Some Tips on Syntax and Grammar

As you write your roughly-weekly assignments, and as you prepare the rough and final drafts of your book reviews for the Introduction to the Professions course, I want to make you aware of some grammatical and syntactic issues that I consider significant. For the most part these are issues with which IIT students have problems. A good guide to common grammatical and syntactic problems and how to avoid them is found at Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style; attend to what he says!

My personal recommendations are these:

1. Use semicolons.
   The semicolon is your friend. It is used to separate two related clauses that are not part of a list, and can turn a run-on sentence into a proper sentence. Thus:
   Right: Joe hit the ball; it was the most convincing hit he got all season.
   Wrong: Joe hit the ball, it was the most convincing hit he got all season.
   Wrong: Joe hit the following balls; the baseball, the basketball, the football, and the soccer ball.
   Right: Joe hit the following balls: the baseball, the basketball, the football, and the soccer ball.
2. Eliminate unnecessary words.
   See Strunk's discussion on this point. It's tempting to add extra verbiage to stretch your writing out, to make it appear more learned, or to illustrate your command of vocabulary. But extra words annoy the reader and waste time and space. Be brutal! Use your word processor as a meat-cleaver!
3. Use possessives properly.
   The possessive of a singular noun or a plural noun that does not end in s is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s. The possessive of a plural noun that ends in s is formed by adding an apostrophe. See Strunk for details.
   Right: Johnny's cat got sick.
   Wrong: Johnnys cat got sick.
   Right: The Smiths have a cat. The Smiths' cat got sick.
   Right: Crusade for women's votes.
   Wrong: Crusade for womens' votes.
4. Know the difference between its and it's.
   Its is the possessive form of the third person singular pronoun "it"; it's is a contraction shortened from "it is". Do not confuse them with one another. There is no such word as "its'".
   Right: The software is powerful. Its uses are legion.
   Wrong: The software is powerful. It's uses are legion.
   Wrong: The software is powerful. Its' uses are legion.
   Right: It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
   Wrong: Its a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
   Wrong: Its' a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
   This is probably the single most common error I find in students' papers, and in casual writing on the internet.
5. Spell correctly.
   Use your spell-checker, but don't rely on it too much. It will catch words that don't exist (assuming that you haven't inserted an incorrectly-spelled word into your private dictionary), but it won't catch misused words. Watch, in particular, homonyms like
   • to when you mean too or vice versa;
   • their when you mean there or they're, or the permutations thereof;
   • it's when you mean its (see above).
   • principle when you mean principal or vice versa.
   
   Strunk has a list of frequently misspelled words that you may want to consult.

6. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs must agree in number.
   It's easy to foul up in using collectives, since some, like "all" and "most," are inherently plural, whereas others, like "each" and "every," are inherently singular. The rule is that a singular noun must be associated with a singular verb, and any adjectives modifying that noun must also be singular. Nowadays it's particularly difficult because the previously accepted (and still formally correct) practice of using masculine pronouns to reference non-gender-specific nouns is offensive to some people. Thus the following is grammatically wrong:
   Each child drew a picture of their favorite toy.
   and in traditional practice the correct version would have been
   Each child drew a picture of his favorite toy.
   Currently this practice is considered unacceptable by many because it is seen as an example of the male domination of English.
   It is still correct to say
   Each child drew a picture of his or her favorite toy.
   I personally find this awkward, but I bow to current practice.
   I personally dislike constructions like
   Each child drew a picture of his / her favority toy.
   and I will treate them as wrong if I see them in your papers.
7. Be careful in using the word "different."
   There are two problems with the word "different." One is simple to fix, and the other less so. The simple one is to recognize that, in a comparison between two items, the correct expression is different from, not different than. The latter is being used more and more, but it is wrong. The British sometimes say different to, and that's also wrong. Thus:
   Wrong: John's bike is different than Mary's bike.
   Right: John's bike is different from Mary's bike.
   Wrong: Oxford's students are different to Cambridge's.
   Right: Oxford's students are diffferent from Cambridge's.

   The only time the word "different" can be followed by "than" is in a comparison between two differences, in which case the word "than" is part of the comparison, not associated with the word different. Thus:
   Right, but unusual: Eight is closer to five than it is to twenty. Five and eight are less different than eight and twenty.

   The second difficulty with the word "different" is subtler: many students use it more than they ought. Overuse of the word "different" is a characteristic of high-school writing and earnest but unsophisticated American prose. I encourage you to avoid using "different" except in explicit comparisons. English has several other words that work better than "different" to indicate distinctness or variety, and I suggest you become familiar with them. There are circumstances where we can simply omit "different" and not replace it at all--it isn't really contributing anything to the sentence (see "Eliminate unnecessary words" above).
   Awkward: Sanger tried to make sense of the different amino acids that make up proteins.
   Better: Sanger tried to make sense of the assortment of amino acids that make up proteins.
   Awkward: Let us consider the different ways that people watch television.
   Better: Let us consider the varied ways that people watch television.
   Wordy: The Bears have several different options to pursue.
   Better: The Bears have several options to pursue.
   Correct:Jennifer Aniston's life is different from mine.

8. Minimize use of superlative adverbs. Do not use adverbs like very and extremely any more than is necessary. If you want to convince your reader that something is important, use strong, lively verbs and keep your language crisp and sincere, rather than by sticking "very" or "extremely" in front of every adjective. If you overuse "very" and its synonyms, you will annoy your readers, and you rob these words of their impact in the rare instances where you really do want them.

9. Use pairs of words and single words correctly.

   English has a few constructs that mean different things if they're spelled as a single word from what they mean as two words. The examples that I can think of at this moment are everyday and every day, and everyone and every one. Everyday is an adjective meaning "typical" or "occuring frequently and predictably". Do not use it in any other context, even though the authors of the bottled-water billboards do:
   Correct: Crime is an everyday occurrence in Bridgeport.
   Incorrect: You should take a bath everyday.
   Correct: You should not necessarily take a bath every day.

   Similarly, everyone is a pronoun meaning "every individual in the current group," whereas every one is part of a longer expression, and is usually followed by of:
   Correct: Everyone should attend the lecture.
   Correct Every one of the cats has dropped kittens at least once.

10. Avoid irrelevant quotation marks.
    Quotation marks are not intended to be used to emphasize or draw attention to phrases, usage in restaurant menus and auto-repair shop front windows to the contrary notwithstanding. You can confer emphasis with italics, underlining, or boldface, or by changing to a larger font, but not with quotation marks.
    Wrong: Try our "jumbo" tamales.
    Right: Try our jumbo tamales.
    Right: Try our jumbo tamales.

    I actually saw the following sign painted on a storefront in Skokie (one extra point for the semester if you can find it yourself and e-mail me a digital photo of the storefront):

    "God" bless America.

    Quotation marks have four legitimate uses:

    1. to set out a direct quotation from another speaker or writer.
    
    Example: John said, "this hamburger tastes like sandpaper."
    Example: President Clinton indicated "a complete lack of confidence" in his opponent's ability to conduct the negotiations.
    2. to demark a non-standard usage, e.g. the use of slang in an otherwise scholarly or formal essay.
       Example: The students liked to "hang out" at the Bog, because it was the only place on campus where anyone would listen to them.
    3. to indicate a lack of confidence in the veracity of an assertion.
       Example:Don't buy the "ultra-absorbent" towels: they don't work. They really aren't particularly absorbent at all.
    4. to surround the title of a play, a short story, a journal article, and certain other artistic and scholarly works.
       Example: N.H. Bonadeo, J. Erland, D. Gammon, D. Park, D.S. Katzer, D.G. Steel, "Coherent Optical Control of the Quantum State of a Single Quantum Dot" Science 282: 1473 (1998).

    These second and third usages, in effect, derive from the first. The implication in the second and third usage is that some un-named speaker or writer has used a terms like "hang out" and "ultra-absorbent", and that you as a writer are not responsible for the term, because you are simply quoting that other speaker or writer. Ironically, the incorrect use of quotation marks for emphasis can serve to discredit your writing, because, in effect, your readers will imagine that you are using meaning number three when you put the quote marks around something.
    Example:Try our "jumbo" tamales.
    This may look like emphasis, but it really comes out looking like the tamales are barely bite-sized.