Good Prose (22 page)

    
• “Between you and I.” It is properly “between you and me,” and the objective case is required in all such instances. (“They invited my wife and me to participate”; “It seems to Fred and me that we must …”) Yes, Shakespeare makes the error in question (in
The Merchant of Venice
: “… all debts are clear between you and I”). But his precedent does not govern, not yet anyway.

    • “I wish I would have …” This was once largely a regionalism (Midwest), but it is spreading. “I wish I had” is correct.

    • Danglers. If nothing worse, danglers can be embarrassing. A prominent wine critic used to write sentences of this sort: “A dark, brooding, muscular claret with cigar box aromas and hints of cherries in the finish, I have never tasted a better offering from this chateau.”

    • Confusion between the verbs “lie” and “lay.” Emerson was fighting the battle 150 years ago and nothing has changed. “Lie” is intransitive, “lay” transitive. “I lie down.” “I lay my body down.” Even in speech one should get this right. Remember Bob Dylan’s lyric: “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.” Remember it because it’s wrong, even though sexier his way.

    • Subjunctives. Beware the reflexive use of “were” after “if.” Part of the confusion is that this use of “were” belongs to what was once an entire system of subjunctive constructions. Everyone knows that “were” is correct in such common usages as “If I were you,” and “If it were up to me.” But it is tempting to use “were” when it doesn’t apply. In if-then constructions, “were” is now properly confined to statements contrary to fact or of doubtful truth. When expressing a
fact, do not use the subjunctive, not even when “if” is involved: “If it was going to cost me a thousand bucks, then damn it, I was going to enjoy it.” Meaning that a thousand dollars was in fact the price. Most subjunctives are dead or dying and unnecessary. “Whether tomatoes be a fruit or a vegetable” has begun to sound affected, and is not required even in the most formal prose.

    • Verb agreement. More and more, writers make the verb agree with the last noun rather than the true subject of the sentence. (“The issue of continued job losses haunt the administration.” It has to be “haunts.”)

    • Gendered pronouns. In a few instances in this book we have followed the convention by which the masculine pronoun stands for both sexes. This practice is eroding fast, and with reason. Already the rule seems effectively to have changed for subjects that are singular in form but plural in meaning. “Everyone should do his best,” we were taught to say. Or “Nobody knows his manners these days.” In these cases the plural pronoun (“Everyone should do
their
best”) avoids bias at no great cost to the language. The
New York Times
copy desk now allows this violation. In at least some other situations—for instance, an address to the graduating class of male and female firefighters—common decency endorses using the awkward “his or her.”
    In other cases requiring a singular pronoun, some writers change “he” to “she,” whether consistently or alternately or randomly. This may have come to seem natural to those who do it, but to many readers (to us) it seems self-congratulatory. But then again, we are members of a generation that hears a
stern voice in the ear enforcing the old rule. It is a weak defense to point out that the voice belongs to a woman who was teaching sixth grade.
    Other solutions have been proposed. The conservative writer Charles Murray has an idea that is simplicity itself: use the pronoun appropriate to your own sex. (Jane says
everyone/her;
John says
everyone/his
. Unfortunately no one seems to recognize this rule except Charles Murray, and it costs him nothing to follow it since he is a man.
    The language has yet to come up with a universally acceptable solution. In most cases it’s possible to write around the problem, by making the subject plural or changing the sentence structure in some other way.

    • “May” and “might.” Avoid the troubling construction favored by sportscasters in which something that could have happened in the past is described as if perhaps it did happen: “If he’d caught that pass, they may have won the game.” The past tense of “may” is “might.”

    • “Who” and “whom” confusion. In speech, one can always use “who” when in doubt. It is better to be informal and wrong than wrong and pompous. Common pompous errors: “Whom shall I say is calling?” “Give the job to whomever will do it better.” The rule governing such constructions isn’t altogether obvious. “Whom” is the objective case, but in phrases like the preceding ones the whole clause (“whoever will do it better”) functions as the object, with “whoever” the subject of the clause. This rule may be arbitrary, but it is the rule, and violations of it grate on educated ears. In formal writing you don’t want to be wrong
or
pompous, so it’s worth taking
time to figure it out. “Who shall I say is calling?” is correct, as is “The person whom you called is not in.”

    • “Which” and “that.” Fastidious writers congratulate themselves on getting the distinction right, and the more libertine take at least as much pleasure in their ignorance. One ought to know the distinction and follow the rule without getting snooty about it. The crux of the matter is the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.
Modern English Usage
explains it in more detail than almost anyone requires, but the passage is clear, definitive, and entertaining. See Fowler.

The Artful Edit
, by Susan Bell (Norton)

The Art of Time in Memoir
, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press)

The Writing Life
, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row)

Writing with Power
, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press)

Writing Creative Nonfiction
, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press)

Tough, Sweet and Stuffy
, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press)

The Situation and the Story
, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life
, by Walt Harrington (Sage)

On Writing
, by Stephen King (Scribner)

Telling True Stories
, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume)

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon)

The Forest for the Trees
, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead)

Unless It Moves the Human Heart
, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco)

The Elements of Style
, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan)

Clear and Simple as the Truth
, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press)

Word Court
, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt)

Style
, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman)

On Writing Well
, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row)

The Chicago Manual of Style
, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press)

Modern English Usage
, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press)

Modern American Usage
, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang)

Words into Type
, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall)

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ICK, AND
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ADDIE, AND TO
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