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The May 2010 issue of the Editcetera newsletter mentions the onlinestylebooks.com site, where you can research style decisions from more than 50 style manuals.

Thanks to the people at Copyediting.com for the recommendation.

Tags: Grammar & usage, How to, Random access, Writing & editing by GD
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William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well and other wonderful how-to books, tells international students at Columbia University: “As you start your journey…, you may tell yourself that you’re doing ‘communications,’ or ‘new media,’ or ‘digital media’ or some other fashionable new form. But ultimately you’re in the storytelling business.”

Source

William Zinsser, Writing English as a Second Language, The American Scholar, Winter 2010.

Tags: Grammar & usage, How to, Random access, Reading, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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The Columbia Journalism Review is a venerable publication, and luckily for those who love the English language, its Language Corner column, by Merrill Perlman, discusses issues that keep some readers, writers, and editors awake at night.

Tags: Grammar & usage by GD
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Many of us don’t know when it’s appropriate to use the odd word whom.

The grammarian will tell you that it’s simple: Whom is always the object of a preposition. That clears things right up, doesn’t it? Not for most of us.

If we’re fluent in a language, we don’t usually decide how to write or speak in terms of grammatical categories. We write or speak according to what sounds right. Words just come to us.

But whom is one of those odd words that only very rarely sounds right to most Americans. It seems stiff and formal, a word that we see or hear mostly in legal documents, religious texts, black-and-white movies with British butlers who accept calling cards from visitors wearing fur.

Here’s a trick that may help: When you don’t know whether to use who or whom in a sentence, ask yourself whether him fits the context. If it does, so will whom.

The movie director, whom we met in the hotel lounge as he drank a fifth martini, did not recognize us later.
The movie director — we met him in the hotel lounge as he drank a fifth martini — did not recognize us later.

For whom does the bell toll?
The bell tolls for him.

Related post: “Its” or “It’s”?

Tags: Grammar & usage by GD
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People often have difficulty knowing whether to write its or it’s. What’s the difference between the two, apart from one apostrophe?

The possessive its shows ownership, and it has no apostrophe. Use this form in any case where you are writing it and want to show ownership. A simple trick is to ask yourself whether you could replace its with either the word his or her. Let’s take this sentence:

The dog has lost its collar.

The collar belongs to the dog, so this is a case of ownership. If you knew that the dog was female, could you write this and still make sense?

The dog has lost her collar.

Yes, the word her fits the context of ownership, so you know that its will also fit here:

The dog has lost its collar.

Things get a little trickier when the it in question is an inanimate object:

The tree has lost its leaves.

Let’s use that trick again: Could you replace its with her in this sentence and still make sense — at least grammatical sense?

The tree has lost her leaves.

Maybe this won’t make much sense in the real world, because the English language doesn’t assign gender to most nouns, but yes, it works as a sentence. And now you know that this is a case for the possessive its:

The tree has lost its leaves.

Enter the Apostrophe

Some of the its/it’s confusion comes from the fact that English often uses an apostrophe to show possession with nouns:

Anil’s daughter
Mexico’s economy
the tree’s branches
the car’s windshield

You might think it would be OK to write either “Mexico’s economy” or “it’s economy” to show possession, but things are not so simple. Whenever you use an apostrophe after it, you are writing a contraction for “it is”:

It’s five o’clock in the morning.
It’s a long way to Tipperary.
This car may not look great, but it’s all I’ve got.
“No matter what he said about me,” she cried, “it’s not true!”

So when you’re faced with writing its or it’s, ask yourself whether you could replace that word in the sentence with her. If that works, at least grammatically, you know to write its without the apostrophe. If that does not work and you mean “it is,” then add the apostrophe to write it’s.

And now, take a little break with a real San Francisco treat, the It’s-It.

Tags: Grammar & usage by GD
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