Uh, maybe an afternoon spent writing indoors in the quiet of an air-conditioned house?

But you don’t believe me, so you decide to try it anyway. You take your notebook, you take your pencils, you leave your phone and electronics behind, and you head up to a secluded corner of the woods. You settle yourself under the graceful canopy of trees. And then you put pencil to paper?paper!?and a thrill of excitement runs through you. You know this is going to be amazing.

Because how could it not be? There’s inspiration in every direction. You could write about the soft rustling leaves, and the way their sound blends into the greenery itself. You also could write about the dew that glistens on the soft early summer leaves and which, by the way, is soaking into the bottom of your jeans right now.

You get up and move your location, wishing you’d thought to bring a towel. Or a cushion. Is that really communing with nature, though? Real nature? And your new writing spot is perfect, with violet flowers spreading out in front of you like a light-dappled velvet counterpane. And it strikes you how each little petal plays its own role in creating that broad violet vista, and then your thoughts wax philosophical. And you go off on tangents. And you amaze yourself at your own brilliance. Also you forget that you were supposed to be writing all this down.

But That’s what the pencil is for! Unfortunately, you left it under the trunk of the first tree, which seems inconvenient, but it turns out to be a good thing.

Because in the same area where you were communing with nature, where in fact you just made one of the most brilliant philosophical observations of your life, some very large animal was also answering nature’s call in a somewhat less philosophical manner. Hazard of writing in the outdoors. You retrieve your pencil, move far from the flowers, and the minutes pass, your pencil scratching away on the pad the only sound in the quiet of the forest. No, not completely silent, but the ambient noises of nature fill your soul.

And your ears. Well, just one ear, a damn mosquito?slap, squish?but surely It’s not as annoying as your phone ringing off the hook at home! You write some more, but the mosquito broke your concentration. You can’t finish the sentence you started. How do you spell that word again? Dictionary?oh, right. No Internet. You write the word anyway. You cross it out. You try it again. No, but really, you should know how to spell this. You write it a third time.

Relax. Breathe. Think about the beauty. The atmosphere, the mood, the not-really quiet around you?an unobtrusive soundtrack for your writing retreat. White noise. Brown noise? How would you describe the color of nature’s sounds? Green, like the soft swish of grass in the breeze. Violet noise, like the barely audible flowers rustling across the way. Or?the black and grey buzz of insects playing merrily in the background. Or the foreground, actually. No, That’s not a black and grey noise, and It’s not playing either. That’s a black-and-yellow-striped noise, an angry noise, a furious noise, a get-the-hell-away-from-my-house noise, and holy shit, you are sitting right next to a beehive. And its inhabitants have just discovered you.

You drop your notepad and flee. To your car. Away from nature and its brutal reality. And you drive all the way home as fast as if the bees are still pursuing you, which maybe they are. And when you get home, you call your notepad a loss, and you load your computer and pull up the Internet and find out that yeah, your spelling of that word was completely off. Glad you checked. And also? There’s white noise here too. The air conditioner makes a lovely background accompaniment to your writing. And who doesn’t want to wax philosophical about staplers and printer ink? Your fingers fly, words singing their way from your mind onto the screen. You write and write and write, and finally you close your laptop, happy with a good day’s work.

And you go to bed satisfied, thinking how lucky you are. You had a great writing session, and you owe your inspiration to the time you spent communing with nature today. You’ll definitely need to do it again.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

— “The Writer’s Toolbox” normally handles those niggling questions of how to get your grammar or sentences just right, but every once in a while The Voice Magazine writers decide on a theme issue. Christina joined in the fun with this submission for the July 1 camping themed issue, and students suggested it was fun (and true) enough that it should be in the Best Of issue. Who am I to argue?

“She thought she could, so she did.”

It’s good to dream?essential, really. Without dreams, we get stuck. Without dreams, we can’t move forward.

But sometimes the opposite is true. As important as it is to dream, It’s equally important to realize when an unrealistic dream is holding us back.

I’m reminded of this as I watch the women’s Olympic gymnastics finals.

As a kid, I was obsessed with gymnastics. I read it, watched it, practiced it in the living room. So my parents got me lessons at a competitive gym, and I was determined to make my Olympic debut a decade later. For years I tried and tried and tried and believed in myself and my dream. I was going to do this.

The problem was, I had no natural talent.

No, really. On a scale of one to ten, I was a negative four. Three years of lessons and all the trying and believing in the world didn’t change that?couldn’t change that.

That’s when I started realizing that maybe it wasn’t the right dream for me anymore.

So I joined the track team at school and found out that I was good at it. To an eleven-year-old, being able to “beat the boys” at the 60-metre dash was the pinnacle of the year, better even than the medals later. I stopped running in high school but took it up again two years ago recreationally, and now I’m on one of those ridiculous earn-a-medal-in-every-state kicks (3 down, 47 to go, but I’ve got my sights set on getting #4 in October). Apparently running was a better fit than gymnastics at that point?and it still is.

As a gymnast, I was stagnating and?if I’m being honest?not really enjoying myself. My dream had long stopped empowering me. Instead it was holding me hostage, tying me down to something that I no longer truly wanted. When I quit gymnastics, I wasn’t really giving up?more like letting go. Letting go to free myself up to dream more fully again.

As an adult, It’s just as easy to get stuck on a dream. Maybe we’ve got a goal that fit with our desires of one, five, ten years ago but that no longer matches what we truly want. Maybe circumstances have changed our perspective, and we’re looking at a different path than the one we originally thought was ideal.

We can keep dreaming big?but that doesn’t mean we can’t dream bigger. It’s okay to evaluate our dreams and modify them if our interests and needs have changed, and even jettison them if they’re no longer the right fit. It’s only when we give ourselves the freedom to turn our old dreams into new, better ones that we can dream fully once again.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

Ever wondered how to?

Maybe it was a fleeting thought. Maybe it was an obsession that haunted you in your sleep that night (you know you’re an editor when?). Either way, rejoice: in this week’s Toolbox, we’ll look at how to approach blogs and blog posts in your writing, and when and whether to apply capital letters, italics, and quote marks.

A Caveat
The following discussion doesn’t apply to academic writing?in that case, follow your professor’s preferred style guide. But in less formal writing, like non-scholarly books, magazine articles, and, well, blog posts (how very meta), this is the approach I’ve found works best.

What?
Generally, I advise writers to use italics for the blog name and quotation marks for individual blog posts.

Like books, magazines, and anthologies, blogs are a collection of smaller, not insignificant works?in this case, blog posts. Following that analogy, it makes sense to treat blogs the same as, say, magazines?italicize the names?and blog posts the same as magazine articles (roman type and quotation marks).

Both APA and Chicago style use this reasoning (in fact, it was one of the changes to The Chicago Manual of Style’s most recent edition). So does Grammar Girl, who published this before Chicago’s 16th edition was released. Chicago even suggests that the same logic can be applied to similar groupings, like podcasts: italicize the title of the series (for example, The Nerdist) but apply quote marks and roman type to the individual episodes themselves.

Example A: I started a blog called The Student’s Path. My first post was entitled “Zen and the Art of Student Maintenance.”

As for capitalization, follow the way the blog itself capitalizes?much like you’d do with uniquely written magazines (like mental_floss) or books (gods in Alabama).

Why?
If you’re wondering why this distinction matters in the scheme of things, consider this. First, there’s the question of clarity. If you treat both blogs and blog posts the same, it may be difficult for your reader to differentiate the two or to figure out how each piece works together in the context of your writing. And reader confusion leads to reader distraction, which pulls them away from what you’re trying to communicate.

And then there’s weight. If you style an entire blog and a single magazine article the same way, you’re making a statement about how much importance or perhaps believability you accord them. Is that fair? Does volume outweigh content?since one good magazine article is probably much more persuasive than a vast compendium of barely readable blogging? Either is arguable, but remember that consistency is key, and what you do in one case you should be ready to apply across the board.

Creating multiple exceptions in this fuzzyish area of style is likely to result in increasing confusion?both for you and your reader. When in doubt, follow what seems to be the trend, and reserve italics for full blog names and quote marks and roman type for individual posts.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

Capitalization
The general rule is to avoid capitalization if the parenthetical is located midsentence, even if the text inside the parentheses is structured as a full sentence.

Example A: He’s not really addressing her argument (she insisted that the situations were different, warranting different treatment).

Of course, proper nouns are an exception.

Example B: Sarah, Jenn, and Kenaia (Jenn’s sister-in-law) drove up together.

If the parentheses are situated separately from the sentence, normal sentence punctuation is used.

What about multiple sentences enclosed within parentheses? If you can avoid it, don’t include them within another sentence.

Example D (incorrect?or just awkward): I passed the ice cream truck on the way home (as always, it was surrounded by customers. It’s really an excellent business model) but continued on my way.

In the above, it’s hard to determine which sentence should be capitalized, which should get a period, and how you make the two sentences line up with established punctuation norms. That’s why in most cases it’s best to rewrite:

Example D (rewritten): I passed the ice cream truck on the way home (as always, it was surrounded by customers; it’s really an excellent business model) but continued on my way.

In editing, I don’t often like to say never, and sometimes applying this preference gets fuzzy in fiction, particularly with short, question-type parentheticals. In cases like Example E below, separating the questions with a comma wouldn’t create the same tone as using question marks. My strategy?and one I’ve seen used elsewhere?would be to use the question marks and eschew capitalization altogether. Can you see the following construction fitting in, say, a Young Adult novel?

Example E: I don’t know what to ask him (why? how? when?), and I’m not sure I’d understand his answer, either.

Punctuation

Punctuation that belongs in the parentheses stays between the parentheses?obviously.

Example G: I didn’t think we’d ever met before (had we?), but she seemed to think otherwise.

But what about punctuation belonging to the surrounding text?

The key here is to treat the parentheses (and the text between them) as one unit with whatever they’re clarifying or explaining. Therefore, commas and periods and other punctuation that would follow a word normally must follow the entire unit, or word + parentheses.

Example F (incorrect): She submitted her assignment, (which was a redo) her essay, and her final project in the same week.

The same applies when a parenthetical follows a phrase or thought or concept:

Example G (incorrect): I had expected some argument, (he was, after all, the child of two lawyers) but he agreed to my terms quite readily.

And watch for double commas, a common error when we try to break the rule and keep it too:

Example H (incorrect): She’d told me that a hundred times, (okay, maybe more like ten), but I kept forgetting.

That’s the basics on parentheses, but don’t forget that capitalizing and punctuating parentheticals correctly isn’t the whole story. As I showed last week, too many parentheticals (even done well) can be altogether too much of a good thing. Use like a good seasoning?just the right amount, and suited to whatever you’re preparing.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

Though parentheses are also used for citations in running text, in this series I’ll focus on parentheses used to interject, to insert a thought or explanation or clarification?in other words, used to convey information that’s not necessarily at the same level of importance as the surrounding text. That’s not to say the information is unimportant. Sometimes parentheses contain an important clarification, even if it’s less central than the word or phrase or concept it’s clarifying. But in many cases, especially in informal writing, parentheticals truly are parentheticals in the colloquial sense: nice-to-know information, a bit of whispered now-you-know it gossip whispered in the ear.

How Short Can You Go?
First, to dispel a myth: there are no rules on how long or short the material in the parentheses should be. Parentheses can enclose a full sentence, a single punctuation mark, or anything in between.

Example A: He agreed to do the job for “as much vodka as I can drink” (!), but he completed it on time and to my satisfaction.

This also applies to situations where the parentheses enclose information that performs more of an explanatory role than offering an aside?like giving a common abbreviation, especially one that might be used more frequently than the full phrase:

Example C: He wrote about the constant fear of encountering improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

When?
Parentheticals really aren’t tricky to use, as long as you keep the punctuation right. It’s the when that is often the tougher call.

And that’s a matter of register?like most stylistic choices.

Parentheticals offer a little something extra to the reader. When that something is an explanation or clarification (as in Example C), parentheses might not be out of place in, say, academic or business writing.

But parentheses enclosing casual asides don’t make sense in that context, because they’re just too informal for the nature of the piece.

In fiction or more informal pieces (like this article), you have a bit more flexibility?because you’re engaging the reader on a more casual level, the conversational tone is expected. But be aware that even in this situation, parentheses can be overdone.

Because (as this sentence shows), a lot of parentheticals back to back (or side by side or in nearby paragraphs) can break up the sentence (or make the flow choppy) and get incredibly annoying (and/or read like a middle schooler’s diary). They’re like italics?a well-placed parenthetical can be very effective to shift the tone of a sentence or paragraph. But they should be used sparingly, a finishing touch rather than the main event.

Nested Parentheses
It’s rare that you need to include a parenthetical within a parenthetical, but it can happen, especially if you’re working with references. Know your style guide here, as practices differ. Chicago style prefers square brackets nested inside parentheses:

Example D: Set up multiple sets of parentheses like this (main text [and the nested parenthetical like this]).

Other styles, particularly in UK English, use sets of nested parentheses:

Example E: Set up multiple sets of parentheses like this (main text (and the nested parenthetical like this (and still further nested parentheticals like this))).

Either way, treat the parentheses like a Matrioshka doll?each complete set within the next biggest. Count them up and don’t leave off the closing parenthesis!

Now that we’ve gotten some of the basics out of the way, it’s time for a look at a few of the more technical aspects of using parentheses?how they interact with capitalization and punctuation rules. In next week’s installment we’ll take on when to capitalize parentheticals, where to put the punctuation, and what to do when you need to fit two sentences into a single set of parentheses.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

You get the idea. But what does it have to do with writing?

Actually, quite a lot.

As an editor, one of the things I have to look out for is biased or offensive language, and That’s cued me in to how the smallest word changes can completely alter the impression we make. Racist slurs, sexist terms, and the like are obvious, easy to spot. But It’s the subtler word choices, often unconsciously made, that set the mood and reflect our own perceptions or what we’ve absorbed from those around us, even if we’re trying to remain neutral.

Take a moment and listen to the phrase: “these people.” Now a personal pronoun like we would convey unity or at least some sort of common ground. But in “these people,” the demonstrative pronoun suggests other demonstratives, like that or those. In other words, the group That’s not like us. And even “people,” while It’s not dehumanizing, has the effect of lumping “the other” into a group?one with a single characteristic, a group without individual traits or interests or needs. A group without individuals at all.

Subtle nuances in language aren’t confined to heated (or rational) argument, of course. If you’ve ever sat in on a courtroom trial, you might have noticed the way lawyers tend to refer to their clients by first name, while the other side gets the more distant “Ms. X.” Victims often get the same treatment, depending on which side the lawyer’s working for.

“Gray Jones attacked Sarah Ken on the morning of January 25,” the prosecutor might say. “Sarah had moved next door to Mr. Jones two months before the attack.” But from the defense you’d be more likely to hear “Gray had been Ms. Ken’s neighbor for two months.”

Elsewhere?especially in journalism?you might find the passive voice used to convey neutrality, victimhood, or blamelessness (“She was assaulted by a stranger”). In business dealings you may have noticed the tendency of management jargon to use dehumanizing language that has the subtle effect of keeping employees in line. Both topics for another day?and I’ll address them individually in a future column.

For now, though, consider the hidden message your word choices convey. Are you saying something you don’t intend or believe? If you write fiction, think too about how the way your character refers to a person, event, or concern is saying something about them?and make sure It’s the impression you want your reader to have. And above all, don’t forget that readers come with their own biases and perceptions, so if You’re in doubt, talk to someone with different views from your own, and get their take on what you’ve written.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but It’s just as sharp?and it can cut. Use it with caution.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

Uh, maybe an afternoon spent writing indoors in the quiet of an air-conditioned house?

But you don’t believe me, so you decide to try it anyway. You take your notebook, you take your pencils, you leave your phone and electronics behind, and you head up to a secluded corner of the woods. You settle yourself under the graceful canopy of trees. And then you put pencil to paper?paper!?and a thrill of excitement runs through you. You know this is going to be amazing.

Because how could it not be? There’s inspiration in every direction. You could write about the soft rustling leaves, and the way their sound blends into the greenery itself. You also could write about the dew that glistens on the soft early summer leaves and which, by the way, is soaking into the bottom of your jeans right now.

You get up and move your location, wishing you’d thought to bring a towel. Or a cushion. Is that really communing with nature, though? Real nature? And your new writing spot is perfect, with violet flowers spreading out in front of you like a light-dappled velvet counterpane. And it strikes you how each little petal plays its own role in creating that broad violet vista, and then your thoughts wax philosophical. And you go off on tangents. And you amaze yourself at your own brilliance. Also you forget that you were supposed to be writing all this down.

But That’s what the pencil is for! Unfortunately, you left it under the trunk of the first tree, which seems inconvenient, but it turns out to be a good thing.

Because in the same area where you were communing with nature, where in fact you just made one of the most brilliant philosophical observations of your life, some very large animal was also answering nature’s call in a somewhat less philosophical manner. Hazard of writing in the outdoors. You retrieve your pencil, move far from the flowers, and the minutes pass, your pencil scratching away on the pad the only sound in the quiet of the forest. No, not completely silent, but the ambient noises of nature fill your soul.

And your ears. Well, just one ear, a damn mosquito?slap, squish?but surely It’s not as annoying as your phone ringing off the hook at home! You write some more, but the mosquito broke your concentration. You can’t finish the sentence you started. How do you spell that word again? Dictionary?oh, right. No Internet. You write the word anyway. You cross it out. You try it again. No, but really, you should know how to spell this. You write it a third time.

Relax. Breathe. Think about the beauty. The atmosphere, the mood, the not-really quiet around you?an unobtrusive soundtrack for your writing retreat. White noise. Brown noise? How would you describe the color of nature’s sounds? Green, like the soft swish of grass in the breeze. Violet noise, like the barely audible flowers rustling across the way. Or?the black and grey buzz of insects playing merrily in the background. Or the foreground, actually. No, That’s not a black and grey noise, and It’s not playing either. That’s a black-and-yellow-striped noise, an angry noise, a furious noise, a get-the-hell-away-from-my-house noise, and holy shit, you are sitting right next to a beehive. And its inhabitants have just discovered you.

You drop your notepad and flee. To your car. Away from nature and its brutal reality. And you drive all the way home as fast as if the bees are still pursuing you, which maybe they are. And when you get home, you call your notepad a loss, and you load your computer and pull up the Internet and find out that yeah, your spelling of that word was completely off. Glad you checked. And also? There’s white noise here too. The air conditioner makes a lovely background accompaniment to your writing. And who doesn’t want to wax philosophical about staplers and printer ink? Your fingers fly, words singing their way from your mind onto the screen. You write and write and write, and finally you close your laptop, happy with a good day’s work.

And you go to bed satisfied, thinking how lucky you are. You had a great writing session, and you owe your inspiration to the time you spent communing with nature today. You’ll definitely need to do it again.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

Her response was equally enthusiastic?heck yes! She thought the convention was stupid anyway.

The AP’s decision was announced at the American Copy Editors Society conference this past March, but it’s only as of June 1, 2016, that AP style no longer requires Internet to be capitalized.

If this comes as surprising news to you?because you can’t fathom why we’re still capitalizing Internet in 2016?you’re not alone. Digital native or not, I’ve long found the convention unnecessary, one of those distinctions preserved for its own sake rather than for its usefulness in helping us communicate. Yes, technically there is a difference between an internet and the Internet, but let’s face it?the vast majority of us mean only one thing when we say the word. Lowercasing or capitalizing, there’s little chance for confusion. With more and more traditionally capitalized words being lowercased, it makes sense from a stylistic side too.

Still, it’s a big deal in the editing world when a change like that comes through, and change is slow?very slow. So far, only the AP Stylebook has made an official decision on the matter. The Chicago Manual of Style editors haven’t announced a similar change, though they already prefer lowercased web?another newly lowercased word in AP style as of June 1 (yes, AP style preferred it written as “Web” before?and many publications ignored that). Canadian Press Stylebook editor James McCarten wrote on Twitter on June 2 that the internet/Internet distinction was “under review,” so Canadian journalists and editors may soon see something official coming their way.

Which means that at some point The Voice might address the issue. I’d like to see the Canadian Press decision first before I make a prediction, but given the fact that the Voice style guide already notes that the lowercased spelling of Internet is becoming more widely accepted, I suspect it’ll be eventually be written as “internet” here too.

In the meantime, how should you handle the word as a writer? Know your audience. If your professor swears by Chicago, stick to “Internet.” If your company’s preferences are ambiguous, it can’t hurt to ask, though you might get reactions ranging from “Who cares?” to “You’re the perfect person to update the style guide?here you go.”

If you’re working with fiction, you have a lot more leeway?there’s no style guide specifically for fiction other than whatever your publisher gives you?so go with your preference.

Internet or internet? How do you feel about the AP decision?

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

Pronouns
As a brief refresher, pronouns are words that stand in for nouns?words like we, you, I, and so on. There are several classes of pronouns, but for the purposes of this article I’ll focus on personal pronouns, particularly one, you, we, they, and I.

Shifty Pronouns
Pronoun shift occurs when one is writing to a certain audience, or about a certain situation, and then you shift the pronouns to cover other situations where we might not expect them to be an issue. Did you catch what I did there? Jumping from “one” to “you” to “we” in a single sentence is a particularly egregious example, but if You’re reviewing it quickly, it might slip through unnoticed.

Pronoun shift is very common, even among experienced writers, and there are times, like in certain types of informal writing, where you may wish to mix pronouns to make a point. But allowing them to creep into your formal or academic writing will take away from your assertions or analysis, or, at the very least, risk confusing the reader.

Example A: When one looks at the vastness of the prairie, at the boundless grassy fields, at the hazy edges of the blue dome overhead, and at the thin ribbon of road winding off into the horizon, you may feel overwhelmingly small.

In Example A above, the complexity of the sentence buries the pronoun shift, but It’s there. To improve the sentence, you can rework it so that the pronouns are consistent:

Example A (using “one”): When one looks at the vastness of the prairie, at the boundless grassy fields, at the hazy edges of the blue dome overhead, and at the thin ribbon of road winding off into the horizon, one may feel overwhelmingly small.

You can also rework the sentence to include just one pronoun:

Example A (reworked): Looking at the vastness of the prairie, at the boundless grassy fields, at the hazy edges of the blue dome overhead, and at the thin ribbon of road winding off into the horizon, one may feel overwhelmingly small.

The Singular They
Sometimes pronoun shift sneaks into your work when You’re trying to find a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun. One is a choice, of course, but working with it can create awkward or stilted sentences. Ditto constructs like he/she, s/he, or alternating he and she?and they only account for binary genders.

One of the biggest recognized style changes in 2015 was a much wider general acceptance of the so-called singular they, or they used as a gender-neutral pronoun to cover third-person singular case. Know your audience, of course?there are still holdouts who refuse to accept this usage?but remember that in many cases, the singular they can be preferable to clunky workarounds.

Example B: A student may appeal to the academic dean if that student feels he/she has been subjected to grade deflation.

Example B (using the singular they): A student may appeal to the academic dean if that student feels they have been subjected to grade deflation.

Note here that It’s important to watch for any risk of ambiguity between the singular and the plural they; if I’d rewritten Example B as “A student may appeal to the academic dean if they feel they have been subjected to grade deflation,” it might have been unclear whether the initial “they” referred to just the student or to the student and the academic dean together. In the following sentence, though, there’s no such issue:

Example C: A student may appeal the decision if that student feels he/she has been subjected to grade deflation.

Example C (using the singular they): A student may appeal the decision if they feel they have been subjected to grade deflation.

Pronoun shift may not seem like a big issue, but it can lessen the professionalism of your voice?especially in the world of formal or academic writing. When You’re revising your term papers for the umpteenth time this spring, keep an eye out for shifty pronouns. Your reader?and your grader?will thank you.

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.

Comma Splices
A comma splice occurs when two independent clauses?clauses that can stand alone as complete sentences?are separated by a comma.

Example A: Sarah went to the store, I raked the leaves.

In the example above, there are two independent clauses, or clauses that could stand independently as sentences:

Sarah went to the store.
I raked the leaves.

Example A shows a comma splice. What’s the problem here? The comma is considered a weaker link, and the two independent clauses need a stronger separation like a period, a semicolon, a conjunction like and or but, or a different word that expresses a relationship between the two sentences (like while).

Example A (revised): Sarah went to the store. I raked the leaves.
Example A (revised): Sarah went to the store; I raked the leaves.
Example A (revised): Sarah went to the store, and I raked the leaves.
Example A (revised): Sarah went to the store while I raked the leaves.

As you see, there are many options for fixing comma splices. However, you may not always want to do so.

But Sometimes…

Look at the following example:

Example B: Trust me, I am on your side.

Technically, it meets the definition of a comma splice. There are two independent clauses:

Trust me.
I am on your side.

And it wouldn’t be wrong to replace the comma with a semicolon, for example, or a linking word:

Example B (revised): Trust me; I am on your side.
Example B (revised): Trust me, for I am on your side.

However, if you compare the revised versions with the original version, you’ll notice that the sound is different. You can use a more informal punctuation mark, like an em dash, to preserve that original sound, but in some cases, leaving a deliberate comma splice may be okay.

In fact, Garner’s Modern Usage specifically states that comma splices may be acceptable when “(1) the clauses are short and closely related, (2) there is no danger of a miscue, and (3) the context is informal” (Garner, 2009, p.724).

In Example B above, the clauses are short and closely related, and It’s easy to figure out the meaning; if the context is less formal (think fictional dialogue or informal writing), most grammarians will be okay with its presence.

Not all, though, and not every instance. Know your audience, know your reader, and know their preferences, and make sure your rule-breaking flows with the writing rather than standing out.

When in doubt, fix the splice.

References
Garner, Bryan. Garner’s Modern American Usage, Third Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009

Christina M. Frey is a book editor, literary coach, and lover of great writing. For more tips and techniques for your toolbox, follow her on Twitter (@turntopage2) or visit her blog.