Lunchbreak Thoughts on Commas
I am glad that the NYT’s most emailed article right now is on how people don’t know how to use commas. They don’t, it’s true, and I think I clicked on that link last week and it explained the reason why you write “my friend Jennifer” and “my mother, Laura.” You can find it, I’m sure. I’m not going to bother linking. Worst practices.
I didn’t email it to anyone. Everybody hates a corrector. Reading people’s thoughts on grammar or commas or misused words online is infuriating not because they are usually wrong (they probably are!) or because the writer is almost never a professional editor - it’s aggravating because because they inevitably make it seem like all editors do is pay attention to commas, which generally leads people to say “It doesn’t matter anyway.” Editors do way more than commas!
Look, if you’re a copy editor, and you hand me a manuscript you just proofed, and all you’ve fixed are the serial commas, you’re an amateur or at least a beginner. You probably missed something huge, actually. You suck at your job if all you can find are style corrections involving serial commas… and I will hate you so much more if you call it an oxford comma.
It’s not that commas don’t matter. They do. It is important to be clear about what you mean, and language is the tool to help you do that. Sometimes you purposely want to be unclear so you fuck with the language and that’s called poetic license and soyoudowhateveryouwant and it’s fine… as long as you know what you’re doing. But you’d better learn the ins and outs of the CMS before you get to play, my writer friend. And I’m not talking about internet writing on your blog or in that casual literary magazine with no business plan - whatevs to that. I’m talking about the writing you’re submitting as a professional - you have to learn how to draw before you can do Rothko or whatnot.
But, like internet feminism, grammar gets a lot of traffic online from people who have opinions.* I hate to tell you this, but you’re bad at grammar, and you’re sexist, too. You’re also racist, sometimes. Them’s the breaks of being a person. Go write a story, and read the Chicago Manual of Style. You’ll find all the answers in there. Then, hand the draft to a copy editor.
*If anyone had told me that two of my interests, grammar and feminism, would be such huge traffic producers, I would have skipped grad school and gone right to making internet specifically for grammar people and feminists and made a whole ton of money. Ha, but I’m happy doing what I’m doing now, which is casually excoriating you on my personal blog.
A Note on “Oversharing”
Based on a conversation from last night, and correct me if I am wrong:
“Fuck you, I am angry” is not oversharing.
“I am feeling things, strongly, and speaking about them in vague terms of how I feel,” is not oversharing. In fact, depending on how vague it is, it may be considered sharing or undersharing.
Talking about feelings in metaphors or fictionalized anecdotes is not oversharing, even if it makes people embarrassed or uncomfortable. That practice is often called poetry or therapy.
Recounting specifics from one’s life in regards to yourself and others - like, say, telling a reporter that “my ex boyfriend called Project Runway ‘Project Gayway’” - is oversharing.
Recording specific physical details from one’s like peeing on a stick to see whether you are pregnant is oversharing.
Words mean things. Even internet-borne words like “oversharing” mean different things when they are just words and when they are clickbait. Language expands its meaning for SEO, but it’s important to recognize what words mean when swelled for Google and what they mean when you’re trying to communicate, precisely.
Remember what I said about “bad at punctuation”? Great job, Minneapolis.
For whatever reason, my job at a food trade magazine put me on the mailing list for a press release for two new comic series, so I got this great press release on two new series, one about Juliet and one about Dorian Gray.
I like comics a lot, but I don’t think comics are literature in any way. Comics rarely deal with words in the way that novels or essays do; I’ve yet to read any comics that I like that rely on manipulating language in the way that good literature does. Film isn’t literature, so neither is comic art.
But if we’re going to change the word “monsters” into a verb in this fashion, then I’m all fucking for it. And I’m cool with “woken” too.
Last fall, I wrote an essay for Creative Ladies Are Powerful (C.L.A.P.) about all of the cover letters I’ve written. Since I graduated from my M.A. program in 2009, I have written probably 200 cover letters. No, that’s not an exaggeration. And although those letters have led me to interviews— most of which met with “sorry, we went with someone with 10+ years of experience who got laid off from this other company”—none of the positions I’ve worked in the past three years required a cover letter for employment. They were serving jobs and temp jobs and, most recently, a position that I was approached about and ultimately accepted. None of them began with a cover letter.
But I have written so goddamn many of those things. I have mastered the form— and it’s a form that almost no one reads. No one looks at the “really well written” cover letter.
But anyway, this is my fun way of telling you that I have a new job, that things are changing, and that all is well. Here here to the cover letter, the completely unnecessary form!
Another disappointment that happened this weekend was when I dreamed I saw the Moonrise Kingdom trailer, and the trailer in my dream was Gwyneth Paltrow in a role that was something like Charlize Theron in Young Adult (a movie I really liked!), but instead she was more likeable, and talking shit a little bit like Courtney Love did in Behind the Music. I dreamed the one way that Gwyneth Paltrow could be endearing again, and it was amazing. In my dream, the trailer for Moonrise Kingdom was a trailer about adults.
So you can imagine how disappointing it was to watch the real Moonrise Kingdom trailer and find out that it’s just a bunch of little kids running around in animal costumes, like Wes Anderson is Max Fischer making the same play over and over again. (I am a huge fan of 4/6 of his films! And this one could be good too, I guess.) Also I was never a huge fan of the Anna Karina archetype, so it will be difficult for me to get past it when it’s pasted on a 13-year-old girl. Gwyneth-Courtney is much cooler is all I’m saying.
showing not telling
to use words like “interesting” and “fascinating” when describing a subject is to essentially stick styrofoam popcorn into whatever you’re writing. would you be discussing the topic at hand if it were boring? probably not! so don’t use these sorts of placeholder words, because you’re only robbing your readers of finding out why something was worthy of your attention.
The most meaningless thing you can write is: “This is interesting because”
If “impact” is the grammatical hill Maura is willing to die on…
..mine is “female/females” as noun and “woman/women” as adjective.
This used to be a huge pet peeve of mine until we did our ladybikes story last summer and was corrected by a trans activist: woman is preferred as an adjective because just because someone identifies as a woman doesn’t mean she is female.
Generally I go with the grammar over the activism, but this argument is super legit. And it’s why I just wind up writing “lady” a lot, but more on that later.
Belle and Sebastian know how to use capital letters.
Not according to Chicago they don’t.
CMS 16 8.157 (“Principles of headline-style capitalization”), no. 3, p. 448:
“Lowercase prepositions, regardless of length, except when they are used adverbially or adjectivally… or when they compose part of a Latin expression used adjectivally or adverbially.”
I’ll probably delete this in the morning, but there was no comments section nor an email address so I had to stick up for myself. Also I’m reorganizing my clothes so capitalization arguments are more interesting.
