GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, AND OTHER CONVENTIONS
[from: Miles, Thomas H. Critical Thinking and Writing for Science and Technology. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.]
Agreement of Nouns and Pronouns
Agreement between a Verbal Phrase and the Subject
Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses
Announcing Lists and Definitions
Using the Dash, instead of Parentheses or Commas, for Special Emphasis
GRAMMAR
Use singular verbs with singular subjects and plural verbs with plural subjects.
Examples:
Fluidized-bed technology allows coal to be burned with fewer noxious emissions.
Various technologies for enhanced oil recovery are receiving increased funding from the Department of Energy.
Errors in agreement can occur when the subject and verb are separated by one or more words.
Correct: The solubility of gases increases with pressure.
Incorrect: The solubility of gases increase with pressure.
Agreement of Nouns and Pronouns
Use a singular pronoun if its antecedent is singular and a plural one if its antecedent is plural.
Examples:
The dog begged for its food.
The coach thanked the players for their discipline and hard work.
Agreement between a Verbal Phrase and the Subject
Make the implied subject of a verbal phrase identical to the subject of the sentence.
Incorrect: Having stored the blood, the lab was closed.
The implied subject of "having stored" is some person, but the subject of the sentence is "the lab," an entity, not a person.
Correct: Having stored the blood, the medical technician closed the lab.
Use parallel grammatical structure for parallel elements. Incorrect: She enjoys swimming, playing racquetball, and to run.
Correct: She enjoys swimming, playing racquetball, and running.
Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses
Use "that" to introduce restrictive clauses and "which" to introduce nonrestrictive clauses.
A restrictive clause specifically identifies its antecedent or referent.
A nonrestrictive clause just adds interesting information.
Restrictive: The beams are sunk only six feet deep because of the rail lines that run under each end of the bridge.
This sentence means: The beams are sunk only six feet deep because of those specific rail lines running under each end of the bridge.
Nonrestrictive: The beams are sunk only six feet deep because of the rail lines, which were laid down before anyone considered building a bridge at that location.
Here, the "which" clause only adds interesting information; the rail lines are already assumed to have been adequately identified.
Restrictive clauses are not preceded by or enclosed with commas. Nonrestrictive clauses are preceded by a comma if they occur at the end of a sentence and are enclosed with commas if they appear within the sentence.
PUNCTUATION
The following guide shows how to punctuate sentences. Recall that coordinating conjunctions are "and, but, or, nor, for, so, and yet" and that adverbial conjunctions are "therefore, consequently, however, nevertheless, also, finally, thus," and so on.
1. Two separate sentences: Subject + verb. Subject + verb.
We went to the Air and Space Museum. I was surprised that Lindbergh's plane was so small.
2. One compound sentence: Subject + verb, coor. conj. subject + verb.
We went to the Air and Space Museum, and we saw the movie on early, manned flight.
3. One sentence with a compound predicate: Subject + verb coor. conj. verb.
We went to the Air and Space Museum and stayed all day. We went to the Air and Space Museum but left at 1 p.m.
4. Two separate sentences: Subject + verb. adv. conj., subject + verb.
We went to the Air and Space Museum. However, the lines were so long that we didn't get in.
Announcing Lists and Definitions
Use a colon (:) to announce lists and definitions.
A List
Psychiatric researchers have identified three of the bodily systems in which stress can be measured: blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature.
A Definition
Two days of the conference were devoted to presentations on entropy: a theory derived from the second law of thermodynamics, stating that the universe follows an irreversible path to disorder.
Using the Dash, instead of Parentheses or Commas, for Special Emphasis
System commands -- those that activate the computer's operating system -- are usually easy to learn.
Use hyphens to join words that function as a compound adjective.
Most dealers in antique cars highly value the traditional, 12-cylinder engine that Jaguar developed.
The manager of the systems-engineering division decided to initiate a computer-based outlining program for her engineers to use when writing reports.
Enclose Interrupters
Meltdowns, this author assures us, are always possible.
The dentist, working quickly and efficiently, extracted the wisdom tooth before the patient's anesthesia wore off.
All the tests, therefore, were graded again.
Punctuate Introductory Elements
When your crew has finished drilling, the well should be 1285 ft deep. Outside, the hotel was being surrounded by helmeted police.
When we drove by, the church door was open.
The diet recommends a daily intake of 2 TBS of fiber, such as wheat bran.
Summary
In the last analysis, a sense of the right punctuation is more an art than a science, combining as it does a feel for the pulse of spoken English, an understanding of the grammatical principles of written English, and a broad exposure to the variations of punctuation found in excellent writers. Aside from the period, the comma is the most frequently used mark of punctuation. In the following article written for Time, Pico Iyer pays tribute to the nature and power of this ubiquitous little mark.
Pico Iyer
The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said, could it not, of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma, unless it be breath itself?
Punctuation, one is taught, has a point: to keep up law and order. Punctuation marks are the road signs placed along the highway of our communication, to control speeds, provide directions and prevent head-on collisions. A period has the unblinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semicolon is a stop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again.
By establishing the relations between words, punctuation establishes the relations between the people using words. That may be one reason why schoolteachers exalt it and lovers defy it ("we love each other and belong to each other let's don't ever hurt each other Nicole let's don't ever hurt each other," wrote Gary Gilmore to his girlfriend). A comma, he must have known, "separates inseparables," in the clinching words of H.W. Fowler, King of English Usage.
Punctuation, then, is a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.) Small wonder, then, that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E. E. Cummings first felt free to commit "God" to the lower case.
Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("a Caramba! Quien sabe"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity, and divinity of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, SubCommittees and Secretariats.
Yet punctuation is something more than a culture's birthmark: it scores the music in our minds, gets our thoughts moving to the rhythm of our hearts. Punctuation is the notation in the sheet music of our words, telling us when to rest, or when to raise our voices; it acknowledges that the meaning of our discourse, as of any symphonic composition, lies not in the units but in the pauses, the pacing and the phrasing. Punctuation is the way one bats one's eyes, lowers one's voice or blushes demurely Punctuation adjusts the tone and color and volume till the feeling comes into perfect focus: not disgust exactly, but distaste; not lust, or like, but love.
Punctuation, in short, gives us the human voice, and all the meanings that lie between the words. "You aren't young, are you?" loses its innocence when it loses the question mark. Every child knows the menace of a dropped apostrophe (the parent's "Don't do that" shifting into the more slowly enunciated "Do not do that"), and every believer, the ignominy of having his faith reduced to "faith." Add an exclamation point to "To be or not to be . . ." and the gloomy Dane has all the resolve he needs; add a comma, and the noble sobriety of "God save the Queen" becomes a cry of desperation bordering on double sacrilege.
Sometimes, of course, our markings may be simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle agedness, but something else.
Thus all these tiny scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.
Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between "Jane (whom I adore)" and "Jane, whom I adore," and the difference between them both and "Jane, whom I adore," marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place," in Isaac Babel's lovely words: a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart.
Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods.
From Iyer, Pico. 13 June, 1988. In praise of the humble comma. Time, 80. Copyright C) 1988 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted BV Permission from Time.