Guide to Grammar and Style -- N
From the Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch.
Comments are welcome.
No offense to the
ecologists, but nature is often useless. Decisions of
a delicate nature would be better if they were just plain old
delicate decisions.
Ask an old-timer, and
he'll tell you that nauseous means causing nausea,
not suffering from it. The word for the latter is
nauseated. A decaying carcass is nauseous, and
(unless you go for such things) will probably make you
nauseated. [Entry added 14 August
1999]
Ugly business
jargon. If you mean require, say require or rework
the sentence so that necessitate is not necessitated.
[Entry revised 14 August 1999]
Network was very
happy when it was just a noun; when you're outside the computer
lab, don't force it to serve double duty as a verb.
Networking summons up images of yuppies in power ties.
Any
grammatical or stylistic rule beginning with "Never" or "Always"
should be suspect, and that includes the rules in this guide. No
word or construction in the language is completely
valueless (even if some come pretty damn close). Apply all
guidelines intelligently and sensitively, and forsake pedantic bugbears in favor of grace. See Audience and read it twice.
Although there are other
possibilities, you can't go wrong if you use nor only
after the word neither: instead of "Keats did not write
novels nor essays," use either "Keats did not write novels
or essays" or "Keats wrote neither novels
nor essays." (You can, however, say "Keats did not
write novels, nor did he write essays.")
This phrase, as in "The
subtleties did not go unnoticed," is often an affectation. Be
more direct.
A noun, as the "Schoolhouse
Rock" song would have it, is a person, a place, or a thing. Piece
o' cake. See also Pronoun.
The high school rule
about spelling out numbers less than one hundred (some say ten;
it's a question of house style) and
writing them as numerals above has enslaved too many people. It's
a good start, but here are a few more guidelines.
Never begin a sentence with a numeral:
either spell out the number, or rewrite the sentence to move the
number from the beginning.
Very large round numbers should be spelled out: not
1,000,000,000, but one billion -- an American
billion, that is; Britain's billion is often a million million.
If ever you need real precision in expressing very large numbers,
scientific notation might make sense.
In a series of numbers, either spell them out or use numerals for
every member of the list: don't switch in the middle, as
in "pages thirty-two, ninety-six, 107, and 235."
Dates should always get numerals: "October 3, 1990."
There's no reason to use both numerals and words for the same
number: unless a law firm is paying you enough money to butcher
the language with impunity, steer clear of abominations like "two
(2)" or "12 (twelve)."
The only time you should mix spelling and numerals is in very
large numbers: not 8,600,000, but 8.6 million.
Use numerals for anything difficult to spell out: not four and
sixteen seventeenths, thirteen thousand three hundred
twenty six, or three point one four one five nine. You
can spell out simple fractions like one half or two
thirds.