The accidents of style : good advice on how not to write badly

325 Pages·2010·1.27 MB·English

by  Elster

The ability to use language is like the ability to drive a car. You can be an
excellent driver without knowing the difference between a carburetor and a
distributor, but you’d better be able to distinguish the brake from the gas pedal.
—Mark Davidson, Right, Wrong, and Risky It seems astonishing that so much
bad writing should find its way into print when so much good advice is to be
had.
—Robertson Davies, The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies It is not, of course,
any single violation of meaning or idiom, however frequent, that harms the
common property of language. If frequent, the error becomes general—becomes
the language—in the traditional way of change. What does harm, now and
hereafter, is the loss of the feeling for words, the disappearance of any instinct
and any preferences about their formation and combination.
—Jacques Barzun, A Word or Two Before You Go Without minute neatness of
execution the sublime cannot exist.
—William Blake, English poet and artist (1757–1827) Abusus non tollit usum.
“Misuse does not nullify proper use.”

For Myrna,
con abrazos y besos
Contents
Introduction
A Note to the Reader
How Accident-Prone Are You?
The Accidents of Style
Are You Roadworthy?
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
In what some have called the greatest match in tennis history, Rafael Nadal
defeated Roger Federer to win the 2008 Wimbledon championship. When
Federer’s final shot failed to clear the net, the elated but exhausted Nadal
collapsed on the court.
“The conquering Spanish hero” was “lying prone on the grass,” wrote
Charles Bricker of the South Florida Sun Sentinel in a syndicated report that
appeared—its glaring error intact—in scores of other newspapers across
America, including my local fishwrap, The San Diego Union-Tribune, which ran
a photo of Nadal lying flat on his back with his arms stretched out.
What was the error that slipped by all those yawning copyeditors? The
misuse of prone to mean “lying on one’s back.” Prone means “lying facedown,
on one’s belly.” The word supine means “lying on one’s back.” Rafael Nadal
was lying supine on the grass of Wimbledon’s center court, but nobody seemed
to know it.
You could call this confusion of prone with supine a slip, a blunder, or, if
you want to be fancy, a solecism. If you want to be fancier still, you could use
the precise rhetorical term for it: catachresis.1 Whatever you want to call it,
when a sentence hits an icy patch and skids off the road into a tree, I call it an
accident of style.
Just like automobile accidents, accidents of style occur all over the English-
speaking world, in print and on the Internet, thousands of times every day—not
everyday, which is an adjective meaning “daily” or “ordinary” and always
modifies a noun, as in everyday life or everyday problems. (Even the illustrious
New York Times Magazine is guilty of this blunder. See Accident 1.) Accidents
of style happen when people are merrily writing along and, for one reason or
another, fail to observe the rules of the road. Maybe they get distracted and make
a wrong turn. Maybe they get too cavalier and lose control. Maybe they’ve
forgotten what the operator’s manual says to do, or they never bothered to read
it.
As the misuse of prone I cited illustrates, accidents of style are not restricted
to writing that is hasty or unpolished. They occur in all avenues of
communication, from the unsupervised byways of e-mail and blogs to the edited
superhighways of newspapers, magazines, and books. Even in the most
reputable publications, accidents of style are surprisingly common incidents—
not incidences, an erroneous plural of incident and instance that repeatedly runs
sentences off the road and into trees.
Accidents of style can happen anywhere, anytime (not any time). They can
be minor, a fender bender that makes the reader wince for a moment but soldier
on, and they can be fatal, a fiery wreck of mangled prose that destroys the
writer’s credibility and kills the reader’s patience. Finally, accidents of style
happen to everyone, to the amateur and professional alike—although, as with
driving, the experienced writer will have fewer accidents while the apprentice
writer will, sadly, have less.
So what can you do to insure yourself against these accidents of style and
ensure that you are a wreckless—not a reckless—writer?
You can learn how not to write badly.
But, you may ask, shouldn’t I aspire to write well rather than worry about
making mistakes? Shouldn’t I study good writing rather than bad? Of course you
should, but if you don’t know enough about what constitutes bad writing, how
can you fully appreciate, much less emulate, what is good?
Anyone who puts words together for any serious purpose wants to make a
favorable impression. And the best way to make a favorable impression, in life
as well as in writing, is to know first what makes an unfavorable one.
The road to writing well begins with learning how to recognize and correct
faulty composition. This book shows you how to steer around the ruts and
potholes in that road and safely navigate its hairpin turns. It’s a crash course in
careful usage. Whether you write for work, for school, for pleasure, or for
publication, The Accidents of Style will help you avoid hundreds of common
word hazards and get the most mileage out of your efforts to drive home what
you want to say.
A Note to the Reader
Most books of this kind are arranged either alphabetically, as dictionaries of
usage, or in chapters covering various categories—word choice, grammar,
spelling, punctuation, and so on. This book takes a different approach.
The Accidents of Style is a meandering road trip along the hazardous
highways of English usage, a peripatetic trek for writers of all levels. Your
affable tour bus driver (a seasoned cicerone) will cover some rugged linguistic
terrain, discussing 350 perilous points of interest along the way. The itinerary
proceeds in order of increasing complexity from the rudiments to the punctilios.
We will begin with the everyday blunders that trip up inexperienced writers and
end with the niceties that nettle the most practiced ones. In short, the road gets
trickier to navigate as you go along.
You can use The Accidents of Style as a reference, looking up specific topics
in the index. Or you can read it linearly as a primer designed to teach you, step
by step, how to become a wreckless writer, one who is not prone to accidents of
style. For your enjoyment, and perhaps also exasperation, I have included a
pretest (“How Accident-Prone Are You?”) and a posttest (“Are You
Roadworthy?”) so you can assess your progress toward wrecklessness, if you are
so inclined.
I suggest taking the whole tour first and then using this book as you would a
photo album, consulting particular snapshots whenever you need to refresh your
memory. But you are the accidental tourist and I am merely the guide. Whether
you open The Accidents of Style for an excursion or an expedition, a sojourn or
an extended stay, I am confident that your journey will be enlightening.
How Accident-Prone Are You?
The following twenty sentences contain 101 common accidents of style. See
how many of them you can find—and how many you miss. A score of 90 or
better qualifies you as a wreckless writer. The number in parentheses after each
sentence shows the number of errors in that sentence. Answers follow the test.
1. Because I can not afford a car, I ride two busses to work everyday. (3)
2. Due to the fact that our hot water heater is broken, we won’t be able to run
the dishwasher or take showers for awhile. (3)
3. Up until now we didn’t know that this bacteria causes the illness, so if
people don’t want to get sick they better wash there hands. (4)
4. There’s a couple things I always think to myself whenever I get bored of a
job or disinterested in what I’m doing. (5)
5. Since every one of you are in favor of the proposal, we have a completely
unanimous concensus of opinion. (4)
6. Noone informed us that the headaches would reoccur until he felt nauseous.
(4)
7. After graduating Yale, a doctorate degree at Harvard became her next goal
because she wanted to be an alumni of two of the best schools in the nation.
(4)
8. He’s one of the only restauranteurs I know who meets that criteria because
he has a variety of different skills. (5)
9. Just between you and I, its one of the things that has been bothering me
alot, and I’m not sure how to diffuse the situation. (5)
10. Having said that, at this point in time we will utilize the staff we presently
have and we don’t anticipate any major restructuring. (6)
11. If your looking for the penultimate summer beach novel, this thrilling story
set in ancient Rome in 40 A.D. during the cruel reign of Caligula, offers
nonstop entertainment that will keep you laying on that warm sand for
hours. (6)
12. If I would’ve known they would play the exact same background music ad
nauseum and make us eat stuff from the kid’s menu, I would’ve worked at
the pizzaria instead. (5)
13. He found her infinitesimal energy totally enervating, working in close
proximity to her had an incredible affect on him. (7)
14. Today, only one in forty-five Americans routinely bring a reusable bag to
the grocery store, but some food industry experts predict that within five
years between 20 to 25 percent of all grocery shoppers will emulate these
eco-conscious trend-setters. (4)
15. We are a nonprofit organization who is dedicated to servicing, as best as we
can, indigent and homeless individuals who have fallen between the cracks
of society. (6)
16. As the number of divorces continue to soar, it begs the question why so
many young women like Sarah and myself are still so anxious to say “’til
death do us part”. (6)
17. When mother said, “I don’t like that restaurant,” my Aunt Dorothy was
surprised and said, “But they have a prix fixe menu that includes: soup,
salad, entrée, and dessert—and it only costs twenty dollars.” (4)
18. After the judges verdict, they were neither reticent to discuss the financial
debacle at CoproCorp or loathe to accept responsibility for the havoc they’d
wrought. (6)
19. At the risk of repeating myself again, the reason I don’t feel badly is
because compared to most people I have less problems to keep me awake at
night. (5)
20. What it is, basically, is an homage to naive youth, a heartwrenching story
that hearkens back to that sweet, innocent, childish, moment in each and
every one of our lives when we first fell utterly and unequivocably in love.
(9)
Answers to “How Accident-Prone Are You?”
1. Three accidents: can not should be cannot; busses should be buses;
everyday should be every day.
2. Three accidents: Due to the fact that is wordy; hot water heater should be
water heater; for awhile should be for a while.
3. Four accidents: Up until now should be Until now; bacteria should be
bacterium; they better should be they had better; there should be their.
4. Five accidents: There’s should be There are; a couple things should be a
couple of things; think to myself should be think; bored of should be bored
with; disinterested should be uninterested.
5. Four accidents: are should be is; completely unanimous is redundant;