As a consequence, I hear text in my head almost as though I were listening to an audiobook, and I’m annoyed by the kinds of things that would annoy me if that’s what I were doing. Part of the reason may be that I read slowly, at roughly the speed at which most people read aloud. But twenty-five or thirty years ago something set me off, and, since then, what began as a mild aversion has become a semi-obsession. I probably did so for the same reason that other writers probably do: to add variety to my prose. I used to use Bad Things myself, occasionally, with no feeling that I was doing anything reprehensible. For the sake of simplicity, therefore, I will refer to all such front-loaded, somersaulting sentences as Bad Things. (You wouldn’t use one in an e-mail or a text to a friend, either.) Yet, if you were writing an obituary for your college’s alumni magazine, let’s say, you wouldn’t hesitate: “A standout schoolboy athlete, he ran his family’s door-and-window business.” Grammatical terms are hard to keep straight, even for grammarians. No one has ever said to you, “A sophomore at Cornell, my niece is coming home for Christmas,” or “Sixty-six years old, my wife is an incredible cook.” Either sentence, if spoken, would sound almost comical, as though the speaker were struggling to learn English. The awkwardness is obvious if you imagine hearing one in conversation. My problem with all such sentences is that they seem to have been turned inside out: they start in one direction, then swerve in another. No mere plastic playthings, these toys have been engineered to appeal to the pachyderms’ social nature, psychology, and intelligence. Ages 54 and 48, they spend their days tinkering with an array of special toys at the Buttonwood Park Zoo in Massachusetts. Known affectionately as “the girls,” Ruth and Emily have a lot of fun for two Asian elephants. Here’s an example of a sentence type that I think no writer should ever use: I use them all the time.” In an article I wrote not long after that, I made sure to use one or two, in case he was checking.īut some common practices are objectively objectionable, in my opinion. The man annoyed me, though, so I said, “Oh, I love split infinitives. If I had an opinion about split infinitives at that moment, it was probably that I despised them, too. At a health club many years ago, the man on the stair climber next to mine, who knew I was a writer, told me that he despised split infinitives. Usage preferences are preferences, not laws, and I sometimes switch sides. (For that matter, how about using “warming trend” only for weather, if even for that?) One of many possible rewrites: “Economists expect restaurant prices and revenues to rise.” One of mine is attributing the power of sight to things that don’t have eyes, as in this sentence from the Wall Street Journal: “Restaurant sales are expected to see a warming trend this spring as menu prices rise and consumers spend more.” “To see,” in the Journal sentence, is a lazy solution to a mildly challenging word-order problem, which the writer created and then gave up on.
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