By Author: By PHILIP B. CORBETT

Is By PHILIP B. CORBETT your favorite writer? Why not get everything By PHILIP B. CORBETT publishes, all the articles, news, and resources, across all sites, delivered directly to you? Choose your method of delivery on the Writers page.

Below are the latest articles from By PHILIP B. CORBETT. The results are culled from all sources Workflow: Writing follows.

  • When Spell-Check Can’t Help

    Just when I think I’ve chronicled all the similar-word mix-ups we’re likely to encounter, I see new and surprising ones, as well as new instances of past missteps.

    There’s no easy cure for this problem – just more attentive writing and editing, and the help of a dictionary if you have a queasy feeling about that word.

  • The Trouble With ‘Like’

    Here’s my latest reminder on the use and misuse of “like.”

    Using “like” as a conjunction, to introduce a full clause, is common in casual conversation. But this colloquial construction grates on the ear of many sophisticated readers, and we should generally avoid it.

    And yet … it’s never hard to find new examples:

  • Everything From This to That

    My colleague Vanessa Gordon and others have noted our frequent use of what critics call “false ranges.” These constructions generally are framed with phrases like “everything from … to …” or “ranging from … to …” and include two or more disparate items: “The legislation includes everything from stricter bank regulations to new taxes on overseas corporations.”

    Judging from how often this idiom appears in our prose, many of our writers and editors obviously have no qualms about it. Other editors, as Vanessa said, take a hard line against the construction, “believing that if a list doesn’t run from high to low, short to tall, past to present, it should not be called a range.”

  • Everything Old Is Hip Again

    We try hard to shed our old image as stodgy and out of it. Perhaps too hard, sometimes.

    How else to explain our constant invocation of the old/new slang “hipster”? As a colleague pointed out, we’ve used it more than 250 times in the past year.

  • Red Pencils Ready?

    This week’s roundup of grammar, style and other editing missteps comes in the form of the After Deadline Quiz. The list includes contributions from colleagues and from several sharp-eyed readers.

  • Who? Whom? Whatever

    Why oh why can’t we get this right?

    Use “who” when it’s the subject of the verb in a relative clause, “whom” when it’s the object. Don’t be fooled by an intervening phrase of attribution.

  • When Spell-Check Can’t Help

    More entries for the mix-up file – including a very familiar one.

  • Loose Connections

    Dangling participles are popping up everywhere we turn. Remember, normally the participle or other modifying phrase should be immediately followed by the person or thing being described. My colleague Ken Paul pointed out these two recent missteps:

  • Phrases We Love Too Much

    I thought the faddish use of “on steroids” to describe anything bigger or splashier had run its course. But three new examples in less than two weeks made me think again.

    Given its origins, the metaphor seems not only overdone but also a bit tone-deaf. After all, baseball players on steroids are not really new and improved; they’re cheating.

  • The ‘Tweet’ Debate

    After I distributed the in-house version of After Deadline to my colleagues last week, word leaked out that I had supposedly “banned” use of the word “tweet” to refer to messages posted on Twitter.

    I had suggested that outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” should still be treated as colloquial rather than as standard English. It can be used for special effect, or in places where a colloquial tone is appropriate, but should not be used routinely in straight news articles. I had made this point before; my memo was simply a reminder.

  • 50 Fancy Words

    Times readers are literate and well educated. But privately, away from the cocktail party, some of them may wonder: what exactly does “jejune” mean, anyway? If someone put a gun to my head, could I give a precise definition of “atavistic”?

  • Bright Passages

    Another small sampling of sparkling prose from recent editions.

    •••

    An arresting opening for the front-page oil-spill overview by Campbell Robertson, Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder (National, 5/25):

    PORT FOURCHON, La. – For weeks, it was a disaster in abstraction, a threat floating somewhere out there.

    Not anymore. In the last week, the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico has revealed itself to an angry and desperate public, smearing tourist beaches, washing onto the shorelines of sleepy coastal communities and oozing into marshy bays that fishermen have worked for generations. It has even announced its arrival on the Louisiana coast with a fittingly ugly symbol: brown pelicans, the state bird, dyed with crude.

  • Hyphen Trouble

    Sure, it’s nitpicking to complain about hyphens. But if the goal is perfection – and it is, however elusive – we have to get the little things right.

    In his Modern American Usage, Garner cites this rather severe judgment by Wilson Follett: “Nothing gives away the incompetent amateur more quickly than the typescript that neglects this mark of punctuation [the hyphen] or that employs it where it is not wanted.”

  • More FAQs on Style

    The aversion to splitting infinitives is strongly held in some quarters, but weakly supported. Here’s what The Times’s stylebook says:

    split infinitives are accepted by grammarians but irritate many readers. When a graceful alternative exists, avoid the construction: to show the difference clearly is better than to clearly show the difference. (Do not use the artificial clearly to show the difference.) When the split is unavoidable, accept it: He was obliged to more than double the price. Note, however, that compound verbs are an unrelated issue: they should usually be separated (as this one was) when used with an adverb.

  • News, Not Chatter

    Here’s the latest of my increasingly desperate pleas to stem the flood of colloquialisms in news stories.

    Stodginess is not the goal. But we take the news seriously, and our news report should sound serious – not like teenage slang, TV happy-talk or Twitter chatter.

  • Whom Goes There?

    We try, but we still haven’t quite mastered the whole who/whom situation.

    At the risk of stating the obvious yet again, “who” is used as the subject of a relative clause; “whom” is used for an object.

  • When Spell-Check Can’t Help

    A couple of recent entries for the “sound-alike confusion” file.

  • Danger! Danglers Everywhere!

    We’ve suffered another outbreak of dangling participles and other misconnected modifiers.

    Be alert whenever a participle construction or other modifying phrase comes at the start of a sentence. In general, the noun or pronoun being described should follow that phrase directly.

  • FAQs on Style

    Many topics come up repeatedly in reader comments and e-mail messages to After Deadline. Unfortunately I’m not able to offer a direct response to each comment (truth be told, After Deadline is a sideline for me). But one thoughtful reader suggested that I compile answers for some of the most common questions.

    Here’s a start in that effort. I’ll add other topics as they come up, and I’ll link to this item from each week’s column so readers can find it easily.

  • Words We Love Too Much

    A recent appearance led me to check up on a word that has become a favorite of Times writers: “emblematic.”

    Its popularity is understandable, particularly in the “nut graf” — that key paragraph that sums up a story’s main point. With a single word, the writer can leap from the particular example or development at hand to the broader sweep that persuades editors – and perhaps readers – of a story’s larger significance. In this function, “emblematic” resembles the “rare window” construction (see the second item here) that I’ve remarked on before.

  • The Chatty Effect

    As I’ve often noted, we strive for vivid and lively writing in straight news as well as in features. But in most cases, slang or colloquial words aren’t the best approach. Those expressions can seem out of place in news stories, undercutting the serious and literate tone we seek.

  • A Bit About ‘That’

    My colleague Ken Paul notes that we often stumble in deciding whether to use or omit the conjunction “that” after a verb like “said.”

  • Bright Passages

    Occasionally I put the carping aside to take note of some of the fine writing that appears in our pages, both print and Web. Here’s another small sampling of sparking prose from recent editions.

  • Red Pencils Ready?

    This week’s roundup of grammar, style and other editing missteps comes in the form of the After Deadline Quiz. The list includes contributions from colleagues and from several sharp-eyed readers.

  • Whether (or Not)

    This week: redundant or not?

  • The Little Things

    Last week, a reader noticed a small but annoying usage error in an online article: the misuse of the contraction “it’s” for the possessive “its,” a staple of fourth-grade English essays.

    This reader cared enough to alert us via e-mail, and editors here made the fix online. When I (gently) chastised some colleagues for letting this slip through, we found out that the error had actually been fixed in the original editing process. But because of an arcane technical glitch, an earlier, partially edited version of the story was initially posted online.

    Our copy editors were blameless; our technical experts went to work to fix the glitch. But the little episode had several lessons.

  • Tangled Passages

    There’s no formula to determine when a sentence is overloaded or threatening to run off the rails. But there are warning signs. Sentences of 40, 50 or 60 words are awfully hard to make readable. When you get up to four or five commas, think again. A half-dozen verbs usually mean trouble. And when a reader’s mind has to move back and forth and back again, all before hitting a period, it’s time to take another look.

  • When Spell-Check Can’t Help

    A few recent entries in the file of mixed-up words, including one of the most common mix-ups.

  • Mixing It Up

    My colleague Patrick LaForge points out that we’ve been doing a lot of scrambling lately.

    In one recent edition, we told readers: “With a crucial 60th vote in the Senate at stake, the perceived tightening has sent Democratic operatives scrambling to Massachusetts to help the Coakley campaign …”

    Elsewhere on the same day, we wrote: “From the heart of Brooklyn’s Haitian community in Flatbush to Little Haiti in Miami, the reports of the devastating earthquake left Haitian Americans scrambling for information about the fate of relatives.” Another section reported that opera companies were “scrambling to get their product into cinemas.”

  • Spelling Check

    Here’s a new nominee for the title of most-frequently-misspelled word (by percentage of uses): “discernible.”

    Like “legible” and “divisible,” it ends in “-ible” rather than “-able” (the spelling generally depends on how the original Latin verb was conjugated). In the past year we used “discernible” in articles 92 times and “discernable” 15 times, for an error rate of about 14 percent.


Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: InCopy Gurus Unleashed
Powered by FeedBurner

  • Popular Search Terms

    Curious what others are searching for? Below are the most popular search terms over the last 30 days.

    • Member Site

    Empowering, Informing, Connecting
    Creative Professionals™

    www.WorkflowNetwork.com

    By Pariah S. Burke

    Get Empowered

    Get Informed

    Get Connected

    Member Site

    Empowering, Informing, Connecting
    Creative Professionals™

    www.WorkflowNetwork.com

    By Pariah S. Burke

    Get Empowered

    Get Informed

    Get Connected