Why I fight with my dad (or copywriting with minimal full stops).

Posted on 4 May, 2012 by hmsteemson

I fight with my dad a lot. Not in a punchy way – it’s more along the lines of: “gee dad, get with the future” (eye roll). “You young people are destroying the world” (parry).

Except it’s not the world he means, really, it’s just punctuation.

You see, he misses full stops. They used to be everywhere, and not just on the ends of sentences either; they were in titles and abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms. Little bullet holes shooting sentences to death: “Mr. Smith and co., of the C.I.A. shot guns, rifles etc., but not people ie. you.”

Oh man. So stilted.

Sure, there’s something grown up and elegant about a Mr. or an e.g., but how about that full-stop-comma carry on? Makes me sort of itchy in my brain, which is the main reason I avoid nearly all non-sentence-finishing full stops, even if that means more fights with my dad.

So, what about you: do you go for the old timey charm of the extra-full stops, or prefer the straightforward stylings of the sans-stop?

This post is literally better than chocolate (or how we misuse ‘literally’)

Posted on 23 February, 2012 by Frithahookway

Ever eaten something so spicy that it literally set your mouth on fire? That must have been traumatic. Or been so mad that you literally exploded? Talk about a mood killer.

The problem with our wee friend ‘literally’ is that it has lost its literal meaning. So often you’ll hear about something that ‘literally’ happened. In actual fact, unless it happened exactly the way it’s being described, the situation is figurative.

Literally, by definition, means ‘exactly and without exception’. However, since the early 20th Century, the term has been widely used to as an intensifier of words like ‘ virtually’ or ‘in effect’. So unless you didn’t stop wriggling for a full eight hours, you didn’t literally toss and turn all night. Nor is it likely, no matter how hungry you might be, that you will ever end up literally eating a horse.

As is expected though, with the way our language tends to evolve, it’s unlikely that the correct term ‘figuratively’ will ever beat out a hundred years of misuse and come back into vogue.

Sigh. You win, society.

But next time you’re out for a Spicy Chicken Masala, just for fun, try: “My mouth is figuratively on fire!”. You may get the odd look or two, but at least you’re doing it correctly. You’re also mixing it up with an alliteration. Literacy points all round.

Hate speech (marks), (or how not to use bunny ears)

Posted on 30 September, 2011 by rebekahguy

We talk; we write. Sometimes we write the things we say. And sometimes we write things that are approximations, or that are ironic, or that have many meanings. So of course the grammar gods would decide that all these things shall be indicated using the same symbols. Of which there are two kinds, and consistency is really the only rule. Nooooooo!

[The above is a basic rundown of what this blog post will be: some bold facts, then some examples, and lastly some panic-ridden statements that only add confusion and take away from any real resolution. You on board? Good.]

Speech marks. Inverted commas. Quotation marks. Bunny ears. “”. ‘’ – I’m going to call them bunnies so I’m not being biased towards one kind of usage. And also because I like bunnies. I also like to call them The Sluts of Grammar because they’re used all over the place, for heaps of different things, and I think they’re dirty. Oh and you might think that double and single ones are regional… Wrong. They may have started out that way, but, as is the wont of the bunny (and as you will see), things are now a big free-for-all.

They pop up in direct speech: “Hey you kids, get out of my boggy marsh!” (unnecessary bunnies, I’d have known that was direct speech via context); they’re used to show that the meaning of the word/s inside isn’t quite applicable: crystals somehow ‘know’ what shape to grown into (duh, I think I’m safe from being fooled here); they’re used to highlight irony: Charlie Sheen derives his “wisdom” from his vast experience in the industry (god, so obvious it’s about to punch you in the face); and they can indicate the names of artistic works: Frank Zappa’s ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’. That last one could mean an album or a song but you’d have to check consistency to know. GOOD. SIMPLE, THEN.

So, they all mean different things at different times and willy nilly seems to be the suggested dosage. You can use either the double ones or the single ones however you like, and they don’t even really hold much meaning within a context.

I know of three definite rules for these things:

- Use the same style for the beginning and end of whatever’s inside them (and thereby consistently within the wider text itself, pleaseandthankyou).

- In British English (the more commonly used variety in NZ) the full stop or comma comes after the bunny ears.

- If a bunny-able phrase appears inside a bunny-able phrase, use the other style, like this: “He just yelled out his window, ‘Hey you kids, get out of my boggy marsh’,” she explained.

My suggestion for bunnies is to be sparing. And, actually, that includes using your fingers to denote a bunny-able phrase. Meaning can be lost in both situations if you’ve got too many bunnies – they look cheap and off-putting. Much like sluts. You may notice I used italics where bunnies might have instead been used in this post, and that’s really where I think the solution lies, because slanty typing is so much prettier, and uses the actual words to connote the deeper meaning, not some candy-ass superscript. There, I said it.

And also, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was written with no quotation marks at all, even with plenty of direct speech in it. In Early Modern English quotation marks were used only to denote pithy comments, let’s go back to that! “There are no stupid people, only stupid punctuation”. Nice.

I before E, except after C (and how to make the rhyme actually useful-ish)

Posted on 22 September, 2011 by hmsteemson

Do you know there’s an extra bit to that rhyme that makes it slightly more useful? The full one goes:

I before E. Except: after C, and in sounding like “ay”, as in neighbour and weigh.

Let’s just stop there, give ourselves a high-five, and ignore words like seize, weird and foreign, OK?

The point of the bullet point (or controlling Jar Jar Binks)

Posted on 19 September, 2011 by rebekahguy

If your document is Star Wars, the bullet points are Jar Jar Binks… Because they look like they belong and they grab attention, but they’re unpredictable and sometimes completely out of control. You’ve got to know how to keep them reigned in. (I was going to use a Clint Eastwood-style opener like, “are you feeling lucky, Point?” but couldn’t follow it through – ah well…).

So why use them, you ask? Good. You’re already dubious as to their relevance. To be brief, bulleted lists are really only useful in business or technical documents, or for notes magneted to the fridge; they’ll ruin a narrative like no other thing could. If you’re listing in a narrative, please use semi-colons, and keep it brief, okay? The first nice thing about bullet-pointed lists that I must concede is their contextual practicality: depending on your bullet format you can make one point more important that the others, or make them all the same. A good example is the “darling please do” list:

Water plants
Take out garbage
Feed dog
Mend hole in my socks
Churn butter

Using the plain bullet keeps the relevance equal. Darling must do all the things, but it doesn’t matter in which order (the mending could probably be done while the butter’s churning, etc). Compare with a technical how-to list:

Wash hair with volumising shampoo.
Condition with silkising treatment.
Separate hair into sections and attach curlers.
Allow hair to air dry to 75%.
Take out curlers and blow into desired style.

So, this stuff has to be done in the correct order or your hair will look horrible (or so society would have us women believe – ha HA!), hence the use of numbers. It’s this type of list which can really only be presented as bulleted, otherwise the directions can get too wordy and complicated: word reduction and conciseness is the second nice thing I’ll concede about bullet points. As long as the first word in each point begins with a verb (in the same form, please, and preferably the bare form: wash, condition, churn, mend…) you don’t really need many more words, and you’re allowed to forget about ones like ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘your’! It’s so rebellious! (Look at the picture – Bill Gates did that bit all wrong, shame. Even having all of the money won’t make you good at some stuff).

There are really no linguistics-based rules about punctuation in bullet-pointed lists – you can use semi-colons, full stops, full sentences, part sentences, single lines of text or many lines – but the important thing is consistency. You don’t have to start each point with a capital letter, because sometimes informality is ‘cool’ (groan), but be sure do it the same way for every one; similarly with full stops. But then if you use full stops at the end of each point you have to use a capital letter to start each new point – you see? When in doubt, do what the MS Word grammar check suggests.

Oh and another thing, don’t use CRAZY CHARACTERS in place of bullets, like hearts or arrows or pizza slices. Especially if you’re writing to me. Oh man they’re so stupid, and since bullet points are only going to be used in formal documents from now on (right? RIGHT??) they’re also unprofessional. As Pope John Paul II said*, “a good bullet in the right place will do wonders for your career”.

*I can’t back that up.