Author: Patricia Nelson

In England they call it a Curriculum Vitae (pronounced “veetah”). In the US we call it a résumé, and that’s how it’s spelled. As in this comic, even though the guy has his priorities wrong:

Don’t spell it like this. Second panel:

“Resume” is when you start up again after stopping something. To get that accented “e,” hold down the Alt key while you type 0233 on the numeric keypad.

Maybe I should write a post containing some résumé-writing tips. Interested?

Also called “conciseness.” That’s the older (but still permitted) word up there in the title.

Anyway, the comic says it all: Take out unnecessary words!

“Nuff said.

I haven’t mentioned this in a while, maybe never: A certain reflexive pronoun is usually a pretentiousism. That word is myself.

Reflexive pronouns are for when you already mentioned the word earlier in the sentence, such as

We did it ourselves.
I baked the cake myself.
You can make your bed yourself.

About the only one people get wrong is “myself.” We don’t say, “Yourself can make the bed.” Here’s an example of how we do it wrong:

Remember Heathkits? The better part of 50 years ago the company had a store here in Maryland, which merited many pilgrimages from myself and my nerdy friends.

http://www.ganssle.com/tem/tem365.html

Sorry, he didn’t mention himself earlier in the sentence, so the sentence should be:

The better part of 50 years ago the company had a store here in Maryland, which merited many pilgrimages from meand my nerdy friends.

Don’t you be pretentious!

They aren’t expository writing! Even though people treat them as if they were. Headlines are marcom (marketing communications). We tech writers say that all marcom people are insane, and it’s true!

I’ve been meaning to write a post about headlines, and I ran into this comic on the subject , so here’s the post. First the comic:

Okay, here are several headlines on one topic in the rather uncontroversial field of astronomy:

• Our Galaxy is Destined for a Head-on Collision
• Galaxy collision to send solar system flying?
• ‘GREAT COLLISION’ COULD WAKE UP THE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE AT THE MILKY WAY’S CENTER
• Galactic collision could wake up Milky Way’s dormant black hole
• Black hole in middle of Milky Way could grow TENFOLD, scientists predict HUGE space crash
• Our Milky Way to Face Double-KO Punch in Two Galactic Collisions – Astronomers
• The Milky Way Could Crash Into Another Galaxy Billions of Years Earlier Than Predicted
• Catastrophic Galactic Collision Could Send Solar System Flying into Space

The actual topic sentence should be something like “Astronomers have recently increased their precision regarding the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

We are not in danger—the event is more than a billion years from now. Are the headlines true? Well, they’re all about side issues, not the main topic. Literally true, perhaps, but misleading!

A lot of us read only headlines, and for every topic I’ve checked into— politics, energy, global warming, environment, economics, private lives of famous people, you name it—both sides (all sides?) frequently distort what’s going on either to get you to click, or to convince you of their position if you don’t read in depth.

And don’t get me started on checking the source of the headline…

Here’s the rule:

Don’t trust headlines!

We have four kinds of horizontal lines in English typography. Everybody knows about the hyphen; you even have two keys for it on your keyboard, the minus key, and up toward the right end of the top row of keys. Speaking of that key, the slightly longer horizontal line above the hyphen is, counterintuitively, the underscore character. (If you want the underscore under letters, you have to use the underscore font style, Ctrl-u in MS Word.)

You might or might not know about the other two horizontal lines, the N-dash and the M-dash. (Alt-0150 and Alt-0151 respectively. Hold down the Alt key while you type the digits on the numeric keypad.)

• Use the N-dash to show a range; your work hours are 9–5, for example.
• Use the M-dash to show a break in thought. It’s like a strong parenthesis.

And here we come to the matter of style:

Don’t put spaces around your dashes.

Those spaces waste space. Here’s an otherwise good sentence with those bad spaces:

That year — 2014 — three young quantum gravity researchers came to an astonishing realization. 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-space-and-time-could-be-a-quantum-error-correcting-code-20190103

Yes, you can insert the spaces, but don’t.

PS— I just ran into an alternative to the M-dash in a place where I’m not used to seeing it: Professional writing. That alternative is two hyphens. Typing two hyphens is okay for casual writing, say, on a typewriter, but not in an ezine article. I suspect his editor was asleep n the job. Here’s the sentence:

Hope you stayed up late watching West Coast basketball (and/or the Masked Singer premiere) last night — otherwise you might’ve missed the quasi-surprise drop of this April’s entire Coachella lineup at 11:28 p.m. ET. 

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/festivals/8492113/coachella-2018-lineup-five-takeaways

Don’t do that, either.

First, look at the comic. It’s the second speech bubble.

First, a rule:

Who is some kind of a subject
Whom is some kind of an object.

Is the word a subject or an object? How else might you say that sentence?

• You could say, “Who are ‘they’?” That would make the word a subject, so “who,” not “whom.”
• You could say, “They are who(m)?” Since the verb is a form of “to be,” the word is a predicate nominative, so we still get “who” not “whom.”
• Maybe look for an antecedent, which would be in the speech bubble in the upper right. That has “they’re doing,” short for “they are doing.” Still a subject, so we’re still stuck with “who,” not “whom.”

The gal in the glasses is incorrect, using a pretentiousism. Maybe she takes after her mom, who also makes lots of mistakes.

I chose this example of the importance of correct comma usage partly because the article I found it in was interesting.

Here’s the rule:

Words between two commas are an aside, and can be removed from the sentence; the sentence still stands.

Here’s the example. Think about the meaning if you take out that second comma.

In June, Amazon bought online pharmacy PillPack, a startup that ships medication directly to customers, for $1 billion.

https://www.wired.com/story/why-hard-escape-amazons-long-reach

See the difference? As the sentence stands, they bought PillPack for a billion dollars. If you take that comma out, you have PillPack shipping meds for a billion. More than I’d want to pay for some pills!

The article in the link is interesting—Amazon is rather diversified.

I remember in grade school being taught that we should use “may I” when we want permission, and “can I” when we’re talking about ability.

That rule seems to have fallen by the wayside. I remember writing some math curriculum for IBM twenty years ago, and the subject matter experts insisted we use “can” in the word problems when we writers would have used “may.” Sigh.

See below.

To add insult to injury, I frequently see “may” used, especially in writing, when the writer means “might.”

I know, linguistic change and all that, but you lose precision when you take away meanings.

Can—ability. You can do it if you try.
May—permission. You may do it if someone lets you.
Might—possibility. You might get permission if you ask nicely.

You can still get away with using the correct words, and no one will criticize you. And your writing will be better.