Writing Tools

My errors in grammar and usage are more embarrassing than yours. Like the preacher caught with the prostitute, like the dentist with bad teeth, like the insane psychiatrist, the language expert who stumbles risks becoming a laughingstock.

My mistakes come from inattention, haste, or careless proofreading, but some come from ignorance. Once, on the section front of a newspaper, I confused "home" with "hone." To "hone" means to "sharpen," while to "home" means to "move toward a goal," which is why a sentence like this makes no sense: "He had studied this problem in geometry for years but was only now honing in on a solution." I've never made that mistake again.

On another occasion, I failed to realize that "discreet" and "discrete" were different words with different meanings, the first as in "I trust you to be discreet with this information"; and the second as in, "He sorted the members of the team into six discrete squads." When I confused these in print, a hawk-eyed reader let me know it. Later, I was invited to discuss on National Public Radio whether more journalists abused language than ever before. I began with an abject confession about "discreet" and "discrete." "I didn't know that!" admitted the other expert on the panel. I felt better, but I never made that mistake again, either.

(When you find a mistake in my work, and you will, please alert me at rclark@poynter.org.)

Having said all that, I admit there is one mistake I keep making over and over again. I usually do not recognize it in my text until months or even years after publication. I call this problem "The Trap." I bet you fall into it, too.

To see how it works, consider this sentence:

"Her collection of Dali's art, which includes paintings, sculptures, posters, glass, jewelry, and even knick-knacks, impress even the most discerning experts."

The writer of this ungrammatical sentence (me!) has fallen into The Trap. Singular subjects require singular verbs; plural subjects plural verbs. That's what we mean when we say that the subject "agrees" with the verb. But in this example they disagree. The subject of the first sentence is "collection," which should take "impresses" as a verb: "The collection impresses..."

In all such cases, I set a trap for myself by placing words and phrases between the subject and the verb. The greater the distance between subject and verb, the more likely the writer will make a mistake, or ever worse, confuse the reader. In my example, the incorrect verb was contaminated by its proximity to plural nouns that were not the subject. "Impress" would be correct if "knick-knacks" had been the subject.

You can imagine that an inexperienced writer, or one learning English as a second or third language, would be vulnerable to falling in the trap: "It is believed that these hills emerged from the sea with a thick cover of clay and is comparatively young at around 60 millions years." Eleven words stand between the plural subject "hills" and the singular verb "is." Only on a comedy show would Julie Andrews have sung: "The hills is alive with the sound of music..."

Even the most accomplished authors, supported by a squadron of editors, falls (oops, I mean fall) into the trap. Ben Yagoda begins one of my favorite recent books about language this way:

"In the end, it came down to two potential titles. Number one, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. Number two, Pimp My Ride. I have to admit that I carry a torch for number two -- which alludes, of course, to the popular MTV series in which a posse of automotive artisans take a run-down jalopy and sleek it up into an awe-inspiring vehicle containing many square yards of plush velvet and an astonishing number of LCD screens." What a cool way to begin a book on the soporific parts of speech. But can you find the trap? (I'll give you a minute.) Here it is:

"...the popular MTV series in which a posse of automotive artisans take a run-down jalopy..." If you recognize that "posse" is a collective noun -- grammatically singular, even though the sense is plural -- you also see that the verb "take" does not agree. A posse (that 'a' should be a hint) does not "take." A posse takes. The plural "artisans" contaminated the verb. Ben Yagoda is one of America's best writers. If he and his editors can fall into the trap, so can you. And so have I.

Strategies to avoid The Trap:

1.  During revision and proofreading, pay special attention to sentences in which subject and verb are separated.

2. If you fall into the trap, save the sentence in a notebook as a reminder of your vulnerability.

3.  Even if separated subject and verb agree, try to rewrite the sentence in a way that brings them closer together on behalf of the reader.

4.  Try to get away from a draft of your story for a few minutes, even when on deadline. Your proofreading eye will sharpen with some distance from the text.

Lesson: Subjects and verbs should agree in number, and they will most of the time. But subject-verb disagreement is one of the writer's most common errors. That goes for experienced writers, too.  One common reason for this error, as we have seen, is the separation of subject and verb. The greater the distance between them, the more likely that error will creep in.

Another problem arises when the subject is a collective noun. Words like collection, posse, class, squadron, gaggle have a plural sense (you can't, for example, have a gaggle of goose), but take a singular verb. You will stumble over occasional exceptions, but if you attend to these cases, you will almost always avoid The Trap.