Sorry About That
The Language of Public Apology
Edwin L. Battistella
From Our Blog
When I read something, one of the things I notice right away is overuse of non-referential there as a means of sleepwalking from topic to topic. Also known as the existential there, this grammatical form asserts the existence (or non-existence) of something and is often used to introduce new information, to shift the topic of discussion or to call something to mind.
Posted on December 1, 2019
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Most of us have been told at some point that a sentence has a subject and predicate and that the predicate consists of a verb and an object'the girl kicked the ball. We may have been introduced to distinctions such as transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs (like carry, snore, and become, respectively). But there is much more to the intricacies of what must follow a verb.
Posted on November 3, 2019
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This October marks the thirty-third anniversary of the passing of Rudolph Flesch, the patron saint of brevity.
Posted on October 6, 2019
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Book banning is not a new phenomenon. The Catholic Church's prohibition on books advocating heliocentrism lasted until 1758. In England, Thomas Bowdler lent his name to the practice of expurgating supposed vulgarity with the 1818 publication of The Family Shakespeare, edited by his sister.
Posted on September 1, 2019
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A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same way forwards and backwards, like kayak or Madam, I'm Adam. The word comes to us from palindromos, made up of a pair of Greek roots: palin (meaning 'again') and dromos (meaning 'way, direction').
Posted on August 4, 2019
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Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless. Instead, we use punctuation to establish a comfortable pace for readers by grouping and emphasizing certain chunks of information.
Posted on July 7, 2019
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Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless. Instead, we use punctuation to establish a comfortable pace for readers by grouping and emphasizing certain chunks of information.
Posted on June 2, 2019
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Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless. Instead, we use punctuation to establish a comfortable pace for readers by grouping and emphasizing certain chunks of information.
Posted on May 5, 2019
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I was surprised to learn from my students that many of them are still being taught to write the five-paragraph essay in high school. You know it: an introductory paragraph that begins with a hook and ends in a thesis statement.
Posted on April 7, 2019
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I've noticed myself saying 'yeah no.' The expression came up in a class one day, when I had asked students to bring in examples of language variation. One student suggested 'yeah no' as an example of not-quite standard California English.
Posted on March 3, 2019
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A few years ago, two colleagues of mine traveled around the country documenting what was going on in the newspaper industry, talking to editors, reporters, and publishers in all 50 states. Reading their book, Practicing Journalism: The Power and Purpose of the Fourth Estate, I was struck by the great passion of journalists and their commitment to public service.
Posted on December 5, 2018
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Writing instructors and books often inveigh against the passive voice. My thrift-store copy of Strunk and White's 1957 Element of Style says 'Use the Active Voice,' explaining that it is 'more direct and vigorous than the passive.' And George Orwell, in his 1946 essay on 'Politics and the English Language,' scolds us to "Never use the passive where you can use the active.'
Posted on January 2, 2019
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The actor Cary Grant once said of acting that, 'It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.' That's true for writing as well'concrete details can paint a picture for a reader and establish credibility for a writer. Details can be tricky, however, and in the swirl of research and the dash of exposition, it is possible to get things wrong: dates, names, quotes, and facts.
Posted on February 6, 2019
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Recently a friend gave me a copy of It's Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Clichés by lexicographer Orin Hargraves. I was intrigued to read it because I had been wondering about clichés for some time.
Posted on November 4, 2018
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According to editors and grammarians, there is no comma after the word but at the beginning of a sentence. But it is something I see a lot in sentences like 'But, there were too many of them to count' or 'But, we were afraid the situation would get worse.'
Posted on October 7, 2018
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The students in my class were arguing a question of semantics: is a hamburger a sandwich? One student noted that the menu designer at the restaurant where she worked couldn't decide if a Chicken Burger should be listed under Hamburgers or Sandwiches.
Posted on September 2, 2018
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After reading a draft of something by a colleague, I asked her how she decides when to use hyphens. She responded tartly: 'Hyphens. You mean like in well-spoken, or half-assed? I'm not sure. I don't care for them.' Personally, I'm a big fan of hyphens and sarcasm won't deter me. Personally, I'm a big fan of hyphens and sarcasm won't deter me.
Posted on August 5, 2018
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This year I've been reading a lot of biographies and writing some short profile pieces. Both experiences have caused me to reflect back on a book-length biography I wrote a few years ago on the little-known educator Sherwin Cody. Writing a book-length biography was a new experience for me at the time. I learned a lot along the way. Here are a few tips based on my experience.
Posted on July 1, 2018
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Sometimes I misplace things'my sunglasses, a book I'm reading, keys, my phone. Sometimes I misplace words in sentences too, leaving a clause or a phrase where it doesn't belong. The result is what grammarians call misplaced or dangling modifiers. It's a sentence fault that textbooks sometimes illustrate with over-the-top examples like these.
Posted on June 3, 2018
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'I'm going to make a lot of money, and I'll hire someone to do all my writing for me.' That was the rationale offered by a student many years ago for why he should not have to take a required writing course. A snarky comment crossed my mind, but instead I mentioned to him that if he had to hire someone to ghostwrite everything he would have to write in his life, it could cost him a small fortune.
Posted on May 6, 2018
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My university just completed a round of strategic planning, its periodic cycle of self-evaluation, redefinition, and goal setting. Many of my colleagues were excited about the opportunity to define the future. Others were somewhat jaded, seeing such plans as bookshelf documents to be endured until the next planning cycle. Still others were agnostics, happy to see us have a good strategic plan but determined not to let it get in their way.
Posted on April 1, 2018
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Not long ago, a colleague was setting up a meeting and suggested bringing along spouses to socialize after the business was done. Not getting a positive reply, she emailed: 'I'm getting a lack of enthusiasm for boring spouses with our meeting.' A minute later, a second, clarifying email arrived indicating that she 'meant boring as a verb not an adjective.' She had spotted the ambiguity in the first message.
Posted on March 4, 2018
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Someone recently asked me if I knew another word for entertaining. 'What's the context?' I replied, wondering if the writer was looking for an adjective like enjoyable or interesting or a gerund like wining and dining or possibly even a verb like pondering. 'Use it in a sentence.' 'Never mind,' she said, 'I'll just use the thesaurus button.' The what?
Posted on February 11, 2018
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Recently I attended a writing retreat for faculty at my university. It was a three-day weekend break from email, grading and meetings. A dozen academic writers from a variety of disciplines gathered under the roof of a spacious rental home near a lake to talk about their projects, share strategies and concerns, and write for long stretches at a time.
Posted on January 7, 2018
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Writing essays is complicated work, and writing the ending to an essay is often the hardest part of that work. Endings are tough for several reasons. You may be tired from writing—or tired of what you have written. You may feel that you have made your point sufficiently and that no more needs to be said or can possibly be said. However, the ending is your last chance to make an impression.
Posted on December 3, 2017
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From time to time, many of us will have the opportunity to write for a reference work like an encyclopedia or a handbook. The word encyclopedia has been around for a couple of thousand years and comes from the Greek term for general education. Encyclopedias as general reference books came about in the eighteenth century and the most ubiquitous when I was a student was the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Posted on November 14, 2017
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Posted on October 1, 2017
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Posted on September 3, 2017
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When it comes to punctuation, I'm a lumper rather than a splitter. Some nights I lie awake, pondering to secrets of commas, dashes, parentheses, and more, looking for grand patterns.
Posted on August 6, 2017
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It's the theatre season in my town of Ashland, Oregon, and I'm keeping up with the play reviews and talking with reviewers about what makes a good review. Reviewing a play is different than reviewing a book or even a film.
Posted on July 2, 2017
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A colleague of mine recently retired from teaching. As she began her last semester, she announced to her students that she hoped they would finally be the class where no one confused "its" and "it's." Her wish did not come true. The apostrophe rules of English are built to confuse us. Not intentionally. But they have evolved in a way that can confuse even the most observant readers and writers.
Posted on May 7, 2017
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The Oxford Comma, so named because it first appeared in the 1905 Oxford University Press Style Guide, is the comma that comes before the word and in a series of three or more listed items. Also known as the serial comma, it's the often ironic rallying cry of a certain type of language aficionado. And it's in the news after a federal appeals court mentioned it in a court decision recently.
Posted on March 25, 2017
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The original Earth Day Proclamation in 1970 refers to "our beautiful blue planet," and the first earth day flag consisted of a NASA photo of the Earth on a dark blue background. But the color of fields and forests prevailed, and today when we think of ecology and environmentalism, we think green not blue.
Posted on April 16, 2017
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I have a confession to make. I often skip the long blocks of quotes when I am reading academic articles and books. I suspect that I'm not the only one who does this. I don't skip the quotes because I'm lazy. I skip them because they often pull me away from a writer's ideas rather than further into them. The writer has put a voice and an idea in my ear only to cede the floor to another voice, that of some quoted authority.
Posted on March 12, 2017
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I'm sitting at my computer early in the morning and my wife walks in. "Good morning," she says. "Is there any more coffee?" I nod. "Do you want some?" I answer. "I'll get it," she says. "What are you working on?" "A blog post on dialogue," I reply sleepily. "Good luck," she laughs, heading for the kitchen. That's pretty bad dialogue. It has no apparent purpose and too many words: adverbs like sleepily, redundant dialogue tags like answer, reply, and laughs, and nothing that really advances a plot or develops a character.
Posted on February 12, 2017
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The dust has barely settled on last year's world chess championship match in New York: Norway's Magnus Carlson defended his title again the tough challenger Sergei Karjakin, in a close match. The event got me thinking about the language of chess strategy and tactics and the curious history and multicultural origins of chess terminology.
Posted on January 8, 2017
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When I was growing up in New Jersey, trading insults was part of making your way through the middle school: 'If they put your brain on the edge of a razor blade, it would look like a BB rolling down a four-lane highway.' 'His parents used to put a pork chop around his neck to get the dog to play with him.' 'If you could teach him to stand still, you could use him for a doorstop.'
Posted on December 24, 2016
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Some years ago, I sent off a manuscript to an editor. After the usual period of review, the editor sent back a note saying that he liked the work, but suggested that I should make it 'less academic.' I reworked a number of things and sent back a revised version with more examples and a lighter tone. A week later, I got a short email back saying 'No really, make it less academic.'
Posted on November 13, 2016
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Whatever its scale or ambition, a grant proposal aims to do two things: to show that a particular project needs to be supported by a funder and to show why some individual, group or organization is the right one'the best one'to carry out the project. Showing the "need" is largely an exercise in argumentative writing. It's argumentative not in the hostile, red-faced, fist-shaking sense but in the classical sense of establishing a claim
Posted on October 9, 2016
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Anthropologist Edward Sapir once wrote, 'Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.' Sapir was talking about the irregularities of language. For me, this leakiness is especially evident in what I think of as doppelgrammar words.
Posted on July 10, 2016
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I write a lot of thank you notes. I thank donors of organizations that I support, gift givers after the holidays and birthdays, friends who have invited me over for dinner, guest speakers who come to my classes, community partners who work with my students, colleagues who help me solve problems, and editors and publishers (you know who you are).
Posted on June 12, 2016
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It's an election year and that means we get to think about the language of politicians'their vocabularies, vocal timbre, gestures, accents, metaphors, style, mistakes, and recoveries. I'm always on the lookout for interesting apologies, and the 2016 election has not been a disappointment.
Posted on May 8, 2016
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William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago this month and my local library is celebrating the anniversary. It sounds a bit macabre when you put it that way, of course, so they are billing it as a celebration of Shakespeare's legacy. I took this celebratory occasion to talk with my students about Shakespeare's linguistic legacy.
Posted on April 10, 2016
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