The GrammarPhile Blog

More on Possessives

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A few weeks ago, we posted an article about use of possessives with singular nouns. Here is some more advice about using possessives when dealing with brand or company names.

The names of many organizations and products contain words that could be considered either possessive or descriptive terms.

As a rule, use an apostrophe if the term is a singular possessive noun or an irregular plural noun.

• McDonald's
• McCall's
• Harper's Bazaar
• Women's Wear Daily
• Children's Hospital
• Levi's jeans
• Macy's
• Reese's Pieces

Do not use an apostrophe if the term is a regular plural.

• American Bankers Association
• Chemical Workers Union
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
• Ladies' Home Journal
• Reader's Digest
• Government Employees Insurance Company

In all cases, follow the organization's preference when known.

• Investor's Management Services, Inc.
• Lay's potato chips
• Folger's coffee
• Diners Club membership
• Thomas' English muffins
• Mrs. Paul's frozen foods
• Mrs. Fields cookies
• Taster's Choice
• Bakers Choice
• Lands' End catalog

When adding the sign of the possessive to a phrase that must be italicized or underlined, do not italicize or underline the possessive ending.

• Gone With The Wind's main characters
• The Wind in the Willows' author  

Source: The Gregg Reference Manual

Commas: To use or not to use, that is the question!

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Have you ever felt like Oscar Wilde? If so, this article can help.  

"I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."
-Oscar Wilde

Despite the difficulties many writers encounter, and the myriad rules describing their usage, commas have only two basic functions: they either separate or set off. Separating requires only one comma; setting off requires two.

A relative clause that is restrictive, that is, essential to the meaning of the sentence, should not be set off by commas. A nonrestrictive phrase or nonessential element is one that offers extra information but can be omitted without affecting meaning, and should be enclosed in commas, or if at the end of a sentence, preceded by a comma.

• The woman wearing a red coat is my sister.
• The report that the committee submitted was well documented.
• The book I have just finished is due back tomorrow; the others can wait.
• That is the woman who mistook my coat for hers.

• My sister, wearing a red coat, set off for the city.
• The report, which was well documented, was submitted to the committee.
• This book, which I finished last night, is due back tomorrow.
• The woman, who was extremely embarrassed, returned my coat.
  

Sources: Gregg Reference Manual and Chicago Manual of Style

Use (or misuse) of Double Negatives

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Most (dare we say ALL?) readers will realize that the following double negative is grammatically incorrect: "They don't have no skis." However, even many literate writers might miss the double negative in the next sentence:

"We won't be able to accept your invitation to attend the competition on September 13 nor even the one on September 15." Change nor to or. Reason: The word won't covers both the competition on September 13 and the one on September 15.

Here are examples of double negatives used correctly:

• He was not unfriendly.
• Not for nothing was he called Andre the Giant.

Caution: Don't confuse this instruction with neither ... nor.

Neither ... Nor
Use a singular verb and a singular pronoun in the following sentence: "Neither Tulabell nor Sassafras was ready to begin her session."

However, if the subject nearer the verb is plural, use the plural forms: "Neither Tulabell nor the other skiers were ready to begin their sessions."

The same rule applies to either ... or.

JUST FOR FUN:

"Double negatives not withstanding," bellowed the stuffy professor, "in English, one negative means no, and two negatives mean yes. But two positives can never mean no." "Yeah, right," moaned the class moron from the back row.

North, East, South or West - Capitalize or Not?

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When proofreading or editing documents, we often find that writers are confused about when to capitalize these terms. Here are some rules to follow.

Capitalize north, south, east, west, and derivative words when they designate definite regions or are an integral part of a proper name.

• in the North
• down South
• the West Coast
• the Eastern Seaboard
• the Deep South

Do not capitalize these words when they merely indicate direction or general location.

• Many waterskiers have relocated from the Northeast to the South.
• BUT: We maintain a slalom course in the south of France.
• OR: Go north on I-95 and then west on Route 110.

Capitalize such words as Northerner, Southerner, and Midwesterner.

Capitalize such words as northern, southern, eastern, and western when they refer to the people in a region or to their political, social, or cultural activities. Do not capitalize these words when they merely indicate general location or refer to the geography or climate of the region.

• Eastern bankers, but the eastern half of Colorado
• Southern hospitality, but southern temperatures
• Western civilization, but westerly winds
• the Northern vote, but a northern winter
• The Northern states did not vote as they were expected. (Political activities.)
• The drought has ended in the northern states. (Climate.)
• My sales territory takes in most of the southeastern states. (General location.)
• She was Southeastern Champion twice in a row.

NOTE: When terms like western region and southern district are used to name organizational units within a company, capitalize them.

• The Western Region (referring to a part of the national sales staff) reports that sales are 12 percent over budget for the first six months.

When words like northern, southern, eastern, and western precede a place name, they are not ordinarily capitalized, because they merely indicate general location within a region. However, when these words are actually part of the place name, they must be capitalized.

• northern New Jersey, western Massachusetts
• Northern Ireland, Western Australia

NOTE: Within certain regions it is not uncommon for many who live there to capitalize the adjective because of the special importance they attach to the regional designation. Thus people who live in southern California may prefer to write Southern California.

Source: The Gregg Reference Manual

Avoid Redundancy in Your Writing

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Let's start with a quote about writing: 

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
- William Strunk, Jr., Elements of Style

Pleonasm is the use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense. Redundancies are found everywhere. Advertisers are particularly guilty of this when promoting their offers: "an added bonus" or "a free gift."

In your writing it is always a good practice to review the completed document with an eye toward avoiding saying the same thing twice. The use of redundant phrases in your writing is a habit worth breaking.

Here is a short list of some to look out for:

Note: Some redundancies contained in phrases have been legitimized over time and should be left alone: safe haven, hot water heater, new beginning, tuna fish, never before, joined together, and false pretenses.

Sources:  Common Errors in English by Paul Brians; Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary; the Internet

Formal vs. Informal -- Informal Doesn't Mean Incorrect Grammar

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Often in our writing the issue is not one of correct grammar or spelling but rather one of how to best convey our point to the reader. The words we choose and how they go together can affect the reader's perception of our company, the message, and us. People assess our expertise, education, and background based on these criteria. Thus it is important to know your audience enough to gauge the tenor of your writing.

The style or tone chosen should fit the occasion as well as the intended audience. You wouldn't want to use formal language when your intent is to be laid back or irreverent, just as you wouldn't want to use an informal tone when writing a policy manual.

Often one's writing will have a mixture of formal and informal elements. For most writers whose words are intended for a general audience the trick is to strike a balance between a tone of slight formality and being downright stuffy.

In general, formal writing is characterized by the tendency to adhere closely to the rules governing grammatical sentences and to avoid expressions and word use that would be used in more casual missives. However, this does not mean that formal writing is intentionally pretentious (using language that seems intended mainly to impress readers). Situations that would call for formal usage would include journal submissions, official reports, job applications, and articles regarding serious subject matter.

Informal writing incorporates many of the familiar features of spoken English. Measures of informality include the use of colloquial terms, contractions, and the tendency to abbreviate sentences by omitting certain elements.

An important factor to remember is that formal and informal refer to the tone or style of your writing, not to grammatical correctness. Each style should conform to grammatical rules. The two styles are simply used for different occasions.

• Imagine how you'd talk to your friend on the phone.
• Imagine how one would speak on a job interview.
• I won't have that report done today.
• I will not have the report finished today.
• Let's stop for the night.
• Let us adjourn for the evening.
• You eat sushi with chopsticks, not a fork.
• Sushi should be eaten with chopsticks, not with a fork.

sources: The Chicago Manual of Style; Fumblerules by William Safire; The American Heritage Book of English Usage; the Internet

Grammar Usage - Compound Verbs

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Many people find rules for writing compound verbs confusing and arbitrary. They end up guessing and producing inconsistent and confusing text that tends to lose the attention of their readers. Credibility is lost, and therefore the power of the message is depleted. Read on and look for examples that can help your writing today.

Compound verbs are usually hyphenated or solid.

• to air-condition
• to baby-sit
• to color-code
• to double-click
• to dry-clean
• to second-guess
• to window-shop
• to test-drive
• to downgrade
• to ghostwrite
• to handpick
• to proofread
• to shortchange
• to troubleshoot
• to waterproof
• to whitewash

NOTE: If you try to check the spelling of a compound verb in a dictionary and do not find the verb listed, hyphenate the components.

Do not hyphenate verb phrases such as make up, slow down, tie in.

• Please kiss and make up.
• How will you tie in the winner's remarks?
• Don't forget to slow down around curves.

If the infinitive form of a compound verb has a hyphen, retain the hyphen in other forms of the verb.

• Would you like to air-condition your entire home?
• The theater was not air-conditioned.
• We need an air-conditioning expert.
• You need to double-space all these reports.
• That material should not be double-spaced.
• BUT: Leave a double space between paragraphs. (No hyphen in double space as a compound noun.)

The gerund derived from a hyphenated compound verb requires no hyphen unless it is followed by an object.

• Dry cleaning is the way to clean this blanket.
• BUT: Dry-cleaning this sweater will not remove the spot.
• Double spacing would make this table easy to read.
• BUT: Double-spacing this table would make it easy to read.
• Spot checking is all we can do.
• BUT: In spot-checking the data, I found some embarrassing errors.

 Source: The Gregg Reference Manual.

Forming Possessives of Singular Nouns

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When proofreading and editing customer documents, one of the most often-confused aspects of writing that we see is how to show the possessive form of a singular noun. Is it "the boss' desk" or is it "the boss's desk"? Read on, and see if our examples help you today.

To form the possessive of a singular noun not ending in an s sound, add an apostrophe plus s to the noun. (But you knew all these...) 

• my lawyer's advice
• my child's teacher
• Tulabelle's haircut
• Mr. and Mrs. Snerd's woodpile
• Illinois's politicians
• Arkansas's former governor
• Des Moines's mayor
• the corps's leadership

To form the possessive of a singular noun that ends in an s sound, be guided by the way you pronounce the word.

If a new syllable is formed in the pronunciation of the possessive, add an apostrophe plus s.

• your boss's approval
• the witness's reply
• Ms. Lopez's application
• Mr. and Mrs. Morris's plane tickets
• St. Louis's airport
• Dallas's football team
• Congress's failures

If the addition of an extra syllable would make a word ending in an s hard to pronounce, add the apostrophe only.

• Officer Phillips' water ski
• Judge Hastings' decision
• the Burroughs' condominium
• Los Angeles' freeways
• New Orleans' restaurants
• Jesus' parables
• Moses' flight from Egypt
• for goodness' sake
• Achilles' heel [but: Achilles tendon]

NOTE: Individual differences in pronunciation will affect the way some of these possessives are written. For example, if you pronounce the possessive form of Perkins as two syllables, you will write Mr. Perkins' kindness; if you pronounce the possessive of Perkins as three syllables, you will write Mr. Perkins's kindness. The important thing is to listen to your own pronunciation. When you hear yourself pronounce the possessive of boss as two syllables (boss's) and the possessive of witness as three (witness's), you will not be tempted to write your boss' approval or the witness' reply. Naturally, tradition should take precedence over your ear. For example, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain is appointed to the Court of St. James's (not, as you might expect, Court of St. James).

When forming the possessive of any noun ending in s (for example, Mr. Hodges), always place the apostrophe at the end of the original word, never within it.

• Mr. Hodges' message (not: Mr. Hodge's message)

Source: The Gregg Reference Manual.

New Compounds: When Two Become One

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Up until at least the 1993 edition, the Associated Press Stylebook called for the word teenager to be spelled teen-ager -- with a hyphen. I'm sure this was one of the most ignored rules in AP history, but it's interesting to note that some authorities were still hanging onto this compound as a two-word structure long past the 1950s, when teen culture made its first big impact and made both the hyphen and Beethoven roll over.

That led me to think the other day of the number of two-word compounds in use today that appear to be rapidly coalescing into one. It's likely all of the word pairs on the following top-of-my-head list will be one word someday relatively soon, but for now, all of them are officially two words per Merriam-Webster.

Cell phone: This one dates back to 1984, used to be cellular phone, and is frequently just cell. There's no good reason for it to be two words anymore, it seems to me, but even the Verizon Wireless Web site has it as cell phone, two words - right next to another module touting its smartphone resource center. Smartphone is a relatively new word, but you'd think one of the reasons it's one and not two is that it looks and feels just like cellphone.

Health care: It might hang on as two words for a while longer than the others, but time is probably not on its side. Even the Feds can't control it: The White House has health care as two words on its site, but over at the Department of Health and Human Services, the division that monitors all this is called the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Home page: A coinage that could already be one word and cause little confusion. But opinion is divided, sometimes in the same story: A piece the other day on the Christian Science Monitor's site about the 115th anniversary of the birth of Popeye cartoonist E.C. Segar had homepage in the headline, but home page in the text.

Price tag: This one could have been one word a long time ago, though it appears to hang on as two in most of the citations I've browsed. But there are uses of it as one that can be found easily: Casino pricetag is $47 million, says a headline on the Cincinnati Enquirer site.

Road map: Not sure when this combo started to turn into one, but that appears to be the usage favored in the tech community. Wikipedia has an entire entry devoted to the definition of technology roadmap as a marketing tool, and makes a distinction between that and road map (two words), in the sense of a diplomatic strategy. The 2010 product roadmap for mobile device maker HTC has been leaked, says a recent piece in PCWorld.

Time frame: Another one in which the consensus for now appears to be two words rather than one. Meanwhile, over at Genealogy.com, you're urged to construct an immigration timeframe to narrow down when an overseas ancestor might have set foot in the States.

Web site: Complicated by the capital letters left over from World Wide Web (itself an anachronistic use of worldwide, long one word) so that it's variously cited as Website, Web site, web site, and website. Earlier this year, Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee said his biggest regret about building the computer network was forcing everyone to type the unnecessary "www," and so we should probably take the hint and just resolve to spell it as website.

White paper: This compound, also borrowed from the world of politics by the business community, is two words in the halls of the State Department. But the tech community sees it differently, often spelling it as one word. Microsoft's Silverlight, its Adobe Flash-style app, comes with the following help message on the tech giant's Web site: On this page you will find a series of whitepapers to help you use Silverlight.

Anyone have any other good examples of two-word compounds that are turning into one? And in the case of these examples, should they all become one word, or are there good reasons for keeping them as two? Post your replies here.

Writing Clearly & Concisely

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Good writing is concise. Especially in the technology age—when messages are often read on the fly on cell phones and PDAs— brevity is key. Less is more. Some online letter-writing utilities even limit responses to a certain number of words. Replace wordy phrases with shorter and more direct expressions. Avoid redundancy. Not only will you find that your paragraphs are shorter, but you will notice that your points are clearer and your arguments are more persuasive.

Here are some wordy and redundant phrases and their concise counterparts.

Please share any others you can think of on this Blog.