E52 – Grammar and Punctuation

Show Notes

This episode offers grammar and punctuation advice for writers. The hosts discuss common errors, including the Oxford comma, comma splices, and sentence fragments, providing explanations and solutions. They also address the use of passive voice and invented words, emphasizing the importance of clear, concise writing. Furthermore, they suggest using writing aids to improve grammar and punctuation and recommend maintaining consistency in invented vocabulary.

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2613

Transcript

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Miss Catherine M.H., and I’m joined by my co-host, useless lump of V.E. Griffith magic. I mean, the co-host of, crap, let me try this again.

Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Ms. Katherine M.H., and I am joined by the Revision Wizard, my co-host, V.E. Griffith.

[V.E. Griffith]
This week, we’re going to dive into a few grammar and punctuation tips straight from the mind of a line editor. So, Ms. Katherine, what comes to mind first?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That we really definitely need to line edit our intro.

[V.E. Griffith]
I think our line edit is perfect.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I would like to say to everybody else that he didn’t catch that he wrote something wrong in our intro, and I was like, yes, we need to keep it because he rarely writes things like he’s the grammar person. So, this is going to be fun. So, we’re going to go over a few grammar tips and punctuation tips.

Let’s start with the most simple of things. What the heck is grammar?

[V.E. Griffith]
Grammar is essentially the order in which you select your words. It’s simple if you’re a native English speaker. It’s much more difficult if you’re not, and I’m a native English speaker, so I’m not really going to address parts of speech.

I don’t do that very well. I do it by ear. If it sounds wrong, it probably is.

So, if you’re not a native English speaker, I don’t know how useful I can be to you because it’s very common for non-native English speakers to make grammatical mistakes that reflect their original language.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Interesting. What are, or I guess, what is punctuation?

[V.E. Griffith]
Punctuation is the stuff at the end of sentences or in the middle of sentences that help you keep track of what I like to call breath control or pacing, or if you’re doing a list of things like blue and green and purple helps you keep track of what those are as well. Things like exclamation points, periods, commas, semicolons, colons, parentheses. Those are the kinds of things that you’re going to run into punctuation rules about.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
So, let’s get in a few of your tips because honestly, I could care less about it. That’s what my line editor is for. I love to sometimes break the rules and try to come up with how I can use sentences wrong but that they’re still correct when you read them and it drives you insane.

You’ve yet to read a chapter that I do this in, like intentionally do this in. Scandal’s Pen, I did not intentionally do that unless I was speaking in Theodore’s, you know, dialect. But what kind of tips?

What’s your number one on your list, your tip for us?

[V.E. Griffith]
Number one on my list is the Oxford comma. This is one of those things where there is much debate in the literary community about whether you should use the Oxford comma or not. It’s going to depend on what style book you’re using.

We’ve talked about style books in the past. If you’re using the AP style book, you don’t want to use them. If you’re using the Chicago Manual of Style, you do.

An Oxford comma is essentially a comma between the next to last and the last item on a list. So blue, comma, green, comma, and purple. That’s an Oxford comma.

If you use one, in my experience, your list is always clear. If you don’t use one, it is possible for your reader to jam the last two items together in ways that are weird. So for example, blue, comma, green, and purple.

Gotcha. So if you have an object that has three distinct colors, then you want to use an Oxford comma to delineate the three separate colors. If they have two colors, one of which is blue and one of which is sort of a purple, green, ugly kind of color, then maybe you don’t want to use an Oxford comma.

Or maybe you want to choose a different word so that you don’t have that problem to begin with. A lot of times, if you don’t know whether you should use an Oxford comma or not, you can think about recasting a sentence so that you’re not using a list or you’re using a different kind of list or you’re using different words. For example, instead of purple, green, you might try a different color like puce or vomit gray.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Why vomit gray out of like all the colors out there?

[V.E. Griffith]
Something that came to mind.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Okay. Well, speaking of wonderful commas, you can use commas in a different way, and that’s your second tip.

[V.E. Griffith]
My second tip is the abuse of commas in what’s called the comma splice. A comma splice is when you take a comma and you use it to jam two complete sentences together. For example, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, comma, the lazy dog is brown.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I’m going to write that into somewhere just to bother you.

[V.E. Griffith]
I know you are. That’s why I don’t like doing these sometimes. They give you ideas that I have to fix.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
What is the tip about using a comma splice then?

[V.E. Griffith]
Don’t.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
How would someone pick up on that?

[V.E. Griffith]
If you’ve got a situation where you have a comma and you can use a period instead, use a period. It makes your writing clearer and it makes your writing less jarring.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Okay. Your third one, which is something in my space opera that I absolutely love playing with is sentence fragments. What are your tips about correcting or writing a sentence fragment?

[V.E. Griffith]
I am more forgiving of sentence fragments in dialogue. I am not a fan of them in exposition. If you’re going to use sentence fragments, you want to use them correctly.

By correctly, I mean in dialogue. People talk in sentence fragments, but I find that when I read sentence fragments in exposition, again, they are jarring. If I’m reading a character’s thoughts, again, that’s a form of dialogue.

It’s internal dialogue that the character is doing with themselves. Again, people think in sentence fragments, but we don’t write in sentence fragments. If it’s not a complete sentence, recast it so that it is.

A complete sentence has at least a noun and a verb in it. You may have other parts of speech as well, but you need at least a noun and a verb.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All right. Your next one, which I’m wondering, where does this fall grammar-wise in here, but passive voice?

[V.E. Griffith]
Everybody knows how much I love passive voice. We’ve talked about it endlessly on this show.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Well, it was talked about a few times.

[V.E. Griffith]
God, kill me now. Bruce Almighty, kill me now. Okay.

Most of the time, if you have a passive voice sentence or a sentence that is in passive voice, you can recast the sentence and rearrange your words. So instead of passive voice was talked about on the show, you can say, we talked about passive voice. That would be a classic example of how to fix your sentence.

The standard advice that I give is to remove was, were, and had, those three words from your writing vocabulary. And if you can rewrite a sentence without those three words, chances are really, really good that you have written an active voice sentence. Active voice is more engaging to the reader, and it has a tendency to hold their attention, which is what you want.

If you’re not holding their attention, they’re not going to read. They’re not going to finish your manuscript. Why would you want to go to the effort of writing a manuscript that your reader is not going to read?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
True to that. All right. Your last tip for the moment.

So just a please me on this. What is it?

[V.E. Griffith]
Making up nonsense words. There are times when you can do this. For example, if you are making up a language, it’s okay to make up words.

If your character is speaking in a dialect, it may be okay to make up words. If you’re making up words in thought, again, it may be okay to make up words. If you’re going to do that, my strong suggestion is that you keep a style book.

And in your style book or story Bible, you have a dictionary of what each of these words mean so that you can keep them consistent and straight in your mind. You want to use the same word to mean the same thing every time you use it. Otherwise, you’re going to…

Ms. Catherine is using our shared Google Doc to make me mad.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It keeps correcting it too. It’s very annoying.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yes, that’s because it’s not a word.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It is a word.

[V.E. Griffith]
It is not a word. Anyway, she’s using the word a-pleasing, which is not a fucking word. Anyway.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Sorry, it makes sense because a-pleasing is pretty much the same as it was appealing and it pleases your eyes. So a-pleasing.

[V.E. Griffith]
Except it’s not a word.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
This is how we make up words.

[V.E. Griffith]
They’re synonyms.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
But of writing books, I do understand where most of the time you don’t actually want to be making up random words that is going to trip up your readers from understanding what it is you are writing.

[V.E. Griffith]
That is correct. So if you’re going to make up words, make them deliberately. Make them consistent.

Make sure that what they mean is clear to the reader. For example, our friend of the podcast, Kim Lark, has an entire language that she has made up and her characters sprinkle that language in with their English. But every time she uses her made-up language, she uses the same words to mean the same things.

So it becomes very clear as you read what these words mean. You want to be careful with that and make sure that what you’re doing is consistent and easy to read and easy to understand. Because again, if your readers don’t understand what you’re writing, they will stop reading.

They’ll go, this is confusing and I’m not going to put the mental effort into it. You want to decrease, not increase, reader workload. Because remember, a lot of times your readers are going to be reading for pleasure at the end of their tiring day, where they’ve been at work all day, and they don’t want to put in more effort into reading your manuscript.

They want your manuscript to be, or they want your book, not your manuscript. They want your book to be easy to read and fulfilling and fun and relaxing.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It’s really pleasing. You guys can’t see his face, but it was great.

[V.E. Griffith]
It’s a good thing I live in Australia and I can’t come up there and throttle you sometimes. I love you, but we’re going to have to stop.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
And this is how the podcast fell apart over the word of pleasing.

[V.E. Griffith]
Those are the big things that I run into. Most people have a pretty good command of English if they’re native speakers. That’s fine.

But these are the little things that people run into that give them trouble. So if you can fix them, that means that your line editor will charge you less because they don’t have to do as much work.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yep. I’d like to add one. Go ahead.

Even though I’m not a line editor and I don’t normally do the line edits, one of the things that I will look for and catch is the repeat of words. So if I’m writing the the, there are times where it misses it or your computer itself will miss it. Those are things to look out for as well.

When you are going through and doing some of your grammar and punctuation edits, when you’re doing your lines, look for those times where you have written the same thing literally in that sentence again. Sometimes it’s like three words and then you’ve written it again because maybe your brain had stopped thinking and then it started back up and you rewrote part of that sentence again. So those are the things that I will look for because for me, that’s the easiest thing for me to see.

Made up words, not as much because half the time I’m dyslexic and I don’t know if the computer was right or if it was wrong or if it is just chosen a different word and that’s not what it is. So I usually tend to leave it there. Passive voice, that one I can do.

But sentence fragments, kind of love those. And commas, that is why I hire a line editor. Sorry, VE Griffith.

[V.E. Griffith]
That’s okay. That’s what line editors are for. It is common for people to overuse words to stop and start sentences the way you described.

One of the tools that I like to use, and we are not sponsored by the way, we’re not making any money from saying this, I like to use ProWritingAid. One of its tools is that it will detect when you have overused words or it will detect when you have started a sentence the same way several times in a row. So that can help you recognize and recast sentences such that you can fix those kinds of issues and vary your sentence structure, vary your word choice.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah. Well, we’ll get into more of how those programs can help us out in a different episode. But in the meantime, anything else?

Any other tips for you?

[V.E. Griffith]
Those are the big tips that come to mind on a regular basis when I’m line editing a client’s work.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All righties. Well, there you go, guys. If you’ve got any other questions, hit them up because I will not be able to answer your questions.

[V.E. Griffith]
All right. That does it for the day, I think.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All righties. Well then, everybody, stay magical and revise your work with beauty.

[V.E. Griffith]
Thank you very much. Bye.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Thank you so much for joining us for today’s episode. You can find every episode on your favorite podcast player and on YouTube. For transcripts, please visit our website at revisionwizards.com.

They go live the same day as our episodes.

[V.E. Griffith]
If you’d like to reach out to us separately, you can find me at vegriffith.com and Ms. Catherine at scribes-pen.com.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Stay magical. Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Ms. Catherine M.H., and I’m joined by my co-host, useless lump of a V.E. Griffith magic. Wait. I mean, the co-host of… Let me try this again.

Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I am Ms. Catherine M.H., and I am joined by the, the, oh, my God, I can’t even talk. The, no, fuck it.

We’re doing it again. It’s because I didn’t type out the rest of it. I didn’t know what I was going to say.

Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Ms. Wow, I just said wizards wrong. That’s cool.

[V.E. Griffith]
We’ve got our bloopers.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
They, they sure are. I’m going to move that microphone closer. I thought I was ready.

I am clearly out of, out of touch, out of practice. This needs to be revised.