Bad Advice. John E. McIntyre
Critical Praise
“This is charming and smart (one of my favorite combinations) and, to be sure, extraordinarily useful.”
—Benjamin Dreyer, author of Dreyer’s English
“A wise and helpful book.”
—Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl)
“The world of writing advice is riddled with bogus rules, misunderstanding, and pseudo-expertise. John McIntyre’s concise and witty book sets the record straight using evidence, experience, and sound judgment.”
—Stan Carey, writer and blogger at Sentence first and Macmillan Dictionary Blog
“Grammar pedants confirm the adage that little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Happily for us, John McIntyre has a lot of knowledge about the English language and its uses. In Bad Advice, McIntyre excoriates the simplistic, outdated and just plain wrong “rules” that have long haunted English writing. Listen to him, rather than the ghosts of English teachers past, and your writing will be all the better for it.”
— Lynne Murphy, author of The Prodigal Tongue
“John McIntyre has written a guide that feels like a grammatical Innocence Project for guilty writers. This legendary copy editor takes a fresh look at the evidence presented by language purists and finds it wanting. After reading him, I was moved to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. Someone yelled, ‘Not guilty!’ It was me. Free at last.”
— Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer and The Glamour of Grammar
Bad Advice
The Most Unreliable Counsel Available
on Grammar, Usage, and Writing
John E. McIntyre
Copyright © 2020 by John E. McIntyre
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-62720-294-7
ISBN Ebook: 978-1-62720-295-4
Cover design by Kevin O’Malley
Author photo by David Hobby
Editorial development by Annabelle Finagin
Marketing plan development by Dominika Ortonowski
Published by Apprentice House
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.ApprenticeHouse.com
For Kathleen,
who, when I returned in excitement from the first national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 1997 to boast that the three hundred of us present may have been the largest gathering of copy editors in one place in all of human history, simply murmured,
“Except in Hell.”
Introduction
In Britain the monarch is never wrong. Whenever the sovereign drops a brick in public, a functionary turns up at Buckingham Palace to explain that Her/His Majesty “was badly advised.”
In the same way, many of the things that you are getting wrong in writing are not your fault: you have been badly advised. You have been taught superstitions about English that have no foundation in the language. You have been hobbled with oversimplifications. You have been subjected to bizarre diktats from supposed authorities.
Much of it was well-intentioned. Grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lacking an established English grammar had to invent one. They turned to Latin, which had prestige and an established grammar they had been taught in schools, and they tried to adapt English to it. But Latin is a very different kind of language, and it was a bad fit.
Others have sought to tidy up the language by inventing and enforcing distinctions and prohibitions, seldom helpfully. (Look at the over/more than entry.)
We have wound up with what the linguist Arnold Zwicky has termed “zombie rules”: absurd rules that have no foundation in the language and which have been repeatedly exploded by linguists and better-informed grammarians, but which roam classrooms and editorial offices like the undead.
As Henry Hitchings summed the situation up in The Language Wars, “The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance.”
Likewise, advice on writing in general is marred by oversimplifications, half-heard advice, and idiosyncratic preferences—sometimes bizarre—passed off as professionalism.
Your teachers, editors, mentors, and supervisors have a lot to answer for.
And you have much to unlearn. Look inside and see.
I have kept the advice succinct. If you need further explanation on any point, look me up. If you want to argue with me, you can try.
Never end a sentence with a preposition
One of the oldest zombie rules, this is a classic example of shoehorning English into Latin. In Latin, prepositions never follow the noun or pronoun they are paired with. The very word preposition means “place before.”
So in the late seventeenth century John Dryden revised his work to eliminate what are now called “stranded prepositions,” and his influence on the matter survives into this era.
But stranded prepositions are perfectly normal in English, and you need not strain to avoid them.
You can say, “What do you want this for?” and sound like a native English speaker.
Or you can say, “For what do you want this?” and sound like an utter prat.
Never begin a sentence with and, but, or or.
Conjunctions are supposed to link things, not stand apart, and there is some stylistic warrant for this “rule.” A series of sentences beginning with and could make you sound like a giddy teenager.
But it is perfectly all right to use the coordinating conjunction but at the beginning of a sentence to emphasize the contrast with the previous statement. And it is perfectly all right to use and at the beginning of a sentence to emphasize the continuity with or amplification of the previous sentence. Or you could continue to observe a schoolroom oversimplification to which experienced writers pay no attention. (See?)
In the Authorized Version of the Bible, the first chapter of Genesis, describing the creation of the universe and humanity, has thirty-two sentences beginning with and. The repetition has a rhetorical power suggesting the continuedness and interconnectedness of the action.
“And God saw that it was good.”
If it was good enough for Jehovah, it should be good enough for you.
Do not split infinitives.
Here we have another superstition rising from the mistaken belief that to be correct, English must be like Latin. In Latin, infinitives are single words and cannot be split. The thinking, if one wishes to call it that, is that the English infinitive, the preposition to plus a verb, must therefore be treated as