Guide to Grammar and Style -- O
From the Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch.
Comments are welcome.
Don't use long words where short ones will do; it
makes your writing dense and difficult to understand. Words
ending in -ality, -ation, -ize,
-ization, -ational, and so forth are often guilty
of making sentences more complex than they need to be. Ask
yourself if these suffixes can be removed without damaging the
sense: if you can use a shorter form, you probably should; if you
can take a big scary noun and make it a punchy and powerful verb,
you probably should. For instance, "The chairman brought about
the organization of the conference" can stand to trade that
"brought about the organization of" for "organized" -- "The
chairman organized the conference." Much better.
Many of these guidelines -- changing methodology to
method, usage to
use, functionality to
function -- are applications of this tip. See Concrete Language, Long Words, and Vocabulary.
Old English, or
Anglo-Saxon, is the technical term for the language spoken
in England from around 500 to around 1100. (The most famous work
written in Old English is Beowulf; you won't be able to
read a word of it without studying Anglo-Saxon.) Old English (or
OE, as it's often abbreviated) was succeeded by Middle English
(ME), the language of Chaucer; and ME was succeeded by Modern
English (ModE) around 1500. This means Shakespeare wrote in
modern English, even though it's loaded with thee's
and doth's. You'll keep English teachers happy if you
reserve the term Old English for truly Old English. See
Latinate versus Germanic
Diction.
Often an
unnecessarily long way of saying something. "On a daily basis,"
for instance, could just as easily be "daily," which can be both
an adjective and an adverb.
Instead of "The magazine is published on a monthly basis," use
"The magazine is published monthly." See Economy.
Though it's not necessarily
wrong to place the word only nearly anywhere in a sentence
-- English is mighty flexible -- try for precision by putting the modifier
next to the word or phrase it modifies. But do it only if you
don't stand to lose grace. "We'll
only write three papers this semester" might suggest we
won't do anything else with these three papers. "We'll write
only three big papers this semester" makes the meaning
clearer. But if it makes your sentence clumsy or unidiomatic,
nix it.
Oxford Comma.
See Commas.