Language myths hinder graceful writing
Wordsmiths split hairs on infinitives, verbs

Chapter 14 from Championship Writing: 50 Ways to Improve Your Writing
By Paula LaRocque

Linguistic and grammatical myths sometimes get in the way of graceful prose and good editing. We commonly hear, for example, that the word none is always singular. It isn't, as any number of respected reference works will testify. The word can mean "no few" or "no several" as well as "no one." And this is nothing new; none has been used with both singular and plural verbs for many centuries.

But we've heard somewhere that none is always singular, so we believe it. We don't question the myth; we don't investigate. Instead, we genuflect before the irrational and create monstrosities such as "none of the people is pleased with the outcome." And although that diction offends both the ear and common sense, we're satisfied because we've followed some imaginary rule.

The language is not as perverse as we're willing to believe. Rules and traditions promote accuracy, clarity and grace. They solve rather than create problems.

When a "rule" results in the unnatural, ambiguous or ugly, we should look it up. The chances are good we'll find no such rule exists. Then we - writers, editors and educators alike - can stop parroting and perpetuating linguistic nonsense. At the very least, since words are our business, we should also make it our business to know a little more about them.

Here's another commonly held but mistaken notion: It's wrong to split infinitives. In the 1800s, Latin was the model for good writing, and wordsmiths tried to make English conform to Latin. The attempt was impractical where infinitives were concerned because the infinitive in Latin is one word and cannot be split. On the other hand, we occasionally must split the infinitive in English. The most we can say about split infinitives - and it should be enough to keep us from splitting them willy nilly - is that they're often awkward and unattractive. But they're not wrong.

Nothing about a split infinitive makes it desirable in itself.

But, as H. W. Fowler writes, it is preferable to real ambiguity or patent artificiality. We should feel perfectly free to split an infinitive when the unsplit version is clumsy or unclear. "We wanted to immediately leave for the airport" splits an infinitive and is the worse for it. But try unsplitting the following sentences, and see the resulting distortion, error or ambiguity that results:

"Administrators expect profits to more than triple this year."

"The committee plans to legally ban frank disclosures."

"We hope to strongly protest advancing the proposal."

Those examples make it clear that a split infinitive is sometimes not only permissible, but necessary. While the notion that split infinitives are wrong has wide currency, another language myth seems perpetuated chiefly by the journalistic community. That's the odd and insupportable practice of unsplitting perfectly clear and natural split compound verbs (should probably go, will never be). Like the split infinitive, the split verb phrase is not an error. Good writers and speakers split them all the time.

Obviously, we should avoid awkward splits. "He drove the car that I had last year given to my cousin" should be "the car that I had given to my cousin last year." But "the proposal was tentatively approved" is just fine - better, in fact, than "the proposal tentatively was approved," or "the proposal was approved tentatively." Here's a handful of split verbs from good writers. All are fine as they stand, and some are better as they stand than if unsplit. 

Marshall Frady: Clinton was also confronted with the decision on whether to allow the execution. . . . The matter of Ricky Rector could hardly have seemed a more incidental concern in the political havoc surrounding Clinton at that moment.

Jamaica Kincaid: I accept that I now live in a climate that has four seasons, one of which I do not fully appreciate.

Vikram Seth: Many people were literally squeezed to death upright against each other.

Ken Auletta: Their names were immediately filed in his PowerBook.

William Trevor: They were in their sixties and had scarcely parted from each other in the forty-two years of their marriage.

Terrence Rafferty: Rodriguez's grubby little thriller has generated a nice buzz on the film-festival circuit. . . and it's now being distributed by a major studio.

John Lahr: Now that history has put paid to the delirium of ideology, Rattigan's intelligence and quiet audacity are more easily seen.

Katha Pollitt: I was once invited to contribute to an anthology about potatoes. . . .

Those sentences are excerpted from the New Yorker, but we could find them anywhere. Trust me: There's a whole literate world out there that has never even heard of the "problem" of the split verb. In this as in all regards, the practice of good editing should be to make writing better without making it worse.

Paula LaRocque is the assistant managing editor and writing coach of the Dallas Morning News. Her new book, Championship Writing: 50 Ways to Improve Your Writing, is a collection of her best columns on writing written for Quill magazine. 206 pages, softcover, Marion Street Press, Inc., ISBN 0-9665176-3-6.  You can order it here.

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