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July 15, 2014 @ 3:15 pm
· Filed under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and the media, passives, Prescriptivist poppycock, Style and register, Usage advice
Radley Balko's Washington Post article "The curious grammar of police shootings" begins by reminding us about "mistakes were made" (an utterance so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page), and proceeds to quote a description of a shooting that is not by a policeman ("The suspect produced a semi-automatic handgun and fired numerous times […]
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January 17, 2014 @ 6:29 pm
· Filed under Prescriptivist poppycock
John McIntyre ("You have not seen it all yet", You Don't Say 1/17/2014) relays a correspondent's claim to have gotten this note from her college professor: Look up Strunk and White (1918) for good rules on writing. Also, I recommend you do not use prepositions at the beginning or end of sentences their use does […]
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November 30, 2012 @ 8:42 am
· Filed under Morphology, Prescriptivist poppycock, Syntax, This blogging life, Usage advice
Some Language Log readers may feel that the two rules I discuss in my latest post on Lingua Franca, "One Rule to Ring Them All," are stated too loosely for their consequences to be clear. Let me explain here just a little more carefully. The topic under discussion is whether who should be in the […]
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June 6, 2012 @ 3:47 am
· Filed under coordination, passives, Prescriptivist poppycock, Silliness, Usage advice, Writing
The Queen's English Society (QES), mentioned only a couple of times here on Language Log over the past few years, is no more. It has ceased to be. On the last day of this month they will ring down the curtain and it will join the choir invisible. It will be an ex-society. Said Rhea […]
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April 13, 2012 @ 6:12 am
· Filed under Language and the media, passives, Syntax
Tom Maguire, on a blog called JustOneMinute, attempts to fisk the arrest affidavit for George Zimmerman (the man in Sanford, Florida, who shot the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin). Mention is made of "a lack of self-confidence from the prosecution, which switches to the passive voice at a crucial moment in the action." Uh-oh! Passive […]
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February 24, 2012 @ 12:16 pm
· Filed under Language and politics, passives
You're the prime minister of Australia. (Well, you're not, actually, but this is my little rhetorical way of plunging you imaginatively in medias res. I want you to imagine that you're the prime minister of Australia.) Your foreign minister is a former prime minister that you ousted from the leadership in 2010, and now a […]
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January 16, 2012 @ 10:23 am
· Filed under Peeving, Punctuation
I can't say I share Mark and Geoff's agitation about the Jeremiad about the disappearance of the apostrophe in the Daily Mail. True, the tone of these things is enormously tiresome, with the outrage camped up just enough so the writer can deter the charge of taking himself too seriously. (It's like karaoke singers who […]
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October 6, 2011 @ 12:24 pm
· Filed under Usage advice
Yesterday in the New York Times, Dwight Garner took on two revisions of classic books of advice (by Dale Carnegie and Emily Post) — updated for the digital age. "Classic Advice: Please, Leave Well Enough Alone" starts by placing the Carnegie book in its cultural context: Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” […]
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August 4, 2011 @ 1:11 pm
· Filed under Orthography, Prescriptivist poppycock, Punctuation, Usage advice, Writing
I got a message from a former teacher who said her friend had sent her my article about Strunk and White and it had stimulated her to ask me the following question: For 31 years, this is the rule I taught to all of my elementary school students: do not put a comma before "because." […]
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February 22, 2011 @ 2:15 pm
· Filed under passives, Usage advice
"The BBC is a remarkable place", says Nigel Paine, the Head of People Development at the BBC, in his prefatory note to The BBC News Styleguide (2003); "Much of the accumulated knowledge and expertise locked in people’s heads stays that way: occasionally we share, and the result is a bit of a revelation." Paine is […]
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July 23, 2010 @ 6:14 am
· Filed under passives, Syntax, Usage advice, Writing
Doostang is a job-search platform and advice service that, for a fee, will try to help you get a job. It provides on a blog such helpful things as tips on spicing up your resume. And one of the things it suggests is that you should avoid (are you ready for this, Language Log readers?) […]
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April 29, 2010 @ 4:47 pm
· Filed under Usage advice
Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economics professor, maintains a blog for undergraduate economics students. On it, back in 2006, he placed a guide to good economics writing. And I fear that you may already have guessed what, with sinking heart, I correctly foresaw that I would find therein.
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April 21, 2010 @ 9:53 am
· Filed under relative clauses, Semantics, Syntax, Writing
When I give lectures on why you should not listen to prescriptivists' dimwitted prattle about the wrongness of constructions that are fully grammatical and always were, people sometimes ask me what I would regard as bad grammar, as if such cases were going to be hard to find. So occasionally I note down striking cases […]
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