy-nine (79!) commenters told a writer that “breathe deep” was incorrect, as opposed to “breathe deeply.” No one cited a dictionary or other source. No one mentioned flat adverbs, much less CMOS 5.160.* In short, no one got it right.

I’m not saying there was no value in that boatload of bad advice. More on that later. But first, here are three reasons why someone who criticizes your grammar might be wrong, followed by three ways to respond.

Reason 1. They’re wrong because they don’t take your story and character into account.

When we ask a friend or spouse a grammar question, we usually keep it short. Same online. We don’t always provide enough information about the character, the location, or the historical moment for someone to judge what’s appropriate. The right grammar in creative writing is a slippery fish. From page to page it can change depending on level of formality, dialect, character, and tone. Good editors ask questions before answering. But people without editorial training aren’t always put off by lack of context. To many, there’s only one right answer, no matter what.

Reason 2. They’re wrong because they’re using old information. (“That’s what I was taught.”)

Someone who bases grammar advice on what they learned back in the day might coincidentally give good advice, but when their stated reasoning consists only of “That’s what I was taught,” it’s not good enough.

The problem today is when people start doing things a certain way, suddenly it becomes acceptable.—Facebook comment on grammar*

People love to hate changes in language, but to experts, change is not a problem. This is language at work. I don’t know about you, but I’m glad English is self-adjusting. I’m glad we no longer have to decide whether to address someone informally as “thee” or “thou” or use the formal “you.” I’m happy not to type a hyphen in “to‑day” or “e‑mail.” I’m glad “Ms.” exists as an alternative to researching and revealing a person’s marital status.

See below for a few examples of rules many of us learned in school that were wrongheaded back then and are still wrong today.

Reason 3. They’re wrong because they’re just making it up. (“It doesn’t sound right.”)

People can argue forever about what “sounds right.” It’s the least compelling reason a grammar critic can give. Don’t fall for it as a sole deciding factor. A critic’s intuitions can be warped by reasons 1 and 2. And seventy-nine people can agree and still make a bad call if they don’t know what sounds right for your specific narrator or character.

On the other hand, if more than one person says your sentence is iffy, it might help to read the passage out loud and literally listen to how it sounds.

What to Do

When someone reads your work and tells you something isn’t correct, sometimes they’re right and you know it. You can fix it. But what if you believe your original wording is right, whether it’s standard English or not? Here are three good options.

Break the rule. If you’re certain you wrote it the way your character or narrator would say it, grammatical or not, go ahead and break the rule. Leave it the way it is. Don’t force the sentence into formal English.

Check the facts. If standard English would be expected of your character or narrator, and you believe your phrasing achieves it but your critic says it’s bad grammar, ask them to point you to the rule. Maybe they’re right—or maybe their source is out of date. Keep a dictionary and stylebook on your desk or bookmarked online. If in doubt, get professional help. An experienced copyeditor’s intuition comes from an informed knowledge of style guides and fiction-writing practices, and you can bet they’ll examine the context before judging.

TIP: If your critic is blowing smoke, they won’t be able to find a source that backs them up. “It’s common knowledge” is stickler-speak for “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Make a change. Consider rewriting your sentence even if you suspect you’re being stickled. After all, if one reader thinks it’s wrong, others might too. The best outcome is a sentence that doesn’t draw focus away from what’s happening.

Takeaway

• By all means take advantage of any help you can get while you’re writing. You’ll get both good and bad advice. It all has value even if you’re not sure of the final answer, because it tells you how readers interpret your words. That’s worth knowing.
• When you’re finished drafting, hire a good copyeditor. Your submitted works will get a better reception from agents and editors.

Bonus: Popular Grammar Beliefs

Here are some bogus rules people love to enforce, along with some paragraphs in CMOS you can cite if you choose to push back.

Claim: “Mary said” is correct; “said Mary” is incorrect.

Why it’s not true: “Because it’s demonstrably silly,” said the copyeditor. “And inconvenient,” added the intern.

The grain of truth: “Said” followed by a pronoun (“said she”) is more at home in poetry or highly lyrical prose. Maybe the myth arose from an unwarranted extrapolation from those contexts. A better use of a writer’s editing time than taking out the “said Marys” would be to get rid of any “X saids” and “said Xs” that aren’t actually needed. If the identity of a speaker is obvious, their speech might stand without a dialogue tag.

Claim: Forms of “to be” should be deleted.

Why it’s not true: It would be nearly impossible to write a book of any length without regular use of forms of “to be.” It’s preposterous to imagine taking them all out. In fact, “to be” (“is,” “are,” “was,” etc.) often provides the simplest and most elegant way to write something.

The grain of truth: I can think of two.

Grain 1. Writers are often told that simple tenses are more dynamic than progressive ones, and progressive tenses begin with a form of “to be.” Hence the antipathy for “to be” verbs as “undynamic.” Eradicating the progressive tense would be extreme. But when progressive-tense verbs proliferate, experiment with changing them to simple past or present:

I was sliding headfirst down the chute, and the crowd was going wild. [Past progressive.]

becomes

I slid headfirst down the chute, and the crowd went wild. [Simple past.]

Grain 2. The passive voice also involves using “to be,” and avoiding the passive in favor of the active is a famous rule for writers. It’s said that the passive deadens writing because it obscures the actor in a sentence:

The award was announced before I arrived. [Passive]

The treasure had been hidden in the tree for generations. [Passive]

The car hogging my spot was parked practically sideways. [Passive]

The reader is left wondering “Who announced the award?” and “Who hid the treasure?” and “Who parked the car?” But when we can’t know or don’t care who dunnit, an active construction rarely improves things:

Someone announced the award before I arrived. [Active]

An unknown person hid the treasure in the tree generations ago. [Active]

Whoever hogged my spot parked their [or worse, “his or her”] car practically sideways. [Active]

TIP: Don’t mistake a lifeless vibe (“the whole scene was a downer”) or a simple predicate modifier (“she was weirdly calm”) for a passive grammatical construction. According to Merriam-Webster, a grammatical passive is “a verb form whose grammatical subject is subjected to or affected by the action represented by that verb.” A grammatical passive can sound action-packed: “A live grenade was hurled directly at me” is passive. If you’re fuzzy on the passive voice, see CMOS 5.118. Meanwhile, a popular shortcut to identifying a grammatical passive is to try adding “by zombies” at the end. If it works, it’s passive. “A live grenade was hurled directly at me by zombies.” Yep—passive.

Claim: You can’t have a semicolon in dialogue, because people don’t “speak” semicolons.

Why it’s not true: People don’t “speak” commas or periods either, yet no one seems to favor banishing them from dialogue.

The grain of truth: Many readers claim to be distracted by semicolons, especially if they appear too often or aren’t used correctly. Yet some successful writers use them with abandon. In a New Yorker essay, Mary Norris considers replacing a semicolon in dialogue with a period (“She looked at me; I was lost for words”) but resists, because “the semicolon keeps the words above water: because of that semicolon, something about her look is going to be significant.”† It seems to be a matter of personal style. Employ semicolons appropriately and sparingly and in tune with your voice, and you’ll be fine.

Claim: The word “that” should be deleted throughout your manuscript.

Why it’s not true: “That” is often essential. That’s why it’s a word. You already knew that. (See also CMOS 5.60.)

The grain of truth: “That” can slow things down when it’s unneeded or repetitious. Although it would be rash to delete the word everywhere without consideration, it’s a good word to keep an eye on, case by case.

Claim: You can’t start a sentence with “But.”

Why it’s not true: It’s never been true, and it’s not now (see CMOS 5.203). Anyone who claims it’s a rule should be asked to prove it.

A situation where it’s true: It’s awkward to start a sentence with “But” if the previous sentence or clause began with one. There’s usually an easy edit:

I promised to be there, but the train was delayed. But it didn’t matter.

Better: I promised to be there, but the train was delayed. It didn’t matter.

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This post originally appeared at The Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on October 19 2021, © University of Chicago.

* The post about “breathe deep” and the comment about “The problem today” took place in a private group for writers, so I won’t share the thread here. I retain the documentation. At the time of this writing, the comment count on “breathe deep” had reached 295.

† Mary Norris, “Semicolons; So Tricky,” New Yorker, July 19, 2012.

Top photo courtesy Pxfuel.

When to Delete “That”

A piece of bossy advice often given to creative writers is to sweep through your manuscripts before you submit them and delete certain words. “Just,” “so,” “very,” and “really” vie for the top target, but the most popular prohibition of all might be of the word “that.”

What’s wrong with “that”?

Nothing is wrong with the word “that.” It’s frequently essential to the grammar or clarity of a sentence (see below). Yet we’re often told [that] it’s “unneeded.” I sense the ghosts of Strunk and White here. “Omit needless words,” they tell us, declaring (for instance) that the sentence “His story is strange” is “more vigorous” than “His story is a strange one” and therefore better.

But is vigorous always better? Do readers demand vigor at all times, from every sentence? Creative writers especially must ask, Is this character or narration meant to be vigorous?

It’s interesting that Strunk and White do not include “that” in their examples of needless words. In fact they use it repeatedly in their own advice on omitting needless words: “This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short . . . but that every word tell” (The Elements of Style, 3rd ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1979], p. 23). Clearly, Strunk and White believed that “that” has the power to tell.

Picture an aged, rasping storyteller surrounded by curious listeners. The storyteller begins. Pick one:

“It is strange, the tale that he told.”

“It’s strange, the tale he told.”

“His story is strange.”

No matter which version you like best, it’s a valid exercise. The writer chooses. What if the character is a beat cop instead of a mysterious storyteller? Most of us would rather base our choice on how the character or narrator speaks than on a dubious rule. We listen to the sentence and choose what fits: vigor, musicality, a dreamy formality.

The problem with labeling any word as “needless” is that sometimes it’s the best word possible. In the sentences above, I used it four times, quoted it twice (not counting the storyteller example or when I referred to it as a word), and chose to omit it once. Would you have made different choices? How to decide?

When “that” can go

I won’t deny that “that” sometimes gets in the way of a good sentence. Newspaper editors who like to save ink are expert deleters of “that.” As the AP Stylebook advises (in its entry on “that” as a conjunction), “That usually may be omitted when a dependent clause immediately follows a form of the verb to say: The president said he had signed the bill.” Creative writers aiming for briskness can take the hint:

Leave “that” out if it slows down the action,

He turned so quickly [that] he knocked the table over.

if a repetition bothers you,

That’s the real one? Everyone believed [that] that one was fake!

if it bogs down snappy dialogue,

“The key [that] I saw is in his pocket!”

or if you simply don’t like it.

She turned the cake so [that] the hole in the side was hidden.

TIP: When using “that” as a relative pronoun, make sure there’s no doubt about what it refers to (see CMOS 5.60).

The word that unlocks the door is “pizza.” [“That” refers to “word.”]

It all depended on a single word from a spell book that was long forgotten. [Was the word or the spell book forgotten?]

On the other hand

There are times when a well-placed “that” prevents the reader from getting the wrong idea. The AP Stylebook is clear on this: “Use the conjunction that to introduce a dependent clause if the sentence sounds or looks awkward without it. There are no hard-and-fast rules.” And further: “When in doubt, include that. Omission can hurt. Inclusion never does.”

Fiction writers encounter the same dangers as journalists if they omit “that” when it’s needed for clarity. Leave “that” in when it begins a subordinate clause after a conjunction like “after,” “although,” or “until”:

She said that after she received the note, she had found two rings and a small pocketknife.*

Retain it after verbs like “believe,” “declare,” and “see”:

They can see that specially planted trees in the fields across the river will provide a perfect cover for the lord’s longbowmen. [“That” prevents us from reading “They can see trees.”]

And keep it when a dependent clause starts with an element of time:

He swore that on the afternoon of the crime he was visiting his sick mother. [Otherwise we don’t know whether he swore on that day or visited his mother on that day.]

TIP: When “that” introduces a quotation, there is no introductory comma, and the quotation normally begins lowercase, even if it’s a grammatically complete sentence. If you remove “that,” the quotation is normally introduced by a comma and an initial cap. (See CMOS 6.40.)

Georgia said that “it was just one of those things.”

Georgia said, “It was just one of those things.”

Conclusion

Like much advice for writers, the campaign to eradicate “that” from our sentences comes from pushing a reasonable caution too far. There are times when trimming is in order. But a better guideline might be simply to keep an eye on your use of “that.”

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*Update 1.18.21: I modified this example after a sharp-eyed reader pointed out that the original did not contain a subordinate clause ("She said that in addition to the wallet, she had found two rings and a small pocketknife.") I'm sorry! 

Photo modified from Deletion Warning by FindYourSearch, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This post originally appeared at The Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on August 12, 2021, © University of Chicago.

“Whoever/​Whomever” in Fiction: Which Should Your Character Use?

Recently, a question that went something like this appeared in a Facebook group for writers seeking help from book editors:

Help with this sentence please! “Some advice, for whoever/whomever is interested.” A friend said it should be “whoever” and my editor said “whomever.” How do you vote?

In the rollicking spirit of Facebook, grammar is routinely decided by ballot. The votes were all over the place. Some were based on the “feeling” of the voter. Some repeated what others had already said. There was at least one claim that the choice depends on whether you’re American or British or Australian. (It doesn’t.) And there was the requisite insult, causing an admin to throw down a caution.

Mainly, there was confusion. Not even the professional copyeditors knew for sure, although it didn’t stop them from holding forth. Two or three cited a source, evidently unaware of social-media etiquette.

Who needs a source if something “sounds right”?

Who indeed? Many commenters at Facebook pointed out that a character should speak naturally, grammar be hanged. I agree.

But what seemed to be missing from the discussion was the idea that knowing what’s technically correct is a superpower for a writer who wants a character to speak naturally, whether or not the character uses standard English grammar.

Having this knowledge, a writer can more finely tune a narrative voice or dialogue, adding layers of subtle distinction. The grammar chosen for a character can potentially reveal more about that person than a paragraph of description. A character can

• know and use the correct grammar confidently
• know what’s correct but choose to use casual grammar or dialect to make a point or be funny
• not know standard grammar and use casual grammar or dialect
• not know the rules of standard grammar but use it intuitively
• “code switch,” fluently using different grammars in different company

But wait—there’s more

The example on Facebook (“Some advice, for whoever/whomever is interested”) suggests yet another scenario, wherein a character tries too hard, using grammar that sounds proper but is technically wrong or needlessly awkward. If the stumble is true to the character—say an ambitious young student who’s been listening and studying but isn’t yet proficient—it provides the perfect touch.

If, however, a grammar choice is wrong for a character or for the narrative voice—if it’s just the writer fumbling (or worse, a copyeditor meddling)—the speaker loses credibility. The reader laughs or cringes at the result:

“Pardon, milady, the telephone.” “Thank you, Withers. Whom is it?”

“Yeah, shut up, Bugsy. It’s fewer than ten bucks.”

His questions hit hard. Harder than did the bullet.

In the first example, a proper “lady” would say “Who is it?” As written, the question befits an Eliza Doolittle type, trying her best but coming up short.

In the second, proper-sounding grammar doesn’t fit the noirish vibe. It’s not that a gangster can’t use standard English; the problem is the inconsistency between the slangy “Yeah, shut up” and the use of “fewer” where “less” would be more natural. (And in any case, “less” is correct in expressions of quantities like dollars.)

In the third example, the clipped prose style begs for “Harder than the bullet,” which happens to be grammatically correct. That fussy “did” reeks of a copyeditor chasing a zombie rule.

TIP: This post centers on the use of “whoever/whomever,” but the same advice applies to decisions about “who” and “whom.” “Whom did they call?” is formal standard English, but few people speak that way. Depending on the context, a fictional character can use “whom” or “whomever” to sound prim, annoyed, polite, or sarcastic. “Who did they call?” sounds more natural, less loaded with meaning.

Some advice, for whoever is interested

(Yes, “whoever” is correct.)*

It’s a recurring dilemma for writers: Should a character sound right or be right? Do readers know or care? What if the grammar is right but readers think it’s wrong? What if the nonstandard version is widely used and accepted? How much does any of this matter?

No one ever said good writing is easy. We’ve all heard of authors who effortlessly spewed a best seller with minimal revision or editing, but dollars to doughnuts, most successful writers labor over their work, drafting, crafting, submitting gratefully to beta readers and editors and copyeditors. It’s through thoughtful honing that a sentence shines, a character becomes real, and a coherent, immersive story emerges.

For writers striving to improve

• Update your grasp of standard English grammar. Read chapter 5 of The Chicago Manual of Style. Read Dreyer’s English, by Benjamin Dreyer (New York: Random House, 2019).
• Make note of grammar you aren’t sure of and avoid it until you’re confident. Use “whom” or “whomever” only if you’re rock-solid sure about why your narrator or character would choose it.
• Be careful who/whom you trust on Facebook.

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* The trick is to stop seeing “whoever” as the object of a preposition when it’s actually the subject of its own clause, “whoever is interested.” See under “whoever; whomever” at CMOS 5.250: “Avoid the second unless you are certain of your grammar {give this book to whoever wants it} {I cook for whomever I love}. If you are uncertain why these examples are correct, use anyone who or (as in the second example) anyone.”

Top image: Snob, by Charles LeBlanc, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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

Jack Hart Talks about Wordcraft

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.

CS: Wordcraft is primarily geared toward journalists and nonfiction writers, but almost everything in it applies to fiction writing as well. Could you say something about that overlap? You’ve written novels yourself.

JH: Actually, I’ve written one book-length piece of fiction: Skookum Summer: A Novel of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). In part, I tackled the project to prove what I’d always suspected: that the rules of storytelling are universal, that they apply across genres, including both nonfiction and fiction.

That indeed proved to be the case. With a lot of help from my novelist friends, I managed to draft a Pacific Northwest mystery, to find a respectable publisher, to work my way through two or three more drafts with a skilled editor, and to get Skookum into print. It didn’t set any best-seller lists on fire, but it received universally positive reviews. And it certainly proved my original point.

And it taught me a whole lot more. Fiction, which I’d always assumed was easier than nonfiction, turned out to be in several ways a whole lot harder. When you have complete freedom to craft any story you want, everything’s on you.

CS: Good point. In journalism, your basic plot is ready-made. How else is fiction harder?

JH: In fiction the rules of storytelling become even stricter. Pose the complication right out of the gate? You bet. In a mystery that means you absolutely must get your protagonist fully introduced in the first few pages with all the background—and not a bit more—necessary to engage him or her in the fate of the victim, who—of course—must be dead by the end of the first chapter. Include only the action that matters? Bet on that, too. Those novelist friends of mine were constantly dinging me for passages describing cars pulling into parking lots or elevators rising through elevator shafts or otherwise including action that simply wasted time and space.

Ditto with scenic detail, which had to go if it didn’t contribute something concrete to the story line. (That rule explains the fate of a favorite chapter, a darling I reluctantly killed about Draft No. 5.)

And so it went. On through the entire list of rules I’d been preaching for decades but applied only loosely because in nonfiction reality limits your control over every aspect of the story.

CS: I understand why rules like that work—but I also see it from another angle. I see aspiring writers robotically following so-called writing rules that were never meant to be absolute. In the Facebook groups I follow, writers instruct one another to delete all forms of “to be” and every possible adverb. However, in fiction writing there are always some contexts where passivity, vagueness, or a long-winded sentence is just the ticket. Especially in dialogue.

After all, not everyone is writing a thriller. Readers of literary fiction have vastly different expectations and tolerances than readers of fantasy or romance.

So how do fiction writers learn which “rules” apply to their work, which rules are spurious to begin with, and when it’s OK to ignore a rule?

JH: Writing involves lots of rules, of various kinds. I was talking about rules of story, the sorts of guidelines I covered in Storycraft. They include the idea, for example, that you should introduce your protagonist and his or her complication early, or that you shouldn’t delay plot unnecessarily with irrelevant scenic or action details. You ignore those sorts of “rules” at the risk of losing your audience.

And then there are also language “rules,” the kind I covered in Wordcraft. Some of those are indeed spurious, such as the rule against split infinitives. Others are commonsense guides to active, vibrant language, such as the idea that you should prefer active verbs to flabby linking verbs. If you follow that guideline, you’ll indeed avoid the various forms of “to be,” although not with a slavish obedience that causes you to jump through awkward language hoops.

I’ll agree that maybe once in a great while “passivity, vagueness, or a long-winded sentence is just the ticket,” but those occasions are rare indeed. For most writers, passivity, vagueness, and long-windedness are the kiss of literary death. At the least, you ought to recognize each transgression and have a damned good reason for committing it.

CS: I think that’s the hard part for most beginning writers: recognizing a good reason when they see it. I find that reading a lot of books of the kind you want to write helps develop a feel for its “rules.”

JH: Assuming that they’re good books.

CS: In chapter 2 of Wordcraft, where you talk about writing process, you urge writers to draft freely and quickly, and you describe an extraordinary exercise from writing coach Don Fry, who suggests working with a printed outline nearby while typing with your computer screen turned off so it’s impossible to stop and read over your output.

I understand the time pressures in journalism, but novelists usually have more flexibility. Assuming a writer has an outline, why is speedy drafting important? Might not slower thinking and writing get results just as good or better? And in any case, are you convinced that stopping to edit as you go takes much longer?

I won’t deny I have a horse in this race.

JH: I have a horse in this race, too, and it constantly wants to pull up to a slow walk. For years I edited every line to perfection before moving on, and when I finished a piece it was completely finished. But I’m convinced that stopping to edit as you go makes writing much more painful and takes much longer.

I’m also convinced that it produces unoriginal prose that’s much stiffer and more cramped. Your true self, writing that’s rich with your authentic voice, emerges only when you’re relaxed. And as years of research—much of it summarized by V. A. Howard and J. H. Barton in their classic Thinking on Paper (New York: William Morrow, 1986)—conclusively demonstrates, you relax only when you write quickly, without constantly pausing over each choice of words and fretting over each turn of phrase. When you finish your draft and shift into editing mode, that’s when you can turn into a stickler.

CS: Well, you’ve persuaded me to dial back the self-editing. But there’s no way I’m going to turn off my computer screen. I mean, according to research we should also be writing by hand, and I’m not doing that.

JH: Don was suggesting only one run-through of the dark-screen exercise, not a regular practice. So you can relax.

CS: Which, after all, is the point. 

One parting question: Dog person or cat person?

JH: Dog person, as the photo of Buck, my beautiful black Lab, demonstrates. No cat could have found, pointed, and retrieved that pheasant. Which was delicious, by the way.

Read the introductions to Wordcraft and Storycraft.

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Photo of Jack Hart courtesy Peking University Press.

This post originally appeared at The Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on June 8, 2021, © University of Chicago.

 

Very Long Sentences in Fiction

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.

And there [the ants] stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color. (New York: Riverhead books, 2020, 76)

That passage takes the reader by the shoulders and shakes. It’s a fine, powerful sentence, made all the more rich by Dominic Hoffman’s virtuoso narration.

A few days later, I came across part of the same passage quoted in a book review in the New York Times and, being the curious type, was motivated to investigate the length of the sentence. I couldn’t count the words easily with my audiobook, so I found an image of the page in the hardcover edition of the book at an online bookseller, transcribed the sentence, and let my word processor do the counting: 187.

That’s a lot of words, but I had thought it would be more. Then I noticed something.

Actually, I noticed two things. First, I saw that the two passages I compared weren’t exactly the same. The newspaper version had been copyedited to fit New York Times style: the phrase “page one story” in the book became “Page 1 story” in the quotation. That was a shocker. It’s standard practice for newspaper quotations from a published source to change spaces around dashes, put titles in quotes instead of italics, and in other ways accommodate old-timey typesetting limitations, but in Chicago style, quotations from written works are spelled exactly as written, not changed to fit a style guide. The intrusion of that fussy, capitalized “Page 1” yanked this reader out of the vibe as if a copyeditor had burst from the page with a STOP sign.

The more interesting thing I noticed was that both the very long sentence and the sentence following it began with “And.” And while in the printed book the first two sentences are divided by a paragraph break, audiobook listeners couldn’t know that. In the audiobook I heard all three sentences as one:

The ants were poor folks’ foolishness, a forgotten story from a forgotten borough in a forgotten city that was going under. And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope . . . [the very long sentence continues]. And all the while, the ants marched each fall, arriving at Building 17 kicking ass, a roaring tidal wave of tiny death, devouring Jesus’s cheese, moving out of the clock and into the boiler room and into the trash can by the hall door, polishing off whatever leftover sandwiches and bits of cake from the wilted, soggy, uneaten lunches Hot Sausage left behind each afternoon as he and his buddy Sportcoat ignored food in favor of their favorite beverage, King Kong. (75–76)

Added together, 21 + 187 + 81 = 289! That sentence says “Look at me” not only because it’s long, but because it has something rich and important to say, something both about and not about ants invading a building every fall, and the longer it goes on, the more rhythm and drive it musters, quickly turning nostalgia to bitterness and hammering it home, all while maintaining humor and humanity and—what the heck—moving the story along while it’s at it.

That sentence breaks any rule you ever read about sentence length, about being concise and not wasting words, about not distracting the reader from the story with displays of writerly skill. It did distract me. It distracted me for days. A writing coach or an editor might have wagged a finger at McBride and told him to kill that darling. But why shouldn’t a reader emerge from a story now and then to observe and admire the artist at work? It’s different from emerging to resent the copyeditor; appreciating the prose is part of reading for pleasure.

McBride is far from the first novelist to use long sentences effectively. Many famous examples are much longer than the one featured here, into the thousands of words, and that’s without including stream-of-consciousness and unpunctuated passages. Whole books have been written as a single sentence, for crying out loud, although I’m not promoting that idea.

Nonetheless, McBride’s very long sentence stands out as an elegant reminder to novice writers that disregarding a rule can be highly effective in creative writing.

TIP: Long sentences are not in themselves a good thing. Probably the opposite. Long sentences are more likely than short ones to suffer from any combination of comma splices, rambling, repetition, contradiction, pointlessness, inconsistency of tense, point-of-view issues, and just plain tedium. A writer who deploys a long sentence had better know what they’re doing and why.

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

This post originally appeared at The Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on May 18, 2021, © University of Chicago.

 

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.

 

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).