The Devil Wore Alberta Ferretti – and screamed at apostrophes
I fetched lattes and learned about possessives: how my uncompromising editor sent me to grammar school
Punctuation!! Who needs it?! Hull University recently said it will drop the requirement for technical proficiency in written English, a discipline it described as ‘homogenous north European, white, male, elite’. But are they right?
I have a confession to make: my grammar was terrible for years.
When we decided to set up Forthwrite, my two co-founders talked passionately about how their English teachers had not only been inspirational, but taught the tools needed to use language brilliantly. I felt slightly envious. Mrs Jolly taught English at my all-girls’ secondary school. She was a lovely woman and it was one of my favourite lessons. But I don’t remember learning grammar.
This didn’t stop me pursuing a career in journalism, via a dream job at a women’s magazine: PA to the editor. The first chunk of my career was spent winging it, feeling like a massive fraud. I had entered the industry with no experience, I hadn’t been to journalism college, I suspected I was dyslexic and worst of all my grammar was awful. I was too afraid to ask anyone questions. (If only Lynne Truss’s quirky little guide to commas, semi-colons and the rest, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” had been published a few years earlier.)
I didn’t know where to start. Grammar intimidated me. Split infinitives? Prepositional noun phrases? Non-restrictive clauses? Even apostrophes confused me. Never entirely certain where they should go, I liked to put them in far-flung places, rather in the spirit of a British mountaineer scattering the Union flag in remote corners of the Himalayas. And why did everyone on the magazine’s features team hate an exclamation mark? They were fun and friendly! It took Donald Trump to make me realise that exclamation marks make any sentence sound uptight and manic.
But a grammatical saving grace arrived in my life when a new editor was appointed to our glossy, one of most eccentric to ever grace the business. [Yes, I know there’s a ‘split infinitive’ there: see below].
Unlike in the film The Devil Wears Prada, my devil’s favourite label was Alberta Ferretti. She definitely gave fictional editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly a run for her money, while I channelled Anne Hathaway’s long-suffering assistant. Like Miranda, my editor was incapable of fetching her own latte (the inconvenience of an actual queue, the hazard of liquids in the proximity of her ‘buttery suede’ Alberta Ferretti trousers). So that became my job.
While I was out fetching lattes, my editor generally terrorised the office, ranted loudly about everyone’s supposed ineptitudes and appropriated much of my personal life as fodder for her weekly newspaper column.
But I owe her a lot: my impossible-to-please boss was a pedant who hated bad grammar. As her PA, one of my tasks was to sit in her office while she read page proofs, wielding her red pen and muttering a constant critique…
‘WHY is the apostrophe before the s? It’s PLURAL POSSESSION.’
‘WHO wouldn’t know that Mum has a capital M – unless it is ‘my mum’?’
“Why is this LEARNT and not LEARNED?”
I scribbled everything down: pages and pages of grammatical rules and errors. What I had failed to learn at school, I learned from her. Along with poor grammar, her other pet hates were bad style, boring writing and how (dubiously) the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a good story. It was a crash-course in writing.
We don’t all leave school having learnt the things we should have. Even now, my grammar is far from perfect (don’t be shy pointing out the mistakes I’ve made here). But Hull University is missing the point: grammar is essential if your writing is to be readable, accurate and widely read. The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes and so on—is to help organise the relationships among the parts of a sentence. It adds precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words.
But, while it is good to be grammar-articulate, don’t be intimidated by the pedants. Frequently, grammarians can’t even agree even among themselves. When Eats, Shoots & Leaves was published, The New Yorker’s Louis Menand smugly reported the ‘first punctuation mistake appears in the dedication’. This at least gives the rest of us a margin for error.
One of my proudest moments came years after the eccentric editor and I parted ways. I had gone to work on a national newspaper. Had I had a particularly brilliant idea? Or written a clever, witty headline? Nope: a colleague just mentioned how he loved my use of the Oxford comma. And I knew what he was talking about.
The grammar rules you need (and the ones you can forget) by some of the best sub-editors I’ve worked with, and the fabulous Mignon Fogarty a.k.a Grammar Girl
Sub-editors are the last line of defence – people who will save the writer from making mistakes, looking daft, being unintelligible or wrong. Here, Bryony Coleman, Lucy King, Olivia McLearon, Samia Qaiyum, Philip Wilson and Mignon Fogarty (plus the Forthwrite founders) clarify the rules of punctuation that sorts the dashes from the hyphens. Stress less, write better.
The rules you need to know
‘A’ and ‘An’ ‘A’ goes before words that start with a consonant sound, and ‘an’ goes before words that start with a vowel sound. That means ‘an MBA’ and ‘a unicorn’ are correct because it's the first sound that matters, not the first letter.
Apostrophes Don’t put apostrophes in normal plurals: 1970s, CDs, vaccines.
Collective nouns and organisations are singular Even though these are made up of many people, you should write, ‘The team is launching’ (not are).
Comma misuse With the words ‘which’ and ‘that’: ‘which’ follows a comma, ‘that’ doesn't. Microsoft spell check will highlight this error with a little red squiggle, yet many ignore it.
Commas v full stops Commas should never be used instead of full stops. Shorter sentences always preferable.
Commas in the wrong places Putting a comma before ‘but’ instead of after it (not always, but often). ‘London can be drab but, on sunny days, it comes alive.’
Oxford comma ‘This is a useful, informative and essential guide.’ In this sentence, for example, a comma after ‘informative’ would be known as an Oxford comma. Although most Oxbridge alumni and Americans would like it to be there, we should only use it if there is a case for calling attention to the last noun in a list. ‘Essential’ is doing the same kind of work in the sentence as ‘useful’ and informative’.
Homophones Beware of words that sound the same but have different meanings and, often, different spellings, for example, new and knew, here and hear. It can be all too easy when in the flow to miss a hear that's snuck in instead of here – and spellcheck won't pick it up either.
Hyphens & dashes Don’t mix hyphens and dashes. Hyphens are half-dashes and connect elements of words that have to be kept apart (re-formed, check-in, mother-in-law). If you want to to separate groups of words – then use a dash (combining the alt key with the hyphen on your keyboard).
It's and its It's is a contraction of 'it is' (the apostrophe indicates that part of the word has been removed). Its is a possessive pronoun – similar to his or her, for nouns without gender – meaning 'belonging to it'.
Words ending in ‘ly’ and hyphens Compounds (an adverb plus an adjective) where the adverb ends in -ly take the place of a hyphen — so a 'socially distanced party' doesn’t require anything; a 'bright-red dress' needs one but a 'largely empty room' does not. To every rule there’s an exception and in this case it’s family — a family-friendly recipe or a family-friendly holiday both have their place.
Misuse of words As Bryony Coleman says, ‘Words such as homely, gourmand and chi-chi, which are all actually mildly insulting.’
Nouns ending in ‘oh’ It took David Crystal – the English lecturer, with over 100 books to his name – to explain this one. As he says, pluralising words like potato by simply adding an ‘s’ feels odd. Volcanos looks like it might rhyme with ‘toss’. Early on in English there was a trend to indicate the ‘oh’ sound by adding an ‘e’ (volcanoes, potatoes). But not all words do this (casinos, pianos)
Proper nouns Bypassing the few seconds it takes to fact-check a proper noun on Google, then getting it wrong. If a restaurant is called Spice Market, don't refer to it as The Spice Market.
Quotation Marks. Full stops and commas go inside a closing quotation mark: ‘You can do this,’ she said.
Semi-colon The semi-colon is used to link two independent yet related clauses. It’s caused more fights between authors and editors than any other punctuation mark. All those in favour? Kingsley Amis, V. S. Naipaul. Against? Gertrude Stein, George Orwell, Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy. Bryony states: ‘The semi-colon is the spawn of Satan and should only be used as a desperate measure.’ Mark Jones retorts: ‘That’s like asking Roger Federer not to use the drop shot; it may not be vital but your game will be more limited and less elegant without it.’
… and the ones you can forget
Geoffrey K Pullum, a chillingly erudite linguistics professor, calls them the "zombie rules: though dead, they shamble mindlessly on.” Our contributors on the rules they no longer use…
Ellipsis Sticklers use four to indicate the end of the sentence, but three suffice.
Like/such Technically, in many instances, ‘like’ should be replaced by ‘such as’. But, for example, if it’s a part of speech and there's no way that the person in question would say, ‘They do amazing cocktails such as mango margaritas and chilli martinis’, then don't get worked up about changing it. A point well made by Olivia and seconded Mignon.
‘Only’ Traditionally, the word ‘only’ is supposed to go directly before the word it modifies, as in ‘I want only a small piece of pie,’ instead of ‘I only want a small piece of pie.’ As Mignon explains, “Putting ‘only’ in the ‘right’ place often sounds awkward, and I've never encountered a real-life sentence in which putting ‘only’ in the ‘wrong’ place leads to confusion. I put the word "only" where it sounds natural to me.”
Starting with conjunctions Joining words like ‘and’ and ‘but’ are conjunctions, and no doubt you were told you it’s wrong to start a sentence with one. Jane Austen, Mark Twain and The Beatles would all disagree.
The ‘st’ Not so much a grammar rule, as a spelling rule for life — amongst, amidst, whilst — drop the ‘st’ and adopt the contemporary among, amid, while. As Lucy succinctly says, ‘It’s 2021 not 1721’.
"They" is only plural. Over to Mignon: “To me, acceptance of the singular ‘they’ is old hat. I can't believe anyone even argues about it anymore. The singular ‘they’ was the American Dialect Society's word of the year in 2015; the word ‘you’ is singular and plural, and that doesn't bother anyone; and finally, if the singular ‘they’ was good enough for Jane Austen (‘Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters’), it’s good enough for me. I often rewrite sentences when it's easy to avoid the singular ‘they,’ but I won't go through contortions over it.”
And finally…why it’s impossible to split an infinitive
Mark Jones writes: Misguided people damn the Star Trek writers for producing the most celebrated ‘split infinitive’ in history: ‘to boldly go’.
Why the quote marks? Because some grammarians argue it’s physically impossible to split the infinite in English. Why? Because the infinitive is simply ‘go’, just as it is simply ‘aller’ in French and ‘ir’ in Spanish. As verb endings in English don’t change according to the subject (I go, we go, they go) we add the ‘to’ when we want to avoid ambiguity.
But you are always going to fall foul of the anti-splitters. Best to avoid the SI if you can. The best way is to deny yourself an adverb. Otherwise, elegantly to avoid the split infinitive your ordinary English syntax slowly will begin to disintegrate .
This blog comes from Forthwrite. We’re all about the business of good writing. This is a time when people have never written more – and what we write has never mattered more. Proposals. CVs. Bids. Reports. Documents. Presentations. Internal company communications. Speeches. The Forthwrite founders have years of experience in advertising, newspapers, magazines and content marketing. If you want to learn to write in a way that will lift your travel brand, destination, hotel, restaurant, bar or blog above the rest, get in touch at forthwrite.co.uk (and we also cover grammar refresher courses).
Guilty. I'm the worst on grammar so a good reminder. Thanks Kerry.