Style Sheet: Mundane Good Habits of Competent Writers Dr. Jacqueline Long Department of Classical Studies

• Apostrophes mark possession (of nouns: Agamemnon's; the king's) or contractions (shouldn't).
  • American English uses apostrophes for possession by singular nouns (Aeschylus's), except for Jesus' or if the noun is a name that ends with –es pronounced "–eez" (Euripides').
  • Possessive pronouns don't use apostrophes: his, hers, its, theirs, yours, ours.
  • Plurals, including year-numbers and athletic teams, don't use apostrophes unless the plural is possessing something (550s BC; the Cubs; as opposed to the authors' poems for poems of more than one author).

• Clauses, including sentences, need both a subject and a predicate in order to be complete. The subject identifies the entity or concept {the clause is saying something about}. The predicate says {what the clause is saying about its subject}.
  • Sentence fragments can work in conversation, when other parties present to the conversation understand how the rest of the thought needs to go. But in expository writing sentence fragments collapse and fail to support adequate meaning. Throwing your reader into confusion...
  • Run-on sentences can legitimately work if they're punctuated correctly.
    • A colon can even attach a string of sentence-fragments to a clause, as a list filling out an idea: Please bring with you the following items: the text assigned for the day, your notebook, an instrument that writes effectively in your notebook so you can take more notes, and your ideas about the assignment.
    • A colon also can attach a second clause as some kind of explanation of an idea in the first clause: Don't ride your bike without a helmet: I don't want you to get hurt.
    • A semicolon can attach a second clause to a first as a kind of continuation; a comma makes too weak a connection for the bond to hold.
• Build statements in such a way that their structure makes the meaning of their ideas cohere.
  • Agreement shows that nouns and verbs have one another in mind. (It is violated, for example, by the Ogden Nash verse, "Tell me, o octopus, I begs, / is those things arms or is they legs?") Agreement also applies to pronouns' reference back to the nouns they [i.e., the pronouns] are standing for.
  • Dangling elements too easily attach to the wrong item, often not with the compensatory funniness of the elephant in Groucho Marx's pajamas. ("The other day, I shot an elephant in my pajamas.")

• Make your words count. Delete expressions that don't add to the meaning of what you're saying: for example, Clytaemnestra is a person who commits murder expresses the idea more impactfully without the extra words.

• When however is used to mean "but," it does not begin a clause. Inside a clause, however, it adds emphasis to the word or phrase it comes after. When you want to begin a sentence with a word that means "but," use "but" or "nevertheless" or some other phrase indicating the sentence being introduced contrasts with the thought of the previous sentence.
  • Neither semicolons (correct) nor comma-splices (incorrect) change how "however" operates: when it means "but," it does not correctly begin the run-on portion of a sentence any more than it correctly begins a freestanding sentence.
  • The only time "however" may begin a sentence is when it means "in whatever manner" or "by whatever means": However he attained the throne, he was ready to use violence to keep it.

• Always identify source-passages, whenever you're referring to a specific piece of text, paraphrasing it, or quoting it verbatim. Line-numbers are usually clearest for plays and poems, but page-numbers can work for prose.

• Neither the passive voice nor any other form of anonymously out-sourcing ideas excuses you from responsibility to ensure the statements you include in your academic writing are valid and accurate. Since, for example, the poet Sappho lived in the late-7th and early-6th century BC, a sentence, "Sappho is known as a fifth-century poet" is just as wrong as "Sappho wrote poetry during the fifth century." She didn't. Nobody who knows what he or she is talking about would say she did. Get the information correct and state it directly. Usually the active voice communicates more vividly than the passive.

• The demonstrative adjectives this, that, these, and those single out a particular noun as more present to or more remote from the context: This morning I got up early; that day I had to rush.
  • If the noun is the same for both items in a contrasting statement opposing a this/that or these/those pair, the noun may be omitted from one member of the pair, usually the second: These pastries are delicious; those are too sweet.
  • But if the demonstrative is being used to point to an idea generally present in the statement, use a plain pronoun if the idea is clear enough not to need to be specified with a noun, or use a noun with the demonstrative if it isn’t: Have I communicated this rule clearly? Will you follow it?

Revised 18 June 2019 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/