Grammar, etc.

There is no denying that Christmas is a difficult time for many people. The reasons for this vary, but they are often quietly personal. An article I read a little while back highlighted this issue by sharing the story of a woman whose son died in a car accident during the festive season. It contained these lines:

“Christmas has changed for her family. She fears, possibly forever.”

While the meaning here is sorrowfully obvious, it is also imprecise in its current form. Each of these two sentences is complete and correct in itself. The effect is that while their individual meanings could be seen to relate to one another due to proximity, they are not actually connected.

The statement that “Christmas has changed for her family” expresses one thought, as does the second sentence about the woman’s fear. Read on its own, this latter statement does not give any indication of why the woman is afraid. It only proclaims that she experiences fear and that this feeling might endure, “possibly forever”.

By placing each thought in a separate sentence, the writer has isolated the cause of the fear from its source, which relates to the way that Christmas has changed. In so doing, the meaning of these lines becomes ambiguous. To remedy this situation, we need to associate the fear with its reason more clearly. One way to do this is as follows:

“Christmas has changed for her family, she fears. Possibly forever.”

This version maintains the structure of the original but shifts the full stop so that both “Christmas” and “fears” appear in the one sentence. However, it creates a sentence fragment with the words “Possibly forever”. Lacking both a subject and a verb, this phrase is grammatically incomplete. Nevertheless, it could be used in this way for a deliberate stylistic effect.

A more correct form of expression would see the sentences reframed as:

“She fears that Christmas has changed for her family, possibly forever.”

Now the entirety of the meaning is conveyed in a single, if sad, statement.

In selecting these sentences as an example to disambiguate, I am conscious of the need for a degree of delicacy. Part of me wonders whether it is appropriate to use the story of a family’s bereavement for this purpose, but there is another part of me that reads this tragic tale and wants to ensure it is given its full significance through clear and correct expression.

I have said before that editing, for me, is about showing respect. This respect is given first to the writer but I believe it is due to the subject of the writing too. That is why this is a good example to use.

Incidentally, having recently written about embarrassment, I also want to make it plain that I do not cite these examples of ambiguous writing in order to shame or demean anyone. That is why I do not specify where I find these snippets, nor name those who write them. I’m sure we can agree that all of us are at times clumsy in our written expression. Indeed, it is when writing about the things that matter most to us that our words may get especially tangled.

It is never my wish to make anyone feel bad about their writing. Instead, my intention is to show how the subtlest of alterations can make a distinct difference to the way our words and our stories are read.

I hope that is how you see it too.

How did you read the original sentences used in this example? If you encountered them in an article, would they have bothered or stopped you, or would you have understood their implied meaning? How important is precise expression to you, both when you read and when you write?

I know what it’s like. You’re full of ideas that you’re eager to share. You want to say everything all at once, give your reader every detail, say all of the things, all in one go, immediately and now, because it’s really important and you just have to get it out there, all of it, this instant!

But sometimes you need to stop.

Or rather, you need a full stop.

Let me introduce you to one of those pesky grammatical gremlins: the run-on sentence. Also known as a comma splice, this particular glitch occurs when two complete sentences get squished together with nothing but a comma between them.

Here’s an example.

Good writing is a genuine pleasure, it can open up entirely new worlds in your mind.

The problem is that the phrases on either side of the comma are complete sentences in their own right. That means they deserve to begin with their very own capital letter and end with their own full stop.

Just as a reminder, a sentence is complete and correct when it contains an independent clause. This is a clause that has both a subject, which is the thing or person doing something, and a verb, which is the action being done by the thing or person. (It’s even better when the subject and verb agree with each other, but that’s a topic for another article.)

The subject and the verb may be joined by other grammatical elements, like objects or complements, but the whole point of a sentence is to communicate a coherent idea. It’s what they are designed to do.

This is why comma splices aren’t so nice. They comprise two (or possibly more) complete thoughts that ought to reside in separate sentences. When this doesn’t happen and a sentence runs on, there can be a feeling of breathlessness in the writing. It is as if everything becomes rushed. Individual ideas pile up on one another and the discrete expression of each gets blurred.

Fortunately, it is easy to mend a comma splice. The simplest way is to insert a full stop and capital letter.

Good writing is a genuine pleasure. It can open up entirely new worlds in your mind.

Other appropriate punctuation, such as a semicolon or dash, can likewise replace the comma, or you could add the word “and” or another appropriate conjunction after the comma to create a compound sentence.

Good writing is a genuine pleasure, as it can open up entirely new worlds in your mind.

See how easy it is?

Learning to detect and correct comma splices in your own writing is a skill that is worthwhile nurturing. One approach for this is to check each comma in turn and assess whether it should be a full stop instead. This involves having some understanding of clauses and sentences, which is in itself is a good idea if you want to improve your writing.

You might also try that magical trick of reading your writing aloud. It may not always help you detect a run-on sentence, but it can be a useful practice anyway.

Ideas, like people, need space to breathe. By making sure you have a single idea in a single sentence, you will avoid comma splices and keep your writing nice.

Do you have a tendency towards run-on sentences? What will you do differently now you understand more about them?

Here, friends, is the latest in our explorations of interestingly misphrased sentences.

“Residents are being encouraged to roll up their sleeves and donate blood by a local politician.”

Admittedly, there is little that is ambiguous about this. The meaning here is clear, and yet I could not help laughing out loud when I read it. Surely I’m not the only one tempted to replace the word “by” with “of”. Am I?

It is possible the journalist who penned this sentence was having a bit of fun by structuring it this way. Even so, my view remains that it is risky to rattle your reader with any phrase or expression that disrupts the otherwise focused flow of their attention, unless that is your express intention.

Good writing sometimes does this, of course, by presenting us with a particularly striking image or an exquisitely sinuous sequence of words. This is why we appreciate such writing so much.

There is an easy way to achieve this in our sanguinary sentence above. All that is required is for the prepositional phrase “by a local politician” to be nudged immediately after the word “encouraged”, thus:

“Residents are being encouraged by a local politician to roll up their sleeves and donate blood.”

This keeps the agent of the encouragement (“a local politician”) close to the verb (“encouraged”), while the additional details (“roll up their sleeves and donate blood”) are appended at the end.

It’s true that the meaning of the sentence is evident in either version. However, one approach makes it clear who is being asked to do what by whom, while the other invites (in my mind at least) the image of zealous residents rolling up their sleeves to merrily shed the blood of their local politician.

Not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing, necessarily…

I’m really not the only one who secretly imagined that sentence read “donate blood of a local politician”, am I? Really?

Sometimes a simple comma can make all the difference. This is what they do most of the time, of course. It’s sort of their job. When laid in the right place, these modest pieces of punctuation give clarity to your expression. Their absence, meanwhile, can cause ambiguity, as shown in the example below.

“In between wing defence Gabi Simpson and goal attack Tippett were outstanding contributors in helping the home team build a telling 30-20 lead at the main break.”

Yes, this is a sentence about sport, and no, it probably doesn’t mean what you think it does.

As written, the sentence suggests that there were “outstanding contributors” who presumably did amazing things on the netball court between the players Simpson and Tippett. A slight shift in phrasing could help demonstrate this, such as: In between wing defence Gabi Simpson and goal attack Tippett, there were outstanding contributors who helped the home team build a telling 30-20 lead at the main break.

Or to put it another way: Outstanding contributors between wing defence Gabi Simpson and goal attack Tippett helped the home team build a telling 30-20 lead at the main break.

The problem is that this is not the intended meaning.

The sentence that appeared before this one in the original article mentions two other players (goal shooter Romelda Aiken and goal keeper Laura Geitz) whose positions place them at either end of the court. Tippett and Simpson play in positions between Aiken and Geitz and are themselves the “outstanding contributors” who helped the home team build that telling lead.

The simple addition of a comma at the start of the sentence makes this plain, removing any confusion and thus attributing the contribution correctly.

In between, wing defence Gabi Simpson and goal attack Tippett were outstanding contributors in helping the home team build a telling 30-20 lead at the main break.

 See the difference?

What’s happening here is that the words “In between” are a prepositional phrase that introduces and modifies the rest of the sentence. It could easily – and meaningfully – be read without the opening phrase, but its inclusion links the sentence with the one that preceded it and helps provide both context and cohesion.

When sentences begin this way, with a few words of introduction, it is often sensible and sometimes essential to place a comma before the main clause. This is always necessary when the phrase is a subordinate clause – as with the phrase “When sentences begin with an introduction in this way” which commences the sentence you read just before this one.

Sometimes, if the introductory phrase is just one or two words long, the comma may be omitted, providing that the meaning remains obvious. Some people also choose to drop the comma when prepositional phrases appear at the start of sentences.

Such tendencies towards using fewer commas reflect a recent trend towards more minimal punctuation. Yet whether it’s fashionable or not, I cheerfully encourage their inclusion, especially when they help achieve better clarity in a text.

In this regard, they do make an outstanding contribution, after all.

Are you enamoured with commas? Do you use them sparingly or sprinkle them liberally? What contribution do commas make to your writing?