In the five or so years I spent as the white-paper editor for Ericsson, some writers would file their copy with two spaces after every period (or full stop if you prefer to call it that). During the noughties, I noticed a revival of the practice. One repeat offender confessed to ‘thinking it was cool and retro’. I think he was swayed by some romantic notion of novel writing on a rickety old typewriter with a view of crashing waves, instead of the reality — rows of white desks and brick-exposed industrial walls.
I learned to type on a typewriter in the early eighties during my final years of high school. Unlike kids who went to school in the US, learning to touch-type wasn’t part of the Irish curriculum. So, I taught myself (no comment). We were fortunate enough to have a typewriter at home and my big sister was a bit of a whizz, so I got some lessons from her before she got bored with me. That iconic clickety-clackety of the keys, the ding of the margin bell, and the smell of ink from the ribbon bar are all things I can get nostalgic about.
Manual typewriters use monospaced fonts — each character takes up the same width on the page — and it was best practice to type two spaces after a period. The idea was to help readers understand they had reached the start of a new sentence, to take a slightly longer breath. This practice was largely dropped when word processors and computer screens became capable of visualizing variable-width fonts. The gap seemed unnecessarily wide and no longer useful. One post I read said, ‘you could get a boat through it’.
Having to wade through someone’s copy and remove all the darn extra spaces (even if you can automate it) is a highly annoying waste of time for an editor. Don’t be swayed by romantic notions, mind the gap and please use a single space after a period.
You wouldn’t believe the number of times people tell me I shouldn’t start sentences with ‘and’. And you can add ‘but’, ‘however’, ‘for’, and ‘while’ to the list of seemingly offensive words that shouldn’t be used as openers. I am not sure where this particular style guideline comes from, but my research seems to suggest that the construct is frowned upon because of its inelegance.
Now I grew up in the seventies. And at the beginning of every school week, we’d spend a couple of hours writing about our weekends. Woe betide any child who began a sentence with ‘and’, for they would endure the wrath of teacher’s red pen and the embarrassment of public humiliation. Personally, I believe it was this practice of news writing that is to blame for the ‘and’ rule. I believe it was post-war schoolteachers who made up this rule to protect themselves from the utter tediousness of childhood prose — endless strings of sentences that start with “and then I went to…”.
During the half-century that’s passed since the flower power era, our lives have changed dramatically and so has our language. I wonder what my primary school teacher would have made of words like flexitarian, emoji, upcycling, or — one of my personal favorites – booyah.
Avoiding repetition and creatingrhythm are two of your best friends when it comes to writing — because they prevent your text from becoming monotonous (and your reader from wanting to stick pins in their eyes). A balance of long and short sentences will help to create rhythm. Awareness of the words you tend to repeat will help your text from the doldrums. My particular minefield is the word ‘enable’. I don’t think I’ve ever written a piece without it. In fairness, I work with enabling technologies, so it fits. But I balk every time I see it.
And it’s the same with starting sentences (like this one) with ‘the dreaded and’. Used sparingly, this construct can be great for creating rhythm. But if you start every sentence with the same word — no matter what that word might be — your text will be dull.
Here’s an example from E.M. Forster’s A passage to India, by my favorite language guru Benjamin Dreyer:
In the hospital he should be safe, for Major Callendar would protect him, but the Major had not come, and now things were worse than ever.
In the hospital he should be safe, for Major Callendar would protect him. But the Major had not come, and now things were worse than ever.
I think it’s clear that the second version is preferable because the rhythm makes the reader focus on the sad bit about the Major not pitching up — and it’s the one that Forster chose.
Tip
Go ahead, break your text free from the shackles of post-war idiocy, but do it deliberately and conscientiously to avoid copy that is boring and monotonous.
If you know me, you’ll know that I have a habit of diving deep down the rabbit hole to solve an issue related to writing or grammar, especially when the rules seem to defy common sense. As a kid, Alice in Wonderland was my favorite story and the bizarreness of the world Lewis Carroll created for his heroine is a fitting setting for the nonsense of possessive pronouns.
The French are lucky for many reasons, but when it comes to singular possessive pronouns, they are fortunate because they use the same words irrespective of whether the subject is a he or a she — his and her are the same. His eyes (ses yeux) and her eyes (ses yeux) — the gender of the object dictates the form of the possessive pronoun not the gender of the subject. English, on the other hand, has no such gender-neutral possessive pronouns for the singular case.
In 2015, the Swedish Academy (Svenska Akademien) — who is responsible for the advancement of the Swedish language — added the genderless pronoun hento the list of accepted Swedish words. Today, Swedish has three subject pronouns han (he), hon (she), and hen, and three possessive pronouns hans (his), hennes (her), and hens. Apart from addressing sensitivities related to gender neutrality and people who do not wish to be identified as he or she, such neutral pronouns tend to make writing easier. I should add though, that the addition of hen led to much debate, rolling of eyes, and general jadedness toward anything that could be labeled as politically correct. By now though, some six years later, I think the initial skepticism is beginning to die down and acceptance of hen is growing.
Working at Tobii, I often find myself wanting to express these kinds of ideas:
The user controls the interface with his eyes.
The user controls the interface with his/her eyes.
The user controls the interface with her eyes.
The default position in English writing was to use the male possessive pronoun in such cases. As gender-equality awareness grew, we switched to the awkward he/she construction, which too became jaded. And some writers will use she in all cases — often as a question of style or quirkiness rather than a political statement.
The problem gets quite absurd when using indefinite pronouns such as anyone, someone, or everyone. And in speech, we don’t think about it, because we incorrectly use the plural possessive pronoun.
Think about a classroom situation, where the teacher wants each kid to raise a hand. The teacher might say:
Everyone raise their hand!
This sounds correct because most native English speakers will say it that way. But everyone is singular, so ‘their’ is grammatically incorrect.
The teacher could instead say ‘Everyone raise his hand’, but then we’re back to the gender issue, and because nobody ever says this, you might be left wondering whose hand is ‘his hand’, and why does he (whoever he is) need everyone else’s help to raise it. And down the rabbit hole we go!
You can often get around the problem by rewriting the sentence or using a plural. So instead of everyone raise their hand, you could be more specific by saying something like: could all the kids in the class raise their hand! Kids plural, so ‘their’ is grammatically correct.
Here’s a good example of rewriting from the AP Stylebook.
Instead of:
The foundation gave grants to anyone who lost their job during the pandemic.
Write:
The foundation gave grants to anyone who lost a job during the pandemic.
Over the past couple of years, most style guides have adapted their rules on the use of ‘their’ as an acceptable use of the singular possessive pronoun. The most commonly used style guides are more or less in agreement, however, that it’s better to rewrite if you can because they kind of want to reserve ‘they’ and ‘their’ pronouns for people who identify as nonbinary.
But I would say that it’s okay to use ‘they’ and ‘their’ in cases where you are referring to people in the singular. So, in the first example above, I would opt for:
The user controls the interface with their eyes.
Or you could rephrase:
Users control the interface by moving their eyes.
A word of warning
Be careful, however, when you have a plural subject and a singular object. I would advise you to re-read your sentence a couple of times to check that your sentence makes sense (unless of course you are writing literary nonsense).
Take a look at this sentence:
Users control the interface by moving their eye.
It might just be me, but at first glance, I think this sentence is okay. But then ‘users’ (plural) do not have a collective eye (singular), even if I think most people will get what the writer means.
Compounds, words composed of two or more words, are sometimes spelled with a hyphen, as in mass-produced and go-between. Sometimes they take a space and sometimes they don’t. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, sometimes, their spellings change over time. The only way to get it right is to look it up in the dictionary. But when that yields nothing, what do you do?
Recently faced with the problem of how to spell a two-word compound, I never imagined how deep down the rabbit hole I would dive to find an answer. I have traveled through Wonderland and find myself on the other side with an entirely different point of view to the one I started out with.
But here I am, and this post describes my journey through the odds-and-ends of how compounds morph and change, and the pros and cons of how you might spell them.
Open, closed, or hyphenated?
The hyphen has several uses. Just like many other punctuation marks, its primary purpose is to prevent confusion. It’s designed to help you, the reader, interpret a piece of text just as I, the writer, intended. It’s my job to make sure that you don’t have to work too hard.
Open, commonplace compounds such as living room and real estate take a space. Go-between uses a hyphen, and closed compounds, such as football and crosswalk, are bound together.
Over time, some compounds evolve. Shifting from open, through hyphenated, to a closed compound as they become familiar. Such as cab driver, cab-driver, and today we write cabdriver (en-us), but for en-gb, we still use cab driver. Well taxi driver might be more accurate. I grew up with en-gb in school, but today I primarily write in US English – the lack of consensus is my favorite alibi for my perceived or actual confusion.
Evolution of compounds and effect on tone-of-voice
Teenager was once written as two separate words. Sometime during the 1940s, it took on a hyphen, and its first appearance as a closed compound was in the late 1960s. Today, The New Yorker still hyphenates teen-ager. TheNew York Times, however, moved over to teenager just before the turn of the 21st century. Merriam-Webster lists teenager without a hyphen, but as a writer, I am free to apply my own rules. The problem comes when you’re trying to create rules for a bunch of people, to make it easy for everyone to be consistent. Magazines and newspapers employ subeditors to ensure that copy, no matter who writes it, is consistent. Organizations rely on people adhering to their style guides — with moderate success.
The day The New Yorker changes its style guide to reflect modern usage will undoubtedly be met with uproar from loyal subscribers like myself. I am likely to go into denial, anger, and eventually accept the change – I might die first. For me, the humble hyphen in teen-ager sets a tone that reflects a desire to belong to a bygone era. A feeling that will be lost when the hyphen is no longer.
The evolution of technology and its impact on spelling
Digital-first publishing and widespread access to content by international audiences have heightened the need for simplicity in written communication. The result has been a shift toward minimal punctuation. Familiarity and minimalism have led to on-line becoming online, and email is now preferred over e-mail – even if Merriam Webster still (April 2020) lists e-mail as its first preference.
Some open compounds, such as ice cream, living room, dinner table, and coffee mug, however, haven’t evolved over time. These open compounds seem to describe commonplace items. Whereas closed compounds, such as eggplant, earmark, and honeymoon, are less common and also reflect changes in use over time. Earmark, for example, stems from the way farmers would make a nick in the ear of an animal to define ownership.
There’s a funny moment in Four Weddings and a Funeral where Charles (Hugh Grant) offers Carrie (Andie McDowell) a suggestion for the etymology of the word honeymoon:
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s ‘honey’ cos it’s sweet as honey and ‘moon’ because it was the first time a husband got to see his wife’s bottom.”
So, it seems logical to adopt an open compound for commonplace broad-reaching ideas such as social distancing, a hyphen if you want to emphasize a connection that may not be obvious, such as head-banging. And a closed compound if the concept is familiar.
Use a hyphen when a compound describes something
Consider the sentence: The butler’s head movement patterns.
Without a helping hyphen, you might stumble and think the butler’s head is the subject of the sentence. And so, some copywriters would apply the rule of hyphenating compounds when they are used as adjectives. To give: the butler’s head-movement patterns. Some subeditors (you know who you are) might argue that the hyphen isn’t needed because there is no room for confusion.
Hyphens in Google search
Just as Google search is case insensitive, it is also hyphen insensitive, so searches for head movement and head-movement should reveal the same results. However, according to Google, such terms are sometimes treated as reciprocal synonyms, sometimes not. See this Twitter post. Unfortunately, search results are inconsistent, and there are more reasons for this than the presence or absence of the hyphen.
Google is continually evolving its algorithms to provide more individual – more relevant – results. Browser activity (what you’ve clicked on in the past) and location have a significant impact on search results.
Sound copywriting should never be sacrificed to cater to Google’s current search methodologies because they can and will change.
Most web-publishing tools provide features to overcome this problem so that Google rates your content, irrespective of whether people search for head movement or head-movement.
A breathing space
There is, however, a compelling argument for adopting an open compound when a hyphen might have been the obvious choice, at least for those of us who went to school in the 1970s. Because it creates breathing space. It avoids the clutter of hyphens when they are not strictly needed. It can make a statement.
Strategies for consistency
Imagine I’ve created an innovative technology for monitoring head movements. I can choose to spell my tech as an open compound, with a hyphen or closed. I’ve decided not to go with the closed version, headmovement, because it’s hard to read.
I now have three choices:
Strategy no.1 — hyphens everywhere
Adopt head-movement for the noun and head-movement when used as an adjective.
Pros
Cons
Easy to remember and apply
Reduces the chance for reader confusion
Is consistent
Ensures the solidity of head-movement as a single concept
Creates unnecessary clutter
May stick out negatively
Strategy no.2 — the copywriter’s choice
Adopt head movement for the noun and head-movement when used as an adjective.
Pros
Cons
Pleasing from a style perspective – follows the rules
Avoids some clutter
Paragraphs that include both head movement and head-movement may cause reader confusion. But simply avoiding such situations solves this problem.
Not easy to apply consistently across an organization
Creates some unnecessary clutter
Strategy no.3 — bunk the hyphen
Adopt head movement for the noun and the adjective.
Pros
Cons
It makes a statement
Easy to implement
Clutter-free
It may lead to reader confusion, but with good style, such situations can be avoided
May set the hair of most editors/copywriters/wordsmiths on end
The other side of Wonderland
Before I wrote this post, I was a firm advocate of the copywriter’s choice. Sometimes, I have even adopted the hyphens everywhere approach because I believed it helped to avoid confusion. Having taken a trip down the rabbit hole and woken up on the other side of Wonderland, I’ve decided to step out of my comfort zone and bunk the hyphen when the compound is the protagonist of the story. Why? Because, writing this post has made me realize that the rules apply to compounds that appear once or twice in a text. But when a core subject is frequently repeated, readers will grasp the idea soon enough. Irrespective of whether the concept is new or familiar, after a few repetitions, people will read the open compound as intended, as a single concept.
I’ve recently read, or should I say devoured Dreyer’s English An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. I never imagined I’d find a replacement for Strunk & White. Still, it seems that a century after The Elements of Stylewas first published(a book that changed my writing and my career), I now have a new bible. A new guide that’s not just an excellent source for creating good copy, it’s also a great read that has me seesawing between laughter and cringing at the memory of my past mistakes.
One of my favorite chapters in Dreyer’s English is number 9, Peeves and Crotchets, which includes common pitfalls of writing and the many cases of abuse of the English language — all delivered with fantastic wit. Unfortunately, my pet peeve, related to the word better, is missing.
It’s a simple word and used in context; there’s nothing better. For example:
The fuel consumption in our new car is better than our old one.
The food is better at my local store than at the hypermarket.
My son has a better education than I do.
So far, so good. There is little room for misinterpretation. The reader is free to make up their mind about what has improved, which in some cases is fine.
Looking at the image I’ve chosen for this post, some people will finish the sentence on the carton, so that it reads: boxed water is better… better than in a plastic bottle. Some might think boxed-water is better because the stuff that comes out of their tap tastes like a visit to the dentist. And for the 600 million people who don’t have access to an improved water source, they might be wondering why you’d box water at all.
Continuing with this train of thought, if you ask yourself the question, why is my son’s education is better than mine, you might come up with several responses:
The education system today is more efficient than it was in the 1970s. So at 15, my son has learned more than I had at the same age — a subjective opinion about the education system in any given country/state/region.
Teaching methods have evolved. Children today are taught to think and make their own minds up about how they want to solve problems — which is a subjective opinion about teachers based on the assumption that teaching methodologies have evolved.
I completed high school, whereas he is currently studying for his Ph.D. — contextual information that’s missing from the original sentence.
He grew up in a country where education is free and available to everyone, whereas I didn’t — again contextual information that’s missing from the original sentence.
The truth of the matter is. It’s probably a mix of the first two, but that’s not the point of this story.
My problem comes when the meaning isn’t clear and there is no context to provide it. And, it seems to me that the problem occurs more often in short headlines, sub-headers, and taglines.
Imagine a highway billboard advertising a car dealership. It states better cars, better deals, better driving.
You might think that’s fine, and under different circumstances, I might agree with you. But if you are in the market for a new car, would these words entice you enough to exit the highway and take a look?
Unfortunately, when you work with words as much as I do. They sometimes morph into weirdness. When I see headlines like this, it sets off a multitude of questions in my head because I don’t know what we are comparing with; better cars than what? Better than the one I am driving, or better than the one in front of me? And why is it better? Because it consumes less gas, or because it’s a 4WD and that will ensure that I can get my kids to school after a snowstorm, or is it because it’s electric and that’s clearly a better option? The point is that better is highly subjective. People interpret the word better, depending on their personal needs and current circumstances.
So, what to do?
How does the copywriter solve this issue? I don’t have a definitive answer, but I feel that similar words such as improved, larger, bigger, greater, and so on, they all suffer from the same disease.
In standalone copy, I tend to opt for words like enriched and enhanced, because these words contain an understanding of improvement to the same object. In other words, the current version of <whatever it is you are trying to sell> is better than the previous version of it. The addition of the prefix en-, meaning in or within, somehow helps to convey the concept of self-improvement, which hopefully then turns the statement into an objective one.
What words do you use?
I’d love to year your ideas on words that are better than better. So drop me a line in the comments below.
dpdoyle 