GrammarPhile Blog

• The report offers a penetrating, accurate analysis of the tournament skiboat industry. (A comma is needed between penetrating and accurate because each adjective could act as an independent modifier. Test: ... a penetrating and accurate analysis ... makes sense.)
• We held the slalom contest on the small clean lake next to the highway. (No comma is needed between small and clean because the two modifiers work in tandem to identify the lake. Test: ... the small and clean lake ... doesn't make sense.)

• People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. (No commas are needed here because who live in glass houses is a restrictive clause. The sentence would not retain its intended meaning if the clause were left out.)
• The people next door, who live in a glass house, have begun throwing stones. (Commas are needed here because who live in a glass house is nonrestrictive. It isn't necessary to identify who is meant by "the people next door.")

• Bartholomew Smithens, the noted big-wave surfer, will [not Bartholomew Smithens, the noted big-wave surfer (no comma) will ...] be the guest speaker at next week's tea. (The phrase in italics is in apposition to the subject, Bartholomew Smithens.)
• Alligator wrestling, a sport that originally developed in Florida, has begun to lose some of its appeal, especially among the alligators. (The clause in italics is in apposition to the subject, alligator wrestling.)

• Noted big-wave surfer Bart Smithens will be the guest speaker at next week's tea. (No comma is needed here because Noted big-wave surfer is a modifier, not an appositive.)

OK, so the game's a close one and it's the fourth quarter. The chips and salsa are long gone, but the beer and sodas are holding out and the excitement is palpable.

I recently discovered a new show on the National Geographic channel called Ultimate Survival Alaska.  Are you a fan? If not, I highly recommend it; the scenery is great and the adventures and challenges are amazing to watch.

Press releases, news reports, and newsletters often include quotations. As the writer, you sometimes find the need to explain or elaborate. You can use brackets to do so. Here's how.

Parentheses within a quotation enclose material that is part of the quotation. Brackets are the only mark of punctuation that indicate that the enclosed material is not part of the quotation.

The mayor said, "John is my choice for treasurer" may not be clear if John has not been identified or if more than one John has been mentioned. The mayor said, "John [Smith] is my choice for treasurer" uses brackets to give the surname without misquoting the mayor.

The mayor said, "He is my choice for treasurer" can be clarified by replacing the pronoun with the bracketed name: The mayor said, "[John Smith] is my choice for treasurer." The pronoun could be allowed to stay—The mayor said, "He [John Smith] is my choice for treasurer"—but it is usually better to omit the pronoun.

Here's another example:  Smith said, "The Bard of Amherst [Emily Dickinson, 1830-86] is my favorite poet." This example uses the bracketed material after The Bard of Amherst rather than in place of it, because it is not just a pronoun that would be displaced; the writer does not want to lose the epithet that Smith used but does want to explain it.

The mayor said, "Smith [who is now out on bail] may not seem the obvious choice" uses brackets to supply material that may not be essential to clarify what the mayor said but that the writer thinks readers will find relevant.

Smith said, "I base my oratorical style on that of Pliny the Elder [actually, Pliny the Younger; the elder Pliny was a naturalist] and expect to overwhelm the electorate with my eloquence" uses brackets to enclose a correction. This type of bracketed correction seems snide and often is snide—which is all right when writers are being frankly derisive. But this can be objectionable if the writer is just slipping in a little dig to make himself appear superior to whomever he is quoting.

The overuse of [sic] indicates such a smart aleck. This can be a useful device when it is important to point out an error, but it should not appear after every minor error. Minor errors should either be allowed to stand for readers to notice themselves or else be quietly corrected, except in works of literary, historical, or legal significance in which such correction would be an unacceptable violation of the text.

Excessive uses of [sic] sometimes expose themselves: "Who [sic] shall I say is calling?" she warbled indicates that the writer, ignorant of proper grammar, thinks Whom would be correct. And GrammarPhile blog readers know "Who shall I say is calling?" is indeed correct!

A compound construction is one in which two or more words share the same role in a sentence. When a pronoun is the final element in these constructions, there's a tendency to use the wrong form, particularly when the choice is between I and me. A good way to tell which form is correct in these situations is to see how the sentence would sound if that pronoun were by itself, or if it were the first word in the construction.

• administration; the Obama administration
• brain trust
• cabinet (but the Cabinet in the Obama administration)
• city hall (the municipal government)
• civil service
• court (a royal court)
• executive, legislative, or judicial branch
• federal; the federal government; federal agencies
• government
• monarchy
• parlement (French; but the Parlement of Paris)
• state; church and state; state powers
• the Department of State; the State Department; the department
• the Bureau of the Census; the census of 1960
• the County Board of Brevard County; the Brevard County Board; the county board
• the Peace Corps
• the United States Congress; the U.S. Congress; the Ninety-seventh Congress; Congress; 97th Cong.; congressional
• the Crown (the British monarchy); Crown lands
• the Privy Council (but a Privy Counsellor)
• the Parliament of Canada; the Senate (upper house); the House of Commons (lower house)
• the Chicago City Council; the city council
• the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; the court of appeals
• the Supreme Court of Canada
• the League of Nations; the League
• the Capitol (as distinct from the capital city)

• the Boston Tea Party
• the Cultural Revolution
• the War on Poverty
• the Great Depression; the Depression
• the Great Recession
• the Industrial Revolution
• the civil rights movement
• the cold war
• the crash of 1929
• the gold rush
• the baby boom
• September 11; 9/11
• (President Johnson's) Great Society
• the annual State of the Union address
• the Checkers speech
• Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech
• ancient Greece
• the baroque period
• the colonial period
• the Victorian era
• the antebellum period
• the Age of Reason
• the Common Era
• the Gay Nineties
• the Enlightenment
• the Middle Ages (but the medieval era)
• the Bronze Age
• the Ice Age
• the nuclear age
• the information age
• the Great Plague; the plague
• the Chicago Fire; the fire
• the Kentucky Derby; the derby
• Girl Scouts of America; a Girl Scout; a Scout
• the League of Women Voters; the league

As you can imagine, we see thousands of documents weekly at ProofreadNOW. We're cataloging a huge collection of contextual errors as we solve more and more problems for our clients.

Here are some words we often find mixed up in documents we read. Are you using these words correctly?

Do you write for newspapers? Do you write press releases? Do you want your writing to be succinct, compact, to the point? Take your lead from the 

• Jet Ski - A registered trademark of Kawasaki for a type of personal watercraft.
• Jell-O - A trademark for a brand of gelatin dessert.
• online - One word in all cases for the computer connection term.
• GIF - Acronym for graphics interchange format, a compression format for images. The acronym is acceptable in copy, but it should be explained somewhere in the story. Use lowercase in a file name.
• JPEG, JPG - Acronyms for joint photographic experts group, one of two common types of image compression mechanisms used on the World Wide Web (along with GIF).
• URL - Uniform Resource Locator, an Internet address. An example: http://politics.ap.org/states/mi.html where http: is the protocol, or method of transfer; // indicates a computer name follows; politics is the server; ap.org is the domain;/states is the folder; mi.html indicates the file (.html is the file type).
• emeritus - This word often is added to formal titles to denote that individuals who have retired retain their rank or title. When used, place emeritus after the formal title, in keeping with the general practice of academic institutions: Professor Emeritus Samuel Eliot Morison, Dean Emeritus Courtney C. Brown, Publisher Emeritus Peter Dibley. Or: Samuel Eliot Morison, professor emeritus of history; Courtney C. Brown, dean emeritus of the faculty of business; Peter Dibley, publisher emeritus.
• navy - Capitalize when referring to U.S. forces: the U.S. Navy, the Navy, Navy policy. Do not use the abbreviation USN. Lowercase when referring to the naval forces of other nations: the British navy. This approach has been adopted for consistency, because many foreign nations do not use navy as the proper name. [Ed. note: British readers, take this with a grain of salt; it's clearly from an American guide.]
• Netherlands - In datelines, give the name of the community followed by Netherlands: AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP)--. In stories: the Netherlands or Netherlands as the construction of a sentence dictates.
• teen, teen-ager, (n.)teen-age (adj.) - Do not use teen-aged. (The hyphen is an exception to Webster's.)
• war horse, warhorse - Two words for a horse used in battle. One word for a veteran of many battles: He is a political warhorse.
• hurricane watch - An announcement for specific areas that a hurricane or incipient hurricane conditions may pose a threat to coastal and inland communities.
• hurricane warning - Warns that one or both of these dangerous effects of a hurricane are expected in specified areas in 24 hours or less: (a) Sustained winds of 74 mph (64 knots) or higher, and/or (b) dangerously high water or a combination of dangerously high water and exceptionally high waves, even though winds expected may be less than hurricane force.
• MiG - The i in this designation for a type of Russian fighter jet is lowercase because it is the Russian word for and. The initials are from the last names of the designers, Arten Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. [This can be especially useful in your next office trivia contest.] The forms: MiG-19, MiG-21s.
• Procter & Gamble Co. - P&G is acceptable on second reference. Note it is NOT Proctor.
• Seven Seas - Arabian Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Bay of Bengal, Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf, Red Sea, South China Sea. [Note that other sources differ in the oceans and seas associated with this phrase.]
• thermos - Formerly a trademark, now a generic term for any vacuum bottle, although one manufacturer still uses the word as a brand name. Lowercase thermos when it is used to mean any vacuum bottle; use Thermos when referring to the specific brand.