Category: Grammar

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Foreign Words: To Accent or Not to Accent

Lisa Adair

Recent postings to the discussion list brought about a lively debate on the use of foreign words in technical writing. Accented letters occur frequently in foreign words. When writers don’t include the original accent marks, words like résumé become resume, thus creating ambiguity.

One of the posts said that non-native English speakers are pushing for the retention of accent marks. However, it does pose the question of where does it end? Should Greek words appear in the Greek alphabet? Should Russian names appear in the original Cyrillic script? What about “sounds” that are indicated with accent marks?

Plural grammatical features from other languages also become an issue. Is it forums or fora, antennae or antennæ, indexes or indices, appendixes or appendices? Most postings agree that context plays a large role in which spelling you choose. And words like wunderkind would never be pluralized as wunderkinds, but would be wunderkinder per native German.

Editing guides typically don’t get involved in these types of questions. Microsoft Manual of Style advises against using foreign words and phrases since they’re typically not understood worldwide. If your audience is not as diverse, foreign words and phrases might be perfectly acceptable.

Good dictionaries (American Heritage, Fourth Edition) list foreign words. Some German words like bildungsroman, zeitgeist, schadenfreude are listed as acceptable whether or not they’re capitalized. They also track the evolution of words quite well, even if they trail actual usage. For example, Rôle became role as it passed into the English language.

Generally speaking, everyone agrees that using original alphabets in scholarly works is acceptable, but will be viewed as annoying in technical writing. However, proper nouns should be written in the original alphabet as much as possible to respect the capitalization and markings of people who use them, that is, André Breton as opposed to Andre Breton.

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To Hyphenate or Not, That Is the Question

Emily Alfson

Technical editors are often faced with the question of whether or not to hyphenate a word with a prefix.

Sometimes following traditional grammar rules is enough to make the decision, but in the world of technology where new words are formed every day and the audience spans the globe, the answer to the question of whether or not to hyphenate a word with a prefix has become more complex than ever. The contributors to the STC Technical Editing SIG discussion list recently pondered the issue of hyphenating words with prefixes and came up with two ways of approaching the issue.

The Grammarians

The grammarians take the more traditional approach to the issue. If the word in question can be found in a standard reference dictionary, these editors will most likely tell the writer to follow the hyphenation used in the dictionary.

These editors are more likely to place a hyphen between a prefix and a word if the meaning of the word is likely to be confused by the spelling. For example, re-sign and resign have very different meanings, as does coop and co-op.

The Intuitives

The intuitive editors tend to show a little more sensitivity to non-native speakers of English and use hyphens more often than not, even if the meaning of the word may seem clear without the hyphen. These writers and editors are more likely to check a variety of sources to see what the most common spelling of the word. They might also check other documents within their technical writing group and see how the word was used in the past to see if there was a trend towards one spelling or another. Then, these editors can draw a conclusion based on what the writers have used in the past and what is used by popular sources of information.

And in conclusion…

As with many of the decisions an editor must make every day, the decision of whether or not to hyphenate a word with a prefix should be based on grammar, an understanding of the audience, and the common usage of the word. No matter what decision you make, just be consistent with each word and clearly define your guidelines regarding hyphenation.

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Podcasting: Entercation or Edutainment

John Martin

What do you think about someone you see walking around, or riding the bus, with earbuds in? I’ve wondered: What song are they listening to? What kind of music are they listening to? I wonder how loud that music is in their ears!

There’s a name for that “tinny sound that leaks out of somebody else’s iPod.” NPR producer Neva Grant calls it “ear spray.” But I digress…

Personally, I listen to about as many podcasts on my iPod as I do songs. Often, on a bus, when I literally “LOL” at something in a podcast episode, I wonder if people are wondering what could possibly be so funny about a song. And then I realize that what they’re really thinking is, “It’s not the song that’s a looney-tune.”

My newest podcast series subscription is to one called “Grammar Girl,” which I found addictive (or is that addicting—see episode no. 16 for the answer) after hearing the first two episodes. What’s great about them to me is that they address issues that even the most experienced of writers and editors think about, and they are presented in a most concise manner.

According to her website, “Grammar Girl quietly hides in plain sight as the real-life science writer Mignon Fogarty. She makes her living writing highly technical documents for large biotech companies (e.g., Applied Biosystems) and health articles for websites (e.g., the Stanford Cancer Center). Mignon earned a B.A. in English from the University of Washington in Seattle and a M.S. in biology from Stanford University. … Grammar Girl believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world.”

Her average podcast is less than five minutes in length, and some topics covered so far in the series include:

  • Overuse of the word “of”
  • “i.e.” vs. “e.g.”
  • “Who” vs. “that” when talking about companies
  • “Which” vs. “that”
  • “Who” vs. “whom”
  • “Effect” vs. “affect”
  • “Among” vs. “between”
  • Split infinitives (She calls this a “grammar myth.”)
  • Style guides (Don’t work anywhere without one!)
  • Fighting wordiness and investigating idioms
  • “If I were there” vs. “I was there”
  • Which words in a title should be capitalized
  • Ending a sentence with a preposition (Times have changed!)
  • Redundancy with acronyms (e.g., the HIV virus)
  • The difference between acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations
  • Helpful tips for effective proofreading
  • Single quotation marks vs. double quotation marks
  • Generic singular pronouns (e.g., “he” vs. “she” vs. “one” vs. “s/he,” etc.)
  • When to use dashes
  • When to use colons
  • How to identify sentence fragments
  • “Its” vs. “it’s”

Grammar Girl is big on mnemonics, and whenever possible, she offers them as a way to remember a certain rule or tip. Here’s one she gives to remember the difference between effect and affect: “The arrow affected the aardvark,” and “the effect was eye-popping.” There are a words in the affect sentence, and e words in the effect sentence.

The other thing that’s great about her is that she is not at all pretentious. She freely admits that she’s there to provide “quick and dirty” tips. Here’s one of them with regards to the use of “who” and “whom”: “Like whom, the pronoun him ends with m. When you’re trying to decide whether to use who or whom, ask yourself if the answer to the question would be he or him. That’s the trick: if you can answer the question being asked with him, then use whom, and it’s easy to remember because they both end with m.”

She gives an example for better understanding: “If you were asking, ‘Who (or whom) do you love?’ the answer would be ‘I love him.’ Him ends with m, so you know to use whom. So it’s, ‘Whom do you love?’

“But if you were trying to ask, ‘Who (or whom) stepped on Squiggly?’ the answer would be, ‘He stepped on Squiggly.’ There’s no m, so you know to use who. So, it’s, ‘Who stepped on Squiggly?'”

Before her quick and dirty tip, of course, she does give the actual grammar rule, in this case: “Use who when you are referring to the subject of a clause, and whom when you are referring to the object of a clause.”

Two other things I really like about Grammar Girl’s teaching style are that she provides historical context to rules when it might help in learning, and she uses current events as an impetus for some episode topics.

An example of historical context use can be found in her episode on apostrophes, where she says, “An interesting side note is that it doesn’t seem so strange that an apostrophe s is used so make words possessive once you realize that in Old English it was common to make words possessive by adding es to the end. For example, the possessive of fox would have been foxes, which was the same as the plural. I assume that caused confusion, and someone suggested replacing the e with an apostrophe to make fox’s in the possessive case. So, apostrophe s for the possessive case was initially meant to show that the e was missing, and then the idea caught on and everyone eventually forgot all about the missing e.”

With regards to topics around current events, a recent podcast discussed the use of the word is in the Christmas carol line, “The Lord Is Come,” another addressed whether Saddam Hussein was hanged or hung, and yet another discussed why people are saying, “Nancy Pelosi is the first woman Speaker of the House,” when they would never say, “He was the first man Speaker of the House.”

Grammatically inquiring minds want to know!

There is a transcript of each episode on the Grammar Girl website, though she is currently polling her audience as to the value of this time-consuming activity for her. The transcript usually contains two sections at the end, one called “References,” which basically contains her citations, and another called, “Further Reading,” which contains pointers to articles of interest on the topic, or to the “nitty gritty” of the topic when the “quick and dirty” doesn’t tell the whole story.

Grammar Girl is committed to continuously improving her product. She often polls her audience on various ways to improve her episodes, and she is currently working to add “slides” to her podcasts, so that, depending on what kind of “client software” you’re using to receive her broadcast, you can see written examples of what she’s talking about, which at times would be incredibly helpful. Eventually, she’d like to delve into video as well.

You can listen to Grammar Girl podcasts even if you don’t have an mp3 player! Just go to her website, at either qdnow.com or grammar.qdnow.com, and you can listen online!

I, as a technical editor, intend to share this “resource” with the writers for whom I edit. (Even though Grammar Girl says it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition these days, some old habits die hard.)

The official podcast name is “Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing.” All quotes in this article are from Grammar Girl episode transcripts at her Web site at http://qdnow.com(external link).

Reprinted from Technically Speaking, the newsletter of the NCSU student chapter of the STC, by permission of the author and editor.

 

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Back to Basics: Sentence Structure

Susan Price Harvey

The life of a technical editor is fast-paced and demanding, and no one wants to add another item to the editing checklist. However, sentence structure is important and deserves special attention in all documents. Here’s a short refresher course in sentence structure that you can take to the author of any document.

Continue reading “Back to Basics: Sentence Structure”