Is comma use changing? (For the worse, naturally)

[thaddeus6th]

Kettle of monkeys is one of my strange phrases (one of those suitable for public broadcast). Mildly surprised I haven't used it here before.

 

[J-Sun]

Good point -- though I have to say I have no trouble with the second one (if the comma is removed), which perhaps is evidence for Brits being happy with fewer commas. I'm also somewhat embarrassed, following your "faux-art" comment, to admit that it's something I might have written myself. I think your revision is perhaps clearer, but to me it's not so interesting to read.

Now I'm embarrassed as I didn't mean to embarrass anyone. (I mean, I gather it's not mortal, but I didn't mean anything at all like that. ) I wasn't really speaking of all writing at all times but this was in a journalism article. In a piece of fiction as part of a consistent style fitting the subject matter (or especially in a poem), it might be perfectly appropriate. In journalism, you don't want to be dull but clarity should definitely be the primary objective. Either way, let me rephrase to "unnatural effort at effect" or something like that. And you're right that it's a matter of taste and some editors might get a line like my revision and turn it into a line like the original to jazz it up.

Anyway - just getting rid of the example, I'll stick with "some punctuation issues can be avoided by restructuring."

Kettle of monkeys is one of my strange phrases (one of those suitable for public broadcast). Mildly surprised I haven't used it here before.

I started to say, "That's not your expression, it's common," until I realized I've mangled it that way so much myself that it looked right to me at first. Yeah, "barrel of monkeys"/"kettle of fish" but I say "kettle of monkeys" all the time myself. (Not "barrel of fish", though - I guess because that'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.)

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

We need to do a better job of actually educating our kids instead of just continuing to lower the scoring standards for all of our benchmark standardized tests. If we don't let the tests do their job, which is partly to tell us whether our current approach to education is working, then we get kids graduating high school (or equivalent) who are, for all intents and purposes, functionally illiterate

I heartily agree with everything you are saying, but I will also say that there may be hope for the educational system in this country. I live in California, which used to have one of the lowest standards of education in the US. They tinkered with it for a while and (in my opinion) made it worse, with history especially a total mish-mash. Now I have noticed that one of my grandsons (the one who is in a mainstream class -- his twin is in special ed) is given assignments that would have been given to fourth, fifth, or sixth graders (depending on the subject) in my day, and even as recently as thirty years ago when my children were in school.

And yes, when my kids were in school everything was centered around those stupid test scores, where the children were being taught to answer the questions on the test and little else, with the result that too many of them were not actually retaining any of it. I was often shocked by how little my youngest daughter knew though she was getting better than average marks in school. I have a friend who teaches at UC Berkeley, and for a while she was teaching a class in remedial English. For college students! And not just community college where everyone is accepted, but an actual university where you have to have the test scores and go through a selection process to get in. (I often wanted to echo Professor Kirke, "What do they teach them at these schools?")

Now, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much focus on the tests. So at least around here things are changing.

 

[Michael Colton]

Part of the difficulty with education reform is how localized it all is. Each state has their own requirements which means that some may get their act together and others may not. A notable example of a negative byproduct of this system is that there are still many states in the United States that do not require sex education to be medically accurate. I am not speaking of requiring them to teach different methods of birth control or anything of that sort - simply the requirement that whatever they do decide to put in their curriculum be medically sound. That is slowly changing, but the fact that several education systems exist with that fault in the twenty-first century is depressing.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Professor Kirke, "What do they teach them at these schools?"

And that was written 1950s England and set in 1940s Blitz era in England.

University here seems to have dumbed down here in last 30 years. They now teach programming languages instead of how to program.

Many Masters and Doctorates seem to be just "make work" on poorly chosen topics (by College) and poorly supervised and then awarded as long as you spend long enough, matches brief, thick enough with enough references. Content poorer than many HND and Degree final year projects 40 years ago.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

Damn kids. Get off my lawn.

Just accept that the language evolves and as adults we cling to the language we were taught, or thought we were taught, and magically think that's proper English whilst in fact the language has been evolving since the beginning. It's prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics. Prescriptive is a sham, unless of course you want to go back to ye olde Englisc.

http://io9.com/10-things-people-once-complained-would-ruin-the-english-1684240298

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

And that was written 1950s England and set in 1940s Blitz era in England.

And to be fair, he was talking about different time lines in different worlds. But still, I felt like the old curmudgeon for a long time, watching them take all the wonder out of learning.

FH, when language truly evolves, it attains greater clarity, it becomes more specific and a better tool for communication. But change is not always evolution. Certainly not the way things are changing so quickly now. The current changes rob language of its richness in so many areas, while only growing better in terms of technical jargon which few understand. In that way, it becomes more elitist, not more inclusive.

 

[Lifeonerth]

And to be fair, he was talking about different time lines in different worlds. But still, I felt like the old curmudgeon for a long time, watching them take all the wonder out of learning.

FH, when language truly evolves, it attains greater clarity, it becomes more specific and a better tool for communication. But change is not always evolution. Certainly not the way things are changing so quickly now. The current changes rob language of its richness in so many areas, while only growing better in terms of technical jargon which few understand. In that way, it becomes more elitist, not more inclusive.

Very well said and a hearty Amen to that, Theresa! The language we use is also related to the neuronal structure of our brains. Simpler language requires fewer neuronal connections, thus fewer connections are formed and a brain with fewer connections is less able to adapt and learn and grow. IQ is closely tied to verbal comprehension and reading at higher grade levels than you are comfortable with can increase your IQ as well as your attention span, etc.

When out with the Philly ME's office at a crime scene, a witness was interviewed and asked if the suspect had been seen at the residence where the crime took place before. The young man said, "Naahh maah, he don' be deh." (Sic) Is this what you would think of as a language evolving? When he was asked more complicated questions in clear and concise english, he looked at the detective like he had three heads and didn't seem to understand him. This was a native born American citizen born to several generations of native born Americans.

I have a young cousin who is now 17. I have to "dumb down" my words when speaking to her or she doesn't understand what I am talking about. When I say "dumb down," I mean to the ~5th grade level or so.

The purpose of language is to communicate. If people can't communicate effectively, the language has broken down. I am not against change per se for its own sake. However, as Theresa so eloquently said, that change should be something that moves us forward, not backward. If things keep going the way they were in that Philly neighborhood, we will eventually all be back in the trees with grunts and howls. Sometimes it seems some of us may be closer to this than we think.

If that is what people want, then that is fine for them. I just believe that humankind is capable of so much more than that. Look at all we have accomplished. I hope that at least some of us still value these things and want to preserve the beauty we have made together and as individuals, both now and in the past. The human spirit needs to grow and evolve. The day we stop learning and growing is the day we die, whether the body dies or not.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Fifth grade? Would that be around a 10 year old's level?

I agree entirely on clarity. That's one of two reasons I think the shift, by some, to replace 'actress' with 'actor' is wrong [using both terms gives the job and gender in one word].

(The other reason is that it assumes the masculine form is the correct/better and should supercede the feminine form. I have nothing against a gender bias [ships as 'she' or 'man overboard'] but this seems a detrimental change to me).

 

[Michael Colton]

An example of this whole thing is American newspapers. They are intentionally written to never go above an 8th grade level of English (the year before high school).

 

[Lifeonerth]

Thaddeus6th- I agree completely. It is ridiculous to think that the genders should be the same. Obviously they are not the same, and thank the gods for that! We each have our strengths and weaknesses, and if we could just admit who and what we are and be at peace with ourselves, our particular strengths and weaknesses compliment each other very well. We should be celebrating and embracing our differences. Mother Nature knows what she is doing. Fighting her just causes pain and dysfunction.

All this junk about so-called "feminism" when they are really just pushing to make women more like men all the time to the point that they now want to push men aside and take over. It is so hypocritical. if a man breathes a word against anything related to a woman, oh, it's *misogyny*!! Most of these people have no idea what misogyny really is, and the word is so over-used in situations where it is not appropriate as to become meaningless. This just hurts the people who actually are being victimized. Argh!!

Michael Colton- Yes, the newspapers are horrible. The media outlets did a study that showed that people like to read a grade level or two (I forget the details) below where they are comfortable so they don't have to work to understand the material (hence the YA trend among adults). The publishers saw this and intentionally began to dumb down the works they published in order to sell more. This only starts a downward spiral because if you are reading a bit above your comfort level, your reading comprehension will expand and voilà, you get smarter!

Naturally, the converse is also true. If you indulge yourself in "lazy" reading on a habitual basis and never stretch your brain, so to speak, your upper limit will shrink, along with your mind. Then the publishers have to keep lowering the grade level of their products. If one were a paranoid conspiracy theorist, one might suppose that perhaps the media *wants* to make us all a bunch of dumb sheeple so that we will swallow whatever agenda they want to push on us without question. Hey, if it was in the news, it must be true, right?? Hmmm...

 

[Jennifer L. Carson]

Speaking of which, I see some poor bloke has been correcting Wikipedia entries changing "comprised of" to "comprising" or "composed of" and people are getting narked because, like, it's all the same, innit, and it's just his opinion, and how dare he correct them... (More power to his elbow!)

A copyeditor has to decide for any given project whether to use descriptive or prescriptive conventions. Descriptive would mean that the convention in question is used at large, e.g., on the Internet, in day-to-day dialog, etc. For example, when I edit dialog in fiction, say a modern urban fantasy, editing to descriptive conventions is important since good dialog for this case invokes rhythms that we are comfortable with hearing (unless the story provides a reason for this not to be true). Prescriptive would mean that the convention is prescribed by authoritative sources such as grammar books and dictionaries. For example, when I edit for the law review I do, I try very hard to make grammatical decisions that I can defend from grammar and style books.

Quite obviously to me, "comprised of" is certainly a descriptive use of the word. I see it all the time, from the Internet to research papers to the law review. However, prescriptively, "comprised of" (last time I looked) was in the dictionary that my certification classes told me to use as industry standard for publishers in the U.S. (though the choice can vary; also note that I have no idea what the prescription is for this in Britain. Things like this can vary country to country.). The entry said that "comprised of" was not considered logical and was therefore not acceptable in prescribed situations. So I looked up "composed of" figuring that since "composes" is the inverse of "comprises," it, too, would have a prescription against it, but that was not the case. So the prescribed uses for "compose" and "comprise" are as follows:

The chapters compose the book.
The book is composed of chapters
The book comprises the chapters

A little trick I use to vet the situation for "comprises" vs. "composes" is to change the verb to "includes." If that works, then comprises (not comprised of) is the proper prescribed use. Also substituting a verb for compose can reveal why they (not me) say comprised of is illogical.

The chapters make the book
The book is made of the chapters
The book includes the chapters
The book is included of the chapters

The potential illogic of "comprised of" is revealed here. BUT with descriptive use, that doesn't matter. In fact the illogic goes away in descriptive use because people incorporate whatever they need as part of the definition of the use at large.

Since I assume the folk here want to write genre fiction, I would not expect to see comprises in a story too terribly often. It's too formal specifically because descriptive use is at odds with prescriptive. However, when I heard that too about the guy changing that on Wikipedia. My thought was, "Oh, cool!" I like it when Wikipedia gets more prescriptively correct.

And yes, this is what my days are like. Spending time looking up such minutia. The last thing I tripped over on a job and that ate up hours of my time was the difference in usage between "try and" vs. "try to." I read a ten page research paper on it..yeah, a research paper on two words...and yeah, what's worse is, I read it...

 

[TheDustyZebra]

the difference in usage between "try and" vs. "try to." I read a ten page research paper on it..yeah, a research paper on two words...and yeah, what's worse is, I read it...

Is it worse still, then, that I'd like to see that?

 

[tinkerdan]

Yes i agree::

Is it worse still, then, that I'd like to see that?

:: must-in toolbox-this odd shaped tool.

 

[Jennifer L. Carson]

Is it worse still, then, that I'd like to see that?

Oh gosh, now I have to find it....<elapse time here> Oh...THERE it is. I'm still learning how to use Chrome's history after I switched away from Safari.

Here is the link. It is talking in terms of usage in the U.S. and in Britain. http://clu.uni.no/icame/ij31/ij31-page45-64.pdf (I had a job "Americanizing" a MS, hence the research...oh yeah, and because I'm a language geek.)

And to answer your question, I think it might be at least as bad. Welcome to the masochists club...or masochists' club...or masochist's club...Oh shoot, you know, taking editing classes made a lot of things muddier not clearer!

And warning...I underestimated the page count. It's 20 pages, but that includes refs, and who reads those...except me...yesterday. Shoot me now.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

But is there a danger of losing the author's style in all this? I have the odd quirky turn of phrase. I know, grammatically, I should be pinned to the fence, but for me it feels right for my voice. Don't I have the right to break a convention I know I'm breaking, given I'm the author? (Poor TDZ, she had this to contend with.... )

 

[tinkerdan]

I would suggest that it's a matter of both your own conventional style and whatever style guide is being used for edits. The important part of it all being--when it helps the flow of the reading and keeps the reader in the story.

 

[Jennifer L. Carson]

The important part of it all being--when it helps the flow of the reading and keeps the reader in the story.

Here, here. I second that motion. Jo, any writing is absolutely yours to do with as you please, but once you give it to a publisher, an editor, or even a reader (or maybe especially a reader), the rules change a little. The best advice at that point is what tinkerdan said.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Here, here. I second that motion. Jo, any writing is absolutely yours to do with as you please, but once you give it to a publisher, an editor, or even a reader (or maybe especially a reader), the rules change a little. The best advice at that point is what tinkerdan said.

Which I agree with. I think there was one line in my copyedit I wasn't sure about and I reworded the sentence to remove it. But the key thing is whether a publisher looks to remove my voice. I've had one edit where that happened and the end result is one I wish had never come out, anywhere. It half sounds like me and half like something else and neither half seems to flow. I think there is a line somewhere between what's perfect and what flows and, also, that still sounds like the writer, assuming their style is part of the reason a publisher signed them...

 

[Ursa major]

I meant to post this on Friday, but forget. It's a piece, with the tile "‘I got a scheme!’ – the moment Saul Bellow found his voice", from the Grauniad's book section about Saul Bellow, focusing (at least partly) on "the day in Paris that changed the course of his career", as the article's standfirst put it. Also in that standfirst is the comment that Saul Bellow "is still considered the greatest US prose stylist of the 20th century".

Some way into the article, I read this (referring to the author's move, as a child, from Canada to Chicago):

In Chicago, new ingredients were added to this linguistic mixture. Neither home, nor school, nor Hebrew school could keep Bellow from the street. Street language in Chicago was “rough cheerful energetic clanging largely good-natured Philistine irresistible” (a typically comma-free sequence) and American.

So it seems that those folks over the Pond have an excuse for omitting commas left, right and centre.