After more than two decades as a subeditor, I know language is alchemy and there’s no exact prescription for good writing. But I also know grammar is central. Meaning can turn on a single word or punctuation mark, and a little fine-tuning can prevent ambiguity and inconsistency. Just read this sentence and tell me grammar doesn’t matter.
Almost everyone has a grammatical pet peeve, and commas attract a lot of attention. When they’re needed, they’re essential – compare “I’m sorry I love you” and “I’m sorry, I love you”. But haphazard or unwarranted commas can be distracting and even misleading.
Jonathan Franzen wrote a whole essay on the “irritating, lazy mannerism” of comma-then, as in: “He dims the lamp and opens the window, then pulls the body inside.” I sympathize, but I’m personally more irritated by comma-but and comma-too.
The Guardian style guide is clear on the Oxford comma (comma-and in a list); it’s definitely not needed in “he ate ham, eggs and chips”, although an essential distinction between these two sentences:
I dedicate this book to my parents, Martin Aims, and JK Rowling.
I dedicate this book to my parents, Martin Aims and JK Rowling.
But I give punctuation champion Lynne Truss the last word: “Don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.”
On non-comma matters, F Scott Fitzgerald thought the exclamation mark was “like laughing at your own joke” and should be done away with, and Milan Kundera claimed he once left a publisher for trying to change his semicolons to full-stops. (I’m a big fan of the semicolon; it encourages the reader to linger a little longer on the thought before it.)
And Proust cringed at “It’s quite true that the sun is on fire at sunset, but it’s been said too often.”
Some personal bugbears come up more regularly than others.
“Compared to” is different from “compared with”. Use the first if you want to liken one thing to another, the second to contrast.
And that reminds me: in my book “different from” is correct, “different to” and “different than” are not.
“Who” and “whom” are both needed, but not interchangeable. The same goes for less/fewer, like/such as and imply/infer. And there’s a simple rule for “that” v “which”: if the sentence needs the (restrictive) clause the word is connecting it to, use “that”, otherwise use “which”. (Some grammar point to an irregular restrictive “which” that can replace “that” but I’m yet to be convinced.)
If all of this sounds like so much nerdy nitpicking, I concede some arcane rules are just begging to be bent, although I would still argue you have to have a good reason.
The Guardian says it’s fine to split infinitives because “stubbornly to resist so can sound pompous and awkward”. Ditto on ending a sentence with a preposition. And while strictly plural, “data” can take a singular verb, as in “data shows”, because how often do you come across “datum” anyway?
Common sense should come into it, and so too aesthetics. Think of how the prose flows. If a sentence is long and inelegant, change it. Sometimes I use an en dash or even parentheses to break up a string of commas. And don’t dangle a verb at the end of the sentence, far from its subject. “How high will emissions from the project proposed for the northern region and the existing plants in the south and west be?” is just ungainly.
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