Keep those meetings off the sidewalks
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
Sometimes I think having been a journalist and a writing instructor all my adult life has left me one of Thomas Parrish’s grouchy grammarians. Parrish wrote a delightful book by that title in which he points out real-life grammar gaffes from top-notch publications to illustrate just how widespread these errors are.
I no longer can read for pleasure because I am constantly in search of grammatical errors. With the coming of the spell checker and computers, the problem has quadrupled. As a writing instructor, I yell at my students to go to the bathroom, close the door and read the manuscripts out loud. That confined space and the sensitive ear are the best grammatical rules I know.
It is especially a good method of catching misplaced modifiers in the rough draft. Richard Lederer, who is famous for his several books entitled "Anguished English," cites these examples:
"I saw the dead dog driving down the highway."
"She handed out brownies to children wrapped in Tupperware."
"The unfortunate woman was killed while cooking her husband’s breakfast in a horrible manner."
I am yet to live down my headline gaffe when I dashed off a small headline for a city council story:
City Council
holds hearing
on sidewalks
Of course the hearing was about sidewalks and it was held in the City Council chambers, not on the sidewalks. If there is any excuse for that sloppiness, it is that newspapers are written in a hurry to be read in a hurry. But then there is always that reader who is looking for misplaced modifiers.
And believe me, there are hundreds of word watchers just waiting for someone to make a verbal mistake. Lederer, an English teacher, first wrote "Anguished English," following by "The Revenge of Anguished English," a book filled with malapropisms, double entendres, mixed metaphors and twisted translations including a sign on a Chinese train: "Please do not throw yourself out the window."
One of my favorites is Patricia O’Conner, formerly a book editor of The New York Times, who first wrote "Woe is I" followed by "Words Fail Me." From that later book, I found this classic example of comma use, or misuse as it may be. Patricia said two college students, one a male and the other a female were given this sentence "woman without her man is nothing" and asked to punctuate it.
The male wrote: "Woman, without her man, is nothing."
The female wrote: "Woman, without her, man is nothing."
Patricia’s sage advice is "don’t overlook the power of punctuation."
And who can forget the famous quote from Oscar Wilde who said he spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out.
The good writing is what is left — or in the trade revised. In
"Literary Outakes," a book listing the false starts, loose lines, dropped dialogue from 101 renowned writers reinforces that theory of good writing. Amy Tan said that before her best seller, "The Joy Luck Club," was published only 350 pages of the 7,000 she had written managed to escape the garbage can.
"Aside from those 7,000 pages, there are also many more that saw life only on my computer screen — and only long enough for me to cringe, then mercifully send into oblivion the fancy phrases, false starts and writerly clichés," she admitted.
Erskine Caldwell recalls after years of rejection he finally sold his first story for $350. Afterwards he went through three suitcases full of previously written manuscripts and burned the lot, including a complete collection of rejection slips.
Sloppy writers today are the result of sloppy editors. The readers are the losers. The industry could take a lesson from Amy Tan and Erskine Caldwell.
(Bill Duncan can be contacted at bduncan@newsreview.info or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)