Category Archives: Style

3 Places You Can Use a Comma, or Not




Note: this is part three of a three-part series on comma use. Be sure to check out these posts as well:

5 Surprising Places You Need a Comma

3 Surprising Places You Don’t Need a Comma

My last two blog posts on commas were all about the official rules of where you do or do not place a comma. But not all comma rules are written in stone; this time, let’s take a look at the situations in which comma use is entirely up to you.

1. Before the last item in a series. When you’re listing three or more items, you can choose whether or not to use a comma before the final item in the series:

Red, white, and blue or red, white and blue

Word nerds often have very passionate opinions about this comma, which is called the serial comma or Oxford comma. For example, you can buy this t-shirt—

—even though Thomas Jefferson did not use a serial comma when he wrote about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”:

People who use the AP Stylebook argue that the serial comma is not necessary because the and signals that the last item of the series is coming up. People who follow The Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA Style Manual say that it is necessary, pointing out that omitting the final comma can result in comical misreading:

And then non-serial-comma-users will point out that the sentence could easily be rearranged so it doesn’t imply that Washington and Lincoln were rhinoceri. The argument goes on forever.

As I always say about matters of style, the most important thing is consistency. Either always use an Oxford comma or never use one.

2. After a brief introductory word or phrase. If you have just a word or a few words introducing your sentence, you can choose whether or not to use a comma before the rest of the sentence.

On a whim, we decided to spend the weekend in Vegas.
In retrospect, it would have been easier to take a taxi.
Later, we’ll look back on this and laugh.

or

On a whim we decided to spend the weekend in Vegas.
In retrospect it would have been easier to take a taxi.
Later we’ll look back on this and laugh.

You get to decide when you want to use a comma with short introductory phrases. But if you are going to leave out the comma, make sure that doing so won’t cause misreading.

X Before eating the family always said grace.
Before eating, the family always said grace.

With a longer introductory phrase, you should always use a comma to prevent confusion.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure that I ever have seen a baby squirrel.
And on top of everything else, I came down with the flu.

There’s no real consensus about the exact number of words an introductory phrase needs to have before it requires a comma; most websites recommend somewhere between three and five, but none of the major style guides addresses it directly. I always use a comma after four words, but I picked that number arbitrarily. You can set your own rule.

3. With the word too. When using too to mean in addition, you can just put it in the sentence, or you can set it off with a comma (or a pair of commas if it’s mid-sentence).

I, too, wish summer could last forever.
“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.”

or

I too wish summer could last forever.
“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.”

Using a comma with too creates a pause around the word, giving it more emphasis. Read your sentence aloud, and if you naturally pause at too, add a comma (or commas). If it flows as part of the sentence, leave it be.

I hope this series on comma use has helped clarify when you should or should not use a comma, and when you can choose for yourself. If you have any questions about commas, please ; as these posts prove, I’m always happy to talk about comma use.

OK, Let’s Talk About How to Spell “Okay,” O.K.?



O.K., you know what’s weird? OK is one of the most commonly used words in English (—which is pretty darn high when you realize that ). But there’s no definitive way to spell okay! Why is it that we don’t know how to spell a word that we use every day? Because it started as an abbreviation and has become a full word over time.

The word dates back to 1839, when there was a fad in New York and Boston slang to misspell a saying and then abbreviate it. , an excellent guide to etymology, lists a few others that didn’t stand the test of time:

  • K.G. for no go, as if spelled know go
  • N.C. for ’nuff ced
  • K.Y. for know yuse

O.K. is an abbreviation for oll korrect. It probably would have disappeared along with the other abbreviations if not for the 1840 presidential election. Martin Van Buren was nicknamed Old Kinderhook (after the village in upstate New York where he was born), and his supporters formed the O.K. Club.

You can buy this 1840 wood-block engraving showing the origin of O.K. for just $2,295 on eBay.

The first instance of spelling out okay was in 1895, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but this spelling wasn’t popularized until the 1930s; President Woodrow Wilson (who served from 1913 to 1921) apparently approved government papers by writing okeh.

But over the second half of the twentieth century, the new spelling really took off. shows the skyrocketing popularity of okay over O.K. and OK in published books.

Does this mean you should use okay? Not necessarily. The major style guides actually lean toward OK.

The AP Stylebook—favored by newspapers—puts it succinctly: “OK, OK’d, OK’ing, OKs. Do not use okay.”

The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing—the guide for academic writing—doesn’t directly address the question, but it recommends turning to a reliable dictionary such as Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary for spelling questions and notes, “Where entries show variant spellings, use the form given first.” Webster’s lists OK first, so that is the preferred spelling for academic work.

The Chicago Manual of Style—used by book publishers—is silent on the issue, too, but in a Q&A on the website, the editors responded:

CMOS doesn’t specify, but as it happens, the manual uses ‘OK’ twice … and does not use ‘okay’ at all. … We follow Webster’s 11th Collegiate, which puts ‘OK’ as the first spelling—but that does not mean it is preferred. Rather, ‘okay’ is an equal variant (also standard).”

If you like periods with your abbreviations, it’s not incorrect to use them in this case, but it is a bit outdated. At this point, the only major publications that favor O.K. with periods are and .

So how should you spell it? If you’re not bound to a particular style guide, choose whichever spelling you like best. As always with questions of style, though, pick one and be consistent.

Wish It Were Still in Style: The English Subjunctive Mood



Zach Braff recently released a teaser for his upcoming Kickstarter-funded movie, Wish I Was Here.

My initial thoughts were, That’s a great wig! and This looks pretty slick, production-wise. How much did he raise? [ $2.6 million, but then a traditional financier brought it up to $10 million.]

And my third thought was, It’s called Wish I Was Here? What an unfortunate title. It’s yet another sign that the subjunctive mood in English is dying.

What’s the subjunctive mood? It’s a category of verb tenses that are used to communicate hypothetical situations, desires, suggestions, emotions, and other non-concrete expressions. If you’ve heard of it, you most likely learned it in a foreign-language class—the subjunctive is going strong in Spanish, French, and Italian, among others. But not in English.

The English subjunctive can be hard to identify because the verbs are often conjugated the same way they would be in indicative mood (the group of verb tenses we use to make statements of fact). But let’s take a look at one example where the subjunctive and the indicative are clearly different: the past tense of the verb to be.

Here’s a comparison of how you conjugate to be in the past indicative and the past subjunctive:

Past Indicative Past Subjunctive
I was I were
You were You were
He/she/it was He/she/it were
We were We were
They were They were

Zach Braff’s movie title is in the indicative—Wish I Was Here. But it’s not a factual statement about something that actually happened; it’s a wish that the situation were different. The movie should be called Wish I Were Here.

Does that sound a bit stuffy? Old-fashioned? That’s probably because the subjunctive mood is quickly fading from common usage. Here’s another example—a famous song lyric that got changed from subjunctive to indicative forty years later.

In Fiddler on the Roof (opened on Broadway in 1964; set in 1905), Tevye sings If I Were a Rich Man.

When Gwen Stefani borrowed the tune in 2004, she changed the title to If I Was a Rich Girl.

You could argue that it doesn’t really matter if we use the subjunctive mood less than we used to. The subjunctive isn’t required for comprehension; we can all understand what Zach Braff and Gwen Stefani are saying.

But something is lost when you change subjunctive to indicative. The subjunctive has a certain poetic ring to it—a depth of feeling that the indicative doesn’t convey.

When says, “I would that I were dead!” we feel the despair behind her confession. If she’d said, “I want to be dead!” no one would be quoting the poem today.

If I were Zach Braff, and I wanted my movie to have an emotional impact on people reading the posters, I would start a new Kickstarter campaign to cover the costs of reprinting all the marketing materials for my newly retitled movie, Wish I Were Here.

Let’s Make a Dash for It: The Different Dashes and When to Use Them



You have probably noticed that there are a few different kinds of dashes, but you may not know what they’re called and when they’re called for. Well, don’t despair—just follow this guide, and soon you’ll be deftly dashing off dashes.

I consulted The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing and combined their advice to create this list of the most common usages of each dash. Using the AP Stylebook? Follow this asterisk.*

I may have omitted or glossed over a few of the less common usages, so if you think of an example that isn’t covered here, please leave it in the comments.

Hyphen

What it looks like:

How to type it: Type the button between the 0 and the +/= on your keyboard.

When to use it: The smallest dash, the hyphen, is commonly used to join words.

  • To connect compound words, compound phrases, and some prefixes

Reno doesn’t have world-class casinos like Las Vegas does.
He’s part of the do-anything-as-long-as-it-feels-good generation.
Sophia lived in a co-op during college.

  • To join coequal nouns

Actor-director Rob Reiner had his first onscreen role in ten years in The Wolf of Wall Street.

  • To separate groups of numbers

Call 1-800-555-1212.

  • To spell out a word

Sophia spells her name s-o-p-h-i-a.

  • To break up a long word at the end of a line (n.b., while this is common practice in books, it is rarely used online).

En Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type a space, then a hyphen, then another space. The program will automatically convert the hyphen to an en dash. If you like keyboard shortcuts, use Ctrl + Alt + Hyphen on Windows or Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or just copy and paste it from this post.

When to use it: The en dash, so named because it’s the width of an n, is usually used to separate numbers.

  • To mean up to and including

We’re almost at the end of the 2013–14 school year.
See pages 45–49 for more details.

  • To mean to

We took the New York–London redeye flight.
The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series by pummeling the Cardinals 6–1 in the sixth game.

  • With an unfinished range of numbers

Dianne Feinstein (1933–) is the oldest member of the Senate.

  • To replace a hyphen in a compound-adjective phrase when the compound is open or consists of two hyphenated phrases.

Is the post–Cold War stability unraveling?
The first-quarter–second-quarter comparison shows steady growth.

Don’t worry too much about this last one. As The Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “This editorial nicety may go unnoticed by the majority of readers; nonetheless, it is intended to signal a more comprehensive link than a hyphen would. It should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable.”

Em Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type two hyphens immediately following a word and then start the next word (no spaces). The program will automatically convert the hyphens to an em dash. Or hold down Ctrl + Alt + Minus (on the numeric keyboard) on Windows or Shift + Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or copy and paste it from above.

When to use it: The em dash, which is the width of an m, is used to create an aside or to separate and draw attention to part of a sentence.

  • Instead of parentheses

And the craziest part of it (and I swear this is true) was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

And the craziest part of it—and I swear this is true—was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

  • Instead of a comma

People at the party were already dancing on the table, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

People at the party were already dancing on the table—and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

  • Instead of a colon

You only ever think about one thing: money.

You only ever think about one thing—money.

  • To introduce a pronoun that summarizes a preceding noun or series of nouns

God, country, family—these were the things he valued most.

  • To show a break in thought or dialogue

“Are you—wait a minute—you’re saying that you know who the murderer was?”

  • In front of explanatory expressions such as “that is” or “namely” or “for example.”

I keep my apartment clean—that is, when I have the time.

If you’re using an email service or a program that doesn’t easily allow special characters, use two hyphens instead of an em dash:

Latest update about the merger–it was just approved by the board.

*Writing for a newspaper? Good news! You only need one kind of dash. The hyphen—which the AP Stylebook simply calls a dash—is used for everything.

Instead of an en dash, just use one dash, no spaces:

We’re almost at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Instead of an em dash, insert a space, a dash, and another space:

And the craziest part of it – and I swear this is true – was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

If you use AP style regularly, you might want to turn of autocorrect for dashes, or Word will automatically turn the Space-Dash-Space combo into an en dash.

I hope this post helps you understand the rules about dashes. Have a question about using a dash in a particular sentence? Leave it in the comments or —I’ll be happy to offer advice.

Let’s Make a Dash for It: The Different Dashes and When to Use Them



You have probably noticed that there are a few different kinds of dashes, but you may not know what they’re called and when they’re called for. Well, don’t despair—just follow this guide, and soon you’ll be deftly dashing off dashes.

I consulted The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing and combined their advice to create this list of the most common usages of each dash. Using the AP Stylebook? Follow this asterisk.*

I may have omitted or glossed over a few of the less common usages, so if you think of an example that isn’t covered here, please leave it in the comments.

Hyphen

What it looks like:

How to type it: Type the button between the 0 and the +/= on your keyboard.

When to use it: The smallest dash, the hyphen, is commonly used to join words.

  • To connect compound words, compound phrases, and some prefixes

Reno doesn’t have world-class casinos like Las Vegas does.
He’s part of the do-anything-as-long-as-it-feels-good generation.
Sophia lived in a co-op during college.

  • To join coequal nouns

Actor-director Rob Reiner had his first onscreen role in ten years in The Wolf of Wall Street.

  • To separate groups of numbers

Call 1-800-555-1212.

  • To spell out a word

Sophia spells her name s-o-p-h-i-a.

  • To break up a long word at the end of a line (n.b., while this is common practice in books, it is rarely used online).

En Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type a space, then a hyphen, then another space. The program will automatically convert the hyphen to an en dash. If you like keyboard shortcuts, use Ctrl + Alt + Hyphen on Windows or Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or just copy and paste it from this post.

When to use it: The en dash, so named because it’s the width of an n, is usually used to separate numbers.

  • To mean up to and including

We’re almost at the end of the 2013–14 school year.
See pages 45–49 for more details.

  • To mean to

We took the New York–London redeye flight.
The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series by pummeling the Cardinals 6–1 in the sixth game.

  • With an unfinished range of numbers

Dianne Feinstein (1933–) is the oldest member of the Senate.

  • To replace a hyphen in a compound-adjective phrase when the compound is open or consists of two hyphenated phrases.

Is the post–Cold War stability unraveling?
The first-quarter–second-quarter comparison shows steady growth.

Don’t worry too much about this last one. As The Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “This editorial nicety may go unnoticed by the majority of readers; nonetheless, it is intended to signal a more comprehensive link than a hyphen would. It should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable.”

Em Dash

What it looks like:

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type two hyphens immediately following a word and then start the next word (no spaces). The program will automatically convert the hyphens to an em dash. Or hold down Ctrl + Alt + Minus (on the numeric keyboard) on Windows or Shift + Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or copy and paste it from above.

When to use it: The em dash, which is the width of an m, is used to create an aside or to separate and draw attention to part of a sentence.

  • Instead of parentheses

And the craziest part of it (and I swear this is true) was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

And the craziest part of it—and I swear this is true—was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

  • Instead of a comma

People at the party were already dancing on the table, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

People at the party were already dancing on the table—and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

  • Instead of a colon

You only ever think about one thing: money.

You only ever think about one thing—money.

  • To introduce a pronoun that summarizes a preceding noun or series of nouns

God, country, family—these were the things he valued most.

  • To show a break in thought or dialogue

“Are you—wait a minute—you’re saying that you know who the murderer was?”

  • In front of explanatory expressions such as “that is” or “namely” or “for example.”

I keep my apartment clean—that is, when I have the time.

If you’re using an email service or a program that doesn’t easily allow special characters, use two hyphens instead of an em dash:

Latest update about the merger–it was just approved by the board.

*Writing for a newspaper? Good news! You only need one kind of dash. The hyphen—which the AP Stylebook simply calls a dash—is used for everything.

Instead of an en dash, just use one dash, no spaces:

We’re almost at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Instead of an em dash, insert a space, a dash, and another space:

And the craziest part of it – and I swear this is true – was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

If you use AP style regularly, you might want to turn of autocorrect for dashes, or Word will automatically turn the Space-Dash-Space combo into an en dash.

I hope this post helps you understand the rules about dashes. Have a question about using a dash in a particular sentence? Leave it in the comments or —I’ll be happy to offer advice.

How to Write an Effective Press Release



I just contributed a guest post about to Searching for the Happiness, a blog about writing. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Press releases (also called news releases) can be a great way to get news about your business to the media, your current customers, and potential new customers. Unlike direct advertisements, press releases are written in the objective third-person voice, just like newspaper articles.

Press releases used to land in the newsroom, where the story would live or die on an editorial whim. But nowadays, numerous online services will post your release and send it to hundreds of news organizations, building strong links to your website in the process. The good news is that you can easily get your message out there. The bad news is that everyone else can, too, including your competitors.

So how do you make your press release stand out from the crowd? Just follow these six steps. …

And if you’d like to have a professional review your press release to make sure it’s as effective as possible, .

Is It Correct to Call Christmas “Xmas”?



The word Xmas, like fruitcake, is one of those holiday traditions that everyone knows of but no one quite understands. Is it proper English to shorten Christmas to Xmas? Is it offensive? No one seems quite sure. So my Xmas gift to you is a quick clarification.

Contrary to popular belief, Xmas is neither an error nor an attempt to take the Christ out of Christmas. The X comes from the Greek letter chi, which is the beginning of Khristos, the Greek word for Christ. In Greek, the word looks like this:

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of X to mean Christ back to 1021 AD and the use of Xmas back to 1551 AD, so if you choose to write the word, you have a long history of legitimate usage backing you up.

However, you should be warned that style guides frown on the use of Xmas. The AP Stylebook admonishes, “Never abbreviate Christmas to Xmas or any other form.” The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage agrees about Xmas, commanding, “Do not use; spell out Christmas.”

And keep in mind that if you use it, you also risk offending Christians who aren’t aware of the word’s origin.

So when can you use Xmas? I thought of four scenarios:

  • If you’re making your own holiday cards, and you want the letters to fit on the page easily
  • If you’re writing a tweet, and the extra five characters in Christmas would put you over the 140-character limit
  • If you’re sending a text message on a flip phone, and typing Christmas will take significantly longer than typing Xmas
  • If you’re a natural contrarian, and you enjoy explaining to people that using Xmas is not actually wrong

Don’t do that last one if you work for a newspaper. Can you think of any other occasions to use Xmas? Leave them in the comments.

And have a very merry Xmas.

How Should You Begin a Business Email?



Expert advice on getting your email off to a good start from the guys who wrote the book on email etiquette

Recently, I’ve been spending probably too much time considering email salutations. Back when letters were the dominant way of corresponding, the salutation was fairly straightforward. For a formal letter, the convention was to start with “Dear” and address the recipient by last name, followed by a colon.

Dear Mr. Smith:

For an informal letter, the convention was to use the person’s first name, followed by a comma.

Dear Jacob,

But email salutations, if used at all, tend to be much less formal. I find that most people start business emails with something like,

Hello Jacob,

or

Hi Jacob,

These greetings are friendly, but slightly ungrammatical. When addressing someone directly, a comma should go between the greeting and the person’s name.

Hello, Jacob,

I experimented with starting emails this way, but I thought it looked weird to have two commas. Not incorrect, just weird. Then I tried using a colon.

Hi, Jacob:

I liked this better, but I’d never seen anyone start an email this way. Unsure of what to do, I thought I’d better get some expert advice.

David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, authors of , favor starting a new email relationship the same way you would if you were writing a letter: formally.

“Email is a more urgent form of communication, and we have many more emails to answer every day than letters,” note the authors. “But it strikes us as rude to bark out someone’s name … even in an email, especially if you don’t really know your correspondent.”

But what if the person you’re emailing with is less formal? If you get an email that starts with “Hey, Bro,” and you respond with “Dear Mr. Smith,” the recipient may feel reprimanded or even insulted.

I asked Will Schwalbe what he thought about an imbalance in formality and grammaticalness. Is it better to mirror the person who’s writing to you, even if the grammar is off, or to be more formal but correct?

“You can never go wrong STARTING with ‘Dear Mr.’ or ‘Dear Ms.’ with someone you don’t know and with whom you’ve never corresponded,” he replied. “But if they write back and sign with their first name only, then go to ‘Dear FIRST NAME’ if they addressed you ‘Dear YOUR LAST NAME.’ If they started ‘Hi Will’ or ‘Hi, Will’ or ‘Hey Will’ or any variation, though, in their reply, switch to mirroring them—it’s always safe and cordial.”

Since receiving this advice, I’ve adopted a three-category approach to sending emails.

1. Starting new relationships formally

Dear Mr. Smith,

2. Beginning a new email thread with an acquaintance or colleague less formally

Dear Jacob,

3. Mirroring the opening line of incoming emails

Jake-
Hi Jacob,
[No salutation]

Do you have a preferred email salutation? Do you follow the lead of whomever you’re corresponding with? Share your strategies below.

Are You “Utilizing” Useless Buzzwords?



Yes, my writing skills are stronger than my PowerPoint drawing skills. But you can tell it’s a bee, right? Right.

“Avoid fancy words.” This command from is excellent writing advice whether you’re publishing a novel or sending an email. They admonish, “Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.”

But somehow we all end up choosing longer, showier words to say something that could be said simply—especially in business writing. Here are just a few of the worst offenders:

Buzzwords Better Words
actionable (adj.) useful
cutting-edge (adj.) advanced
implement (v.) do
incentivize (v.) encourage
innovative (adj.) new
facilitate (v.) ease
groundbreaking (adj.) fresh
monetize (v.) profit from
paradigm (n.) model, pattern
solutioneer (n.) problem-solver
solutioneer (v.) solve
synergy (n.) teamwork
takeaway (n.) lesson
utilize (v.) use

Open one of your business documents and do a search for each of these words. Are you using buzzwords without noticing? Believe me; it’s easy to do.

Now try replacing your buzzwords with the stronger words in the right-hand column. You’ll be pleased with how much simpler and snappier your writing becomes.

Buzzwords will never go away entirely. But the less you use them, the better your business communication will be. So whenever you start reaching for one of these words, remember this post, and repeat the mantra: “Avoid fancy words.”

How should you write a.m. and p.m.?



Bidding’s still going on eBay for this festive clock.

Being a night owl, I rarely go to bed before 1:00 AM. Or is that 1:00 A.M.? Or maybe 1:00 am? 1:00 a.m.? 1:00 am? Nope, it’s 1:00 a.m.:

The meeting was moved to 10:30 a.m. tomorrow.
My flight is at 8:10 p.m.

The abbreviations a.m. and p.m. come from the Latin phrases ante meridiem and post meridiem, meaning, respectively, “before noon” and “after noon.” As with many other Latin abbreviations that we use in English—e.g., i.e., et al., etc.—the preferred style is to use lowercase letters with periods.

The Chicago Manual of Style, the AP Stylebook, the MLA Style Manual, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary all recommend this style. But keep in mind that it is a question of style, so some people may disagree. If your company has an in-house preference for small caps with no periods, that’s what you should use.

Related fun fact: It’s not technically correct to say 12:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m.; noon cannot logically be after noon, and midnight could be either twelve hours before or twelve hours after noon. If you want to be a real stickler, say 12:00 noon or 12:00 midnight.

Of course, we could solve both of these problems by using the twenty-four-hour clock. British people are laughing at us for even needing to consider these questions. But Americans seem about as likely to convert to the twenty-four-hour clock as to the metric system, so we’re stuck with these debates for the foreseeable future.

Do you have a preference for one of the other styles of writing a.m. and p.m.? Do you cringe when other people use 12:00 p.m.? Or do you roll your eyes about that technicality? Do you use a twenty-four-hour clock? Share your thoughts below.