Grammar and Style

Noun, Verb and Object: The Holy Trinity

At one of my teaching stops, students were required to fill out an evaluation at the end of the class and explain what they learned. Some wrote a lot, some wrote things that are anatomically impossible for me to do. One student wrote simply this:

“Noun, verb, object: The Holy Trinity.”

If you want to write well, he’s not far off. The thing that makes most sentences good is that they consist of concrete nouns and vigorous verbs. They also tell simple stories in active voice: The noun-verb-direct object order.

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Above is a simple sentence diagram (It’s even a bit off, in that the “object” should be “direct object,” but you get the idea). In fourth grade, Sister Mary Kenneth beat this into us over and over and over: Draw a diagram and dissect the sentence. (She was about 183 years old when she taught me all those years ago; It would not surprise me if she were still out there somewhere, scaring the hell out of preteens in an English class…)

The goal here isn’t necessarily to fully diagram a sentence or to create an intricate overall visual structure, but rather to help you boil down your thoughts to a few simple words. If you can build your sentences with a good NVO structure, you can avoid using far too many adjectives and adverbs. You can also improve the overall clarity of your approach to content and build your stories in a more reader-centric fashion. Consider this lead:

Firefighters fought a blaze at a burning house, Tuesday evening, in Springfield, that was caused by electrical failure in a storage room.

If you want break that down into a simple sentence diagram, or at least locate some of those “main idea” words, look for the verb:

Action word: Fought
Noun (who did the fighting?): Firefighters
Object (what did the firefighters fight?): A blaze.

So in short, you have a core sentence that says “Firefighters fight fire.” Isn’t that what they always do? Instead, look at what matters most: What the fire did. How bad was the fire? Try this instead:

An electrical fire caused $150,000 damage to a Springfield home Tuesday, after a freezer malfunctioned in a storage room and sparked the blaze, fire officials said.

NVO = Fire caused damage.

Other good starts could be “Fire damaged home” or if people were hurt/killed “Fire hurt/killed people”

At the core of all strong sentences are those primary elements, so when you write, look to see how your sentences stack up.

 

GAME TIME: An AP quiz for the folks at the College Media Mega Workshop (and the rest of us, too…)

In honor of the student journalists who are slaving away at the College Media Mega Workshop, here’s a chance to prove moral and intellectual superiority over your peers: An AP style quiz that is based on the CMMW.

If you’re not there, don’t worry. You can still play this and dominate all.

Same rules as before: 10 questions, speed counts, rankings will be posted.

CLICK HERE TO START

Everyone needs an editor (sometimes two or three)

The best money I ever spent in life was the $50 I handed over to a 20-year-old college kid who was working a copy desk. I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of a year writing and rewriting and rewriting (and then rewriting some more) on my dissertation. For those of you who have never heard of a dissertation, it’s the giant book that Ph.D. candidates have to write that nobody ever reads that shows you are worthy of being called “doctor” by somebody at some point in time.

I was at the final phase when all the people had signed off on everything that needed a signature and all that was needed was a final edit for grammar, style, spelling and consistency. After that, it was time to print it on “the good paper” and then off to life as a “Doctor of Paper” (to quote one of my former student’s parents).

The problem? I’d gone blind to the text.

I had read it so often, I was filling in words that weren’t there. I wasn’t able to see inconsistencies in style or formatting. I had no idea if I had spelled anything right, spellcheck be damned. So, I found the most trustworthy member of a student-staffed copy desk at my newspaper and cut a deal: I handed her my APA (not to be confused with AP) styleguide along with my dissertation and forked over the cash. In return, she made me look less inept.

When she finished, I ponied up an extra $10 or $20 or whatever I had on me at the time. It was worth it. It also codified a truism that all writers should understand: Everybody needs an editor.

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute hit on this today with his look at the love/hate relationship news writers have with the copy desk. Writers craft prose, copy deskers crush souls. Writers live for imagery, copy deskers imagine the lawsuit that’s coming unless the story gets shored up a bit better. And so it goes, the tug-of-war between writers and editors.

Like everything else on this site, however, editing isn’t just a newspaper issue. EVERYONE in media writing needs an editor. If you don’t believe me, look what happens when an advertising firm thinks, “Yeah, that looks right…”
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As a writer, you should always go through your copy multiple times, looking for various things that can go wrong. As copy editor Jennifer Morehead notes in the upcoming edition of Dynamics of Media Writing:

“I’ve tried to approach stories of every kind in the same basic way: They *must* be accurate, they *must* be clear… Someone always notices,” she said. “Errors in any story, from local crime briefs to big features, erode credibility.”

And when you are done, find someone you trust who can provide your work with another look.

Everyone needs an editor. (And I’m sure there are at least a dozen errors in this post, so feel free to be mine…)

Spell words right or the “Terriorists” win

When it comes to mistakes, people often say, “Well, it’s not set in stone.”

Unless, of course, it is.

COLUMBIA CITY, Ind. (AP) – The designer of a Vietnam War memorial in northern Indiana says a misspelling on a bench seems to be getting too much attention.

The memorial was put in place Tuesday outside the Whitley County courthouse in Columbia City. The word “terrorism” was misspelled on a nearby bench.

The artist argues that it’s such a little thing and that people shouldn’t be paying this much attention to it.

“This is the important part: the guys that gave their lives,” Murphy said. “A mistake on a bench is a pretty small thing to worry about where there are so many other things you should concentrate on.”

And we owe them not only a debt of gratitude, but also the time and effort needed to spell their memorial properly.