Category: Writing

Another hot tip from Sarah’s Dad:

Do not confuse everyday and every day.

In spelling two-word phrases there is a trend toward uniting the two words into a single word. Often there is an intermediate stage in which the two words are joined by a hyphen (flower pot, flower-pot, flowerpot). In many cases, however, it is important to distinguish between the one-word form and the two-word form of a compound.

This is usually obvious in the case of compound verbs. The verb carry over means to continue or postpone, while the noun carryover is what has been continued or postponed. Other words seem trickier because the meanings of the different forms are close.

The single word everyday means “ordinary, usual, unremarkable.” In the sense of a routine or recurring event, it can also mean “happening daily.” Here are some everyday examples.

An everyday occurrence. An everyday experience.

Everyday prices.

I look forward to my everyday yoga session.

She quit her everyday job.

In contrast, the two-word phrase every day means “on each day.” It is just like the phrases “every minute,” “every hour,” “every week,” “every time,” etc., all of which are also spelled as two separate words.

I have this experience every day.

Low prices every day.

I look forward to my yoga session every day.

The two-word phrase every day can also mean “all days”: She loved every day of her job.

Other pairs that have distinct meanings include altogether and all together, already and all ready, and compounds using the word any.

I’ve already done that. — I’m all ready for the dance.

She’s altogether too polite. — She gathered them all together in the kitchen.

Anyone would know that. — Any one of you would know that.

Anyway, I certainly knew it. — Any way you look at it, they deserved it.

In all these cases, stop and consider the actual meaning of the compound in the sentence you are writing. All right, folks, that’s enough for today, and maybe every day.

It was taking me so long to get another grammar tip posted, I knew I needed help. So I emailed my dad and asked if he would be a Guest Grammar Tipper. And he said, “Oy! I can’t do it right now. Maybe tomorrow.” But within an hour I received the following. He is obsessed. That is why I am so weird.

(this is Dad explaining the following rule to my nephew Zev)

A While and Awhile
By Robert Leavitt
Do not confuse a while and awhile. The noun a while means “a relatively short period of time.” The adverb awhile means “for a short time”; in other words, awhile is equivalent to “for a while.” The following examples illustrate the differences.

She spent a while on the telephone.

She was playing cards awhile this afternoon.

Wait for a while before you go out. Wait awhile before you go out.

It’s not always easy to tell which term is correct. A good rule of thumb is that if you can substitute “for a short time” then you can use awhile. See how this works in the next two sentences (and try it in the other sentences here, too).

She waited (for a short time). — Therefore, She waited awhile is correct.

She waited quite (for a short time). — This doesn’t make sense; therefore, you must write She waited quite a while.

If you remember that prepositions (in, after, for, etc.) are followed by nouns, then you can avoid spelling errors in the following situations.

Lunch will be ready in a while.

He got the hang of it after a while.

At the beginning of a sentence, a while is almost always a noun.

A while later, he returned from the store.

A while ago, I received a cheque for $500.

So, stop awhile! Take a while to decide on the correct spelling!

Quotation marks can be used for a number of purposes. They can indicate dialogue, a word used as a word (see Tip #6), slang, epithets or nicknames, titles, or, my favourite, irony. Like so:

Amy said, “Please come with me to the coronation, dearest.”

Remember when “depilation” was a dirty word in our crowd of lesbian feminists?

Where I come from, we call notebooks “scribblers.” (See Geist Magazine’s Canadian Phrasebook for more sentences about Canadian slang.)

Many people know me as Sarah “the Pathetic Grammar Weirdo With Nothing Else to Do on the Weekend” Leavitt.

I have always loved “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne.

Word is that Anchal on America’s Next Top Model is “fat.”

There are other uses, too. But all too often, quotation marks are misused. As on this sign I saw in Prince Rupert, BC last summer:

Here, quotation marks are used incorrectly for emphasis. But we read it as irony. So it’s as if the sign is saying we shouldn’t really drive slowly. Or the people who made the sign didn’t mean us to understand the common definition of “slow” but maybe some other meaning that only locals know.

Here is another example, from BC Ferries:

See what I mean? Do not use quotation marks willy-nilly. It makes people laugh at messages that are supposed to be taken seriously.

PS The quotation marks in the title of this post are excessive and inappropriate and undermine the serious nature of what I am trying to say.

I have a job marking students’ papers this fall, and one of the most common errors I see is the misuse of apostrophes in plurals. More often than not, students will insert unneccessary apostrophes. I imagine them saying to themselves, “Does this take an apostrophe? I’m not sure, because no one ever taught me. Oh well, I’ll throw one in. Better safe than sorry.”

In most cases, a simple “s” forms a plural. No apostrophe needed. So we write:

4 arms
27 cash registers
18 boys
5 trucks

(I am not sure what this adds up to, but the point is that there are no apostrophes.)

And, contrary to popular belief, we do not use an apostrophe in the plural forms of proper names. So the cute carved and painted wooden signs outside houses that say, “The Smith’s” or “The Cohen’s” are WRONG. Even if the signs were intended to indicate the possessive–i.e. “The Smiths’ House” or “The Cohens’ Cottage”–the apostrophe is still in the wrong place. But that is another topic.

These are the only rare cases where an apostrophe is required along with the “s”:

1. Words used as words:
When you are talking about a certain word, and put it in quotations, the plural is formed with an apostrophe. For example:

Sarah loves to use the word “wrong.” How many “wrong’s” do you think there are on this whole website?

OR

His letter to his lover was full of meaningless “I love you’s.”

If you use italics to indicate a word as a word, you just use a roman (non-italicized) “s” to form the plural:

i love yous

2. Abbreviations with more than one period:

Bob just has one B.A., but Shelly was in school for decades and ended up with two B.A.’s and an M.A. too.

Abbreviations with just one period, like “ed.” for “editor” just have an “s” added before the period, like so: “eds.”

3. Letters used as letters:
An example of a letter used as a letter would be:

The plural is usually formed by adding an “s.”

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, letters used as letters should be written in italics, and the plural is then formed by adding a roman “s.”

But when you use roman type or quotation marks, the plural is formed with an apostrophe, just as in #1 above. This is especially true if there would be confusion without the apostrophe. For example:

There are a lot of “I’s” in your story; it would read more smoothly if you took yourself out of it.

Without the apostrophe, “I” and “s” would spell “is.”

Just a short tip (and a late one) for this week:

Here are two words that people use that are not actually words at all. Please do send along more. What a fun rainy day activity!

Preventative and exploitive are not words. The real words are preventive and exploitative. How do we know? Because we say, “prevention,” not “preventation.” Similarly, we say “exploitative” because the noun form is “exploitation.”

A lot of cyclists have a sticker on their bikes that says “One Less Car.” I fully support the sentiment, but the grammar sucks. It should say “One Fewer Car” or “One Car Fewer.” Why?

You use “fewer” when talking about things you can count, like bicycles or people or cars or traffic accidents.

You use “less” when talking about a quantity of something that cannot be counted, like sugar or happiness or guilt or rain.

“Less” is more commonly misused than “fewer.” These are incorrect:
More bicycles means less cars.
There have been a lot less accidents since they put in speed bumps.
There’s been a lot less people coming by the store today.

You can sometimes use “less” with countable items if those items together form a unit, like “less than ten feet”– the ten feet are not ten separate countable items, but one unit. Similarly, you would say something cost “less than five dollars.”

If you see someone hovering around a bike rack with a Sharpie, that’s me.