Editor Mark's Blog

Without grammar, your
haiku would fall to pieces.
I think I’ll tweet that.

The National Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest is back. Nearly 180 poems were entered into last year’s contest. They were brilliant. Even picking the best 10 was very difficult. But, National Grammar Day falls on a Sunday this year, so the organizers decided they could handle having another go at it.

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Newspapers have been quick to tell us about the latest trends and help us prepare for a changing world. But they’ve been amazingly slow to recognize the changes that are necessary to remain relevant. And now, as newspapers finally enter the 21st century, “online-first” operations risk losing what made them great in the first place: the trust of the communities they serve.

I hope that the successor to Booth Newspapers in Michigan can combine an online focus with a newspaper’s commitment to truth and accuracy. I’m watching with interest as my former colleagues transition to new roles with MLive Media Group, the statewide news operation that has veteran journalists focusing on delivering the latest news online.

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I’d like to say goodbye to “good-bye.”

The unhyphenated “goodbye” gets nearly five times as many Google hits. ”Goodbye” is the preferred spelling in the Associated Press Stylebook. The American Heritage and Webster’s New World dictionaries list goodbye as the first spelling. Bryan Garner in “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” compares the hyphenated form to the archaic “to-day.”

Merriam-Webster, though, includes only “good-bye” and “good-by.” Many style guides, including the Chicago Manual of Style, prefer a Merriam-Webster dictionary, so “good-bye” is with us for now.

The word in any form is only a few hundred years old, stemming from the earlier “good morning” and “good day,” etc., and a shortening of the phrase “God be with you.”

Everyone said it’s easy. I was up late trying to figure out how to include all my website information in one place, and I failed. Or at least fell asleep. All I succeeded in doing was transferring the URL to my blog, so my site exists only on a hidden server somewhere and on my hard drive.

If you are looking for www.markallenediting.com, I hope to have my information back up here soon. If you need anything in the meantime, I’m at markallen@copydesk.org, 614-961-9666, @EditorMark on Twitter and (sometimes) copyeditor1 on Skype.

If you are looking for editormark.wordpress.com, my blog postings are all below.

If you are looking for my archive of tweeted tips, most of them also are on this site — I copied them to my blog when I reached about 500. Scroll down to find them.

Thanks for your patience.

Mark

Grammar was not my subject. In high school English class, we did a unit on grammar every semester. It always seemed to be the same thing to me. The work was either obvious (I could recite “Grammar Rock” with the best of them) or unnecessarily confusing (English is like that). The book we used seemed authoritative, but there just seemed to be more rules and guidelines in there than anyone could possibly know. There wasn’t, it turned out, but it seemed that way.

I might be decades behind the time in my perception of grammar textbooks, but the criteria I would use to judge are the level of detail (less is more), the level of intimidation, and the clarity of the rules listed.

My first impression of Mignon Fogarty’s new student grammar is that it’s very orange. It’s inescapably orange with a cover reminiscent of the old Chicago Manual of Style (now blue) and a matching orange inside for headings, examples and shading. Its title opts for bravado over brevity: “Grammar Girl Presents the Ultimate Writing Guide for Students.” It has cartoon drawings, most featuring the familiar Aardvark and Squiggly (a snail) of previous Grammar Girl books. We can give it points for lack of intimidation right away.

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I strolled away from Google Plus to visit Twitter a few moments ago, and I pointed out that “for free” is criticized because “free” often works better in half the space. Usage guru Bill Walsh of the Washington Post pointed out that the real criticism is that “free” is not a noun, a more challenging argument.

The idiom forces “free” into the position of a noun, as if it is the same as “zero dollars” or “no pay.” It’s hard to reconcile, so it might always be considered nonstandard, or as Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “not used in writing of high solemnity.”

But the phrase, apparently only decades old, is very widely used. Blind condemnation sometimes takes an understandable statement and exchanges it for something confusing.

“I worked for free” is more clear than “I worked free” or “I worked for nothing.” “It is impossible to live for free” is not the same as “it is impossible to live free.”

If the meaning doesn’t change, “free” is the better choice. But “for free” is too established and too useful to be disallowed.