Here’s a quote from a book I very much enjoyed:
“My bow is a rarity, crafted by my father along with a few others that I keep well hidden in the woods.” (The Hunger Games, Chapter 1)
How many bowyers is Katniss hiding in the woods?[i] Did she free them before the bad guys destroyed District 12 or are the poor buggers still there, stuck under a tree, waiting for rescue? And how many readers care that bad grammar riddles the book?
If Suzanne Collins can sell 17.5 million copies of The Hunger Games, do we need to study grammar at all?
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English is a subject/object structured language. A normal English sentence goes like this: Subject -> Action -> Object. But, because English is a wonderfully flexible language, we are allowed to re-order our sentences. We can hide both subject and object within subtle layers of meaning. So how do you choose your sentence structure? And why have years of academic writing left me struggling with my fiction edit?
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Erratic and excessive use of colons and semi-colons is one of my long-standing punctuation demons. For the final draft of my doctoral thesis before my viva I went on a massive cull, slashing semi-colons until there were a little less than 70 in the book (that’s about one every five pages), and I was still picked up for having too many of the little buggers.
I think my problem was that I was using them as pauses, and worse still as a cheap way to show a link between two ideas without actually demonstrating the link. This is a common fault in bad academic writing (particularly in Derrida rip offs). It is a stylistic workaround for not being able to prove what you are saying. In the short term, learning to write without semi-colons and to minimise the use of colons forces you to provide a clear a constructive argument.
However, in the long-term, there are occasions where the colons and semi-colons are both better and more beautiful. So how are you supposed to use them?
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Apostrophes are surprisingly difficult to use. They shouldn’t be. The rules surrounding them are straightforward. But even if you can get a handle on the rules, which I’ll talk about in a moment, errors can be difficult to spot when they inevitably slip through the editorial net.
I had a document back from a very pleased editor today, which is a nice thing to happen. However, looking at the text, the first thing I noticed was that I had written “the doors over there” as the penultimate piece of dialogue. I didn’t spot the mistake, my readers didn’t spot it, and the editor didn’t spot it. Apostrophes are tricky beggars*.
You may be asking yourself what the mistake was. It’s impossible to tell without the context – but the context is that the character is trying to indicate the location of a particular door, ie. the door is over there, rather than pointing out a particularly interesting group of doors. So the sentence should be “the door’s over there” not the “doors over there.” This sort of error is easy to miss. Given the right context, the incorrect sentence would be correct. Mis-used apostrophes can easily appear in the guise of misplaced words or awkward ideas.
So what are the rules for apostrophes?
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Living in France has meant having to study French. Studying French has meant learning to use the subjunctive, a special type of conjugation that turns up when expressing doubt, sentiment, a personal judgement or a desire.
So “je comprends le subjonctif” is right (I hope), but “c’est important que je comprends le subjonctif” is wrong and should actually be “c’est important que je comprenne le subjonctif.”
With me so far? You’re doing better than I did, or most Anglophones do for that matter. The subjunctive is one of those things that we all struggle with, but which French people use all the time (unless they’re getting it wrong as well.) So far I reckon I have about a 50% success rate.
It is at this point in a class that the French teacher (and many Anglophone students) may nod sagely, and observe that the reason for the difficulty is that we English don’t use the subjunctive. Which is, as it happens, completely wrong: we use the subjunctive in English all the time. It just isn’t always clear that we’re doing it.
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