Writing, Clear and Simple

Here’s a quick online game, based on Lynne Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

It only tests you on apostrophes and commas, so calling it a “Punctuation Game” is a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, I suppose that’s a bit more mellifluous than “Apostrophe and Comma Game.” 

Here’s a question that came up on a technical writing list I subscribe to: If you have a copyright statement in a document that you distribute regularly, do you update the copyright date for the new year?

If the document is unchanged, then no. For example, if you publish a recipe for eggnog in December of 2006, the copyright statement should say “Copyright © 2006 Alphonse Q. Murgatroyd.” According to the American Bar Association’s guide to copyright, your copyright begins “from the time the work is created in fixed form.” You might distribute that recipe for many years, but as long as you don’t make any changes to it, you don’t change the copyright.

However, assume that in 2007 you add some information about how to avoid salmonella poisoning (in an effort to avoid lawsuits) and republish your recipe, then you would update the copyright date.

If you have a website (like a blog) that you claim copyright for, and the information on that website is updated regularly, then as soon as a change is made on that website, you should update the copyright statement for the new year. 

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I’m basing this on an interested layman’s understanding of U.S. copyright law.

Adverbs—words that modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs—are like salt: they help give your writing savor, but it’s easy to add too much and ruin things. How can you know when they’re needed and when to delete them?

On his Writing Tools blog, Roy Peter Clark offers some good advice about evaluating whether you need an adverb or not: Read the passage without the adverb and see if the meaning changes. If the adverb intensifies the meaning, but doesn’t change it, leave it out. He illustrates this method with a few paragraphs from a sports columnist, and finds that roughly 75% of the adjectives can be removed.

Movie critic David Germain apparently has one point to make about the movie Eragon, that it is  “essentially “Star Wars” — with dragons. Or maybe “The Lord of the Rings” — with dragons.”

That’s all well and good; everyone’s entitled to an opinion, and in the case of Eragon (I’ve read the book, but not seen the movie), he has a good point.

But he then proceeds to use the same basic schtick to pound that point home—“accidentally” referring to a character or setting from Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, and then “correcting” himself. He starts this early the review, in the fifth paragraph:

Alagaesia is a realm of sorcerers, elves, monsters and dragons, though the latter have become scarce since tyrant King Galbatorix (Malkovich) betrayed the Jedi Knights, er, the dragon riders, humans who ride the flying beasts and maintain peace in the land.

In the next paragraph,  he reuses that device, making reference to “innocent farm boy Luke Skywalker, oops, Eragon.” And on he goes. Few paragraphs go by without Germain doing it again, and again, like a 6-year-old who thinks that a knock-knock joke is just as hilarious every time you repeat it.

Humor in writing is a fine thing. You’d be surprised at how many different types of pieces you can slip it into. But a little goes a long way. Don’t milk the same joke over and over again. Once, it’s funny.

Some usage authorities and style guides insist that fewer than should only be used when you’re talking about things that you can count, such as marbles, people, or humpback whales, and that less than must be reserved for amounts that aren’t in distinct units. For example, you can say “I used fewer cups of flour” (you can count the cups) or “I used less flour,” (you can’t count flour). That distinction is all well and good as a personal preference, but it shouldn’t be elevated to the status of Iron-Clad Rule™ when it isn’t one.

It is true that you shouldn’t use fewer for non-countable amounts (and it’s pretty easy for most people to recognize that “I have fewer courage than you,” is just wrong). Less, on the other hand, can be applied to both countable and non-countable amounts. According to Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage, we have written evidence that people have been using less for countable things since about 888 A.D.

It might help to look at it in a little Venn diagram:

Let’s think about the general category of “Stuff,” and the smaller sub-category of “Stuff you can count.” The larger category of “Stuff” includes both the countable and non-countable—apples, sand, geckos, intelligence, marbles, molybdenum, politicians, and so forth—and the adjective less can be applied to all of it. Within the sub-category of “Stuff you can count”—from our previous list, the apples, geckos, marbles, and politicians—you can use both less and fewer.

In some cases, less might sound better than fewer. For example, I think “There were less than 10 people at the party” sounds better than “There were fewer than 10 people at the party.” But that’s entirely subjective. Both are entirely correct, so in those cases, use your ear.