It’s our job to offer academic editing services at Stickler, and we love it. We know how hard it is to proofread your own work, and how difficult it is to remember all those grammar rules you learned at school.
But did you know that some of those rules your dreaded 8th grade English teacher taught you aren’t so cut and dry?
Here are five “bendable” rules that you shouldn’t sweat.
1. “You should never split infinitives.”
Before you break into a cold sweat, just remember that an infinitive is a verb with “to” at the beginning: “to go,” for example. Many teachers say that you should never separate the “to” and the verb. So how did the writers of Star Trek get away with saying “to boldly go where no man has gone before”?
Apparently, this rule is the result of Classics teachers who loved Latin so much, they decided to impose certain Latin grammar rules onto English language. In Latin, an infinitive is a single word that can’t be split. Clearly, this isn’t the case in English, where the one-word infinitive (such as “go”) is simply accompanied by “to.”
2. “You should use ‘who’ as a pronoun when talking about a person, not ‘that.’”
Is it “Arya Stark is a girl who has no name” or “Arya Stark is a girl that has no name”?
Apparently, it can be both. Grammar Girl has done the dirty work of checking the major style guides, such as Fowler’s Modern English Usage and The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. These style guides agree that, for the most part, both “who” and “that” are acceptable, and this is more a matter of style.
3. “It’s ‘slowly’ and ‘quickly,’ not ‘slow’ and ‘quick.’”
Words like “slow” and “quick” are what are known as flat adverbs. “He walks slow” and “He walks slowly” mean the same thing. They function like adverbs without -ly on the end.
They used to be much more common than they are now, and the list of common flat adverbs includes flat, sharp, close, and clean. A word of caution, though: while some flat adverbs are interchangeable, others are not. “He works hard” and “He hardly works” definitely don’t mean the same thing.
4. “Never end a sentence with a preposition.”
Those pesky Latinists strike again. In Latin, sentences cannot end with a preposition, but it’s quite normal in a Germanic language like English. Sticking to this rule can cause you to write horribly convoluted, Yoda-like sentences. Ending sentences with prepositions isn’t something you should be particularly worried about. (Or would you rather I said, “Ending sentences with prepositions isn’t something about which you should be particularly worried”?)
5. “You cannot use ‘and’ or ‘but’ at the beginning of a sentence.”
Apparently, no one’s ever been able to find the ancient text to support this rule. But as we all heard (gleefully, I could say) in Finding Forrester, teachers continue to drill this rule into their students’ brains. And then those students correct others for doing so. Or they become teachers who teach this rule to their students. And so on.
As the above paragraph demonstrates, using “and” or “but” or any other conjunction to begin a sentence is fine.
So, stop wasting your time going through your writing with a fine-tooth comb editing out these types of mistakes, especially if you’ll have to write longer, awkwardly constructed sentences to “correct” them!