Legal Writing

Can you feel what I feel? Empathy's adjective

Posted on May 23, 2010
A reader sent me an e-mail message about word usage in a caption that appeared on the Sports front  recently. You can see the photo below. The reader asserted that the adjective should be empathic, instead of empathetic. Because I have rarely, if ever, seen empathic used, I immediately turned to my dictionaries...

Arguing with idioms: Batten down the hatches

Posted on May 16, 2010
A quote in a New York Times story that The N&O used in print inspired my latest idiom research. Here is how the quote appeared early in the editing at The N&O: "It's a corporate problem," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., who has been particularly critical of BP's operations in Alaska and will lead the House committee hearing...

Word choices we have to make: Grammar Guide quiz

Posted on May 11, 2010
Copy editors learn early in their training to distinguish commonly confused words. Stylebooks and writing manuals have entries and lists of such words. One of my favorite books is "Working With Words," by Brian S. Woods, James L. Pinson and Jean Gaddy Wilson...

Sometimes grass is only sleeping: Chinglish in translation

Posted on May 04, 2010
The New York Times has an interesting article about a commission's efforts in Shanghai to make public signs and menus more intelligible to English speakers.  The commission has expert translators and English speakers on staff but also relies on hundreds of volunteers...

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Words you see only in headlines

Posted on April 17, 2010
I am a copy editor, and as part of that job, I write headlines. Last week, I wrote this headline, using a word that we rarely see except in headlines. I wasn't happy with this headline. But I wanted to be sure to get "Tax preparer" into the head because those are the keywords that would be picked up in a search engine on the Web and because, with the deadline for filing our tax returns bearing down, these are the words that would attract the eyes of human readers in the print edition...

On my bookshelf: "Garner's Modern American Usage"

Posted on April 05, 2010
I have mentioned that I have a bad habit of buying and collecting books on grammar and usage. For me, a new or updated usage book is like the newest iGadget to many tech fans: I must have it. Yet, I had resisted buying the new version of my favorite usage guide, "Garner's Modern American Usage...

A head that causes head-scratching

Posted on March 28, 2010
A headline in the Sunday (March 28, 2010) Parade stopped me this morning. At first, a reader might think that the magazine's editors made the dreaded apostrophe-plural mistake. In fact, I think the editors are saying "Teenager is in love."   I am almost always confused when I read a headline that makes a contraction of a noun, and I don't think I am the only reader in the world who is baffled by such contractions...

Subject-verb agreement: The clause counts

Posted on March 23, 2010
A reader found fault with this sentence from a front-page story Sunday:  The number of households in the state that depend on food stamps has increased 45 percent over the last two years.  She thought the writer and editors had made an error in subject-verb agreement...

What does "soup to nuts" mean?

Posted on March 21, 2010
An editor asked about "soup to nuts," which appeared in this story. It means from beginning to end or the whole shebang, of course, but then we wondered where the phrase comes from.  I turned first to "The Word Detective" by Evan Morris, and he confirms what I thought, that the saying refers to the courses of a meal, which starts with soup and ends with nuts...

Defending a perfectly good word

Posted on March 13, 2010
An online reader comment on a headline prompts this post in defense of a word. The headline was "Kinfolk defend victims, suspect." The story is from Johnston County. For those of you blog readers who aren't familiar with the Triangle, I will point out two things: Johnston County is a mostly rural area southeast of Raleigh and I live in Johnston County...

Grammar Guide quiz No. 45: Word choice

Posted on March 07, 2010
Today's quiz is about word choice. Choose the better word in these five sentences. You might find a couple of sentences tricky. I hope you find the quiz enjoyable and educational. After all, that's the point. Click here or on the question mark icon to begin...

National Grammar Day is coming! Take a quiz

Posted on March 03, 2010
March 4 is National Grammar Day. Two smart women with grammar obsessions are promoting the day -- Martha Brockenbrough of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar and Mignon Fogarty of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips. Both of them are multimedia masters with Web sites and books, and Fogarty has audio products...

Why "an historic" is wrong

Posted on February 22, 2010
I ran across a story that used "an historic" and gathered other evidence to show how pervasive this error is in print. This post is about why the article should be "a," not "an." I'll save the "historic" vs. "historical" issue for another post...

The Grammar Guide Quiz returns! And it's supersized!

Posted on February 21, 2010
At last, I have a new Triangle Grammar Guide quiz for you to try. This one has 10(!) multiple-choice questions, and they all have to do with word usage. You will choose the best word to fill in the blank. The quiz is just for fun, and no one will know how you scored...

Word of the year lists

Posted on January 10, 2010
I  am a fan of word of the year lists. They give us insight into our times. They also give us grist for the blog mill.  The American Dialect Society has chosen "tweet" as the 2009 word of the year, and "google" as the word of the decade...

Word watch: Dilemma

Posted on January 01, 2010
A colleague pointed out some loose usage in this passage: Your house may soon be overrun by holiday weekend houseguests. As the host, you'll have a dilemma: what to feed them. A dilemma is a choice between two bad alternatives, many usage experts say...

Book review: "I Laid an Egg on Aunt Ruth's Head"

Posted on December 21, 2009
Joel Schnoor, who lives in Apex, sent me a copy of his book, "I Laid an Egg on Aunt Ruth's Head." (Author House, 2009) Here is how he describes the book: "The book contains 43 short stories featuring a tough, lovable Aunt Ruth character who struggles with proper English usage...

Every time a cliche rings, a copy editor gets her wings

Posted on December 14, 2009
An editor urged copy editors at The News & Observer to avoid seasonal cliches such as "'Tis the season" and "Deck the halls." I am all in favor of writers coming up with interesting new turns of phrase, but sometimes one man's cliche is another man's cultural lifebuoy...

A phrase that might sound dirty but isn't

Posted on December 12, 2009
One copy editor duty is to keep vulgar words and phrases out of the newspaper -- or at least, to alert a decision-making editor about an off-color reference, even in a direct quote. Last week, I edited a story that included a quote with the phrase "balls to the wall...

Word of the year: Unfriend

Posted on November 19, 2009
Oxford University Press, publisher of the New Oxford American Dictionary, has chosen "unfriend" as the word of the year for 2009. Here is the definition, according to the OUP blog: unfriend ? verb ? To remove someone as a ?friend? on a social networking site such as Facebook...

Copy editors will think this is funny

Posted on November 18, 2009
We used to have a saying on the copy desk: Don't follow the stylebook out the window. In other words, common sense should govern which style rules you enforce. The Associated Press Stylebook is the guide we use for deciding how to handle some usage matters...

Word search: How a copy editor thinks

Posted on November 17, 2009
We work very fast these days with diminished resources, and sometimes my word nerd proclivities have to wait until I am off deadline. Lucky for me, I have shelves filled with dictionaries and usage books at home. I can indulge my need to know more about English when I am not on deadline...

The plain language of death

Posted on November 15, 2009
I wrote a post a few years ago about the language of death. As a regular reader of the paid obituaries in our newspaper, I was fascinated with the many ways that survivors and funeral homes found to refer to death. I concluded that in these short summations of a person's life, the terms such as "called home," "went to his (or her) heavenly reward" and "passed away" could be comforting to the loved ones of the person who died...

Book review: "My Dog Bites the English Teacher"

Posted on September 20, 2009
Marian Anders tells the truth when she writes, "Unless you want to be an English teacher, you only need to know the grammar necessary to write correctly -- for school, work and your personal life." That is the guiding principle of Anders' book, "My Dog Bites the English Teacher: Practical Grammar Made Quick and Easy" (Aviary Publishers, available in bookstores and online at www...

Word watch: town hall meeting

Posted on August 17, 2009
A reader has an interesting point to make about a phrase that is all over the news these days: "It is sad that Kilpatrick has given up writing his columns on usage.  If he were still writing, I am certain that he would by now have issued one of his 'injunctions' against the currently sickeningly popular cliche 'town hall meeting...

Punctuation mystery: Why a comma?

Posted on August 05, 2009
Staff photojournalist Shawn Rocco and staff writer Martha Quillin reported this week on Cary homeowner David Bowden's very large message to the town of Cary. You can see Rocco's photo below. The ACLU says the town would be abridging free speech if it used an ordinance to get the sign removed...

Mechanics: Plural possessive of a family name

Posted on July 15, 2009
The New York Times report of a well-known British conductor's assisted suicide alongside his wife has a passage that illustrates a rare and tricky challenge. The conductor was Sir Edward Downes, and his wife was Lady Downes. The story never uses the expected plural of Downes: Downeses...

Word news: Don't take a staycation with your frenemy

Posted on July 12, 2009
The editors of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary have added about 100 words for the 2009 edition and to the dictionary online. Among them are staycation, a vacation spent at home or nearby, and frenemy, a person who pretends to be a friend but who is actually an enemy...

Words we like: antebellum

Posted on July 07, 2009
The latest installment in The N&O's Old North State series, Warrenton fights to regain lost glory, allows us a chance to use the lovely sounding word, antebellum. Staff writer Kristin Collins' story refers to the town's "antebellum architecture" and to its heyday before the Civil War...

Modify your misplaced and dangling modifiers

Posted on June 29, 2009
Misplaced and dangling modifiers can sneak in when writers and editors aren't paying attention. A couple of readers found such constructions in recent N&O pieces, and I found a couple in one article I was reading on another Web site. Those examples provide the makings for this post...

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