Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work

(It would be really nice if people actually read these handouts and applied the prescriptions to their stories.)

1. Can not is not a synonym for cannot. “I cannot go to the store” means I can’t go to the store. “I can not go to the store” means I have the power to refrain from going to the store. 99.999% of the time, what you mean to say is cannot.

2. “Joe is five years old” needs no hyphens. But when you turn the predicate into a compound adjective or compound noun, you do need hyphens: “Joe is a five-year-old chess prodigy”; “Joe, a five-year-old, mated the Grand Master in sixteen moves.”

3. In dialogue, the “he said/she said” stuff is called attribution. Other attributions are various synonyms for or embellishments on said. As a general rule, you end a sentence of dialogue with a comma only when what follows is an attribution:

   “I hate you,” she said.

   “I hate you, too,” he replied, grinning fiendishly.

   If what follows a sentence(s) of dialogue is not an attribution, you normally end it with a period:

   “I hate you.” She brandished the skillet menacingly.

   “Not nearly as much as I hate you.” He prepared to duck.

   N.B. Smiled, grinned, scowled, etc. are not attributions, so:

   “I also hate your cat, your cooking, and that mud mask you wear to bed.” He smiled bitterly.

4. Family names like mother, father, mom, dad, uncle, etc. need to be capitalized when they’re proper nouns—“Why are you hitting me, Father?” “I’m scared of Aunt Regina, Mom”—but are lower-cased when they’re common nouns: “My dad is abusive”; “Our aunt held séances whenever we visited, and I finally told my mom about it.”

5. In literate usage, the correct relative pronoun to use for people is who/whom. “He is the man who loves me”; “The man whom I love is a podiatrist.” Using that for people is, as of 2002, a perceived sign of ignorance or poor education (e.g., PTL in “The PTL Club” stands for “People That Love,” which William Safire spent several Times columns sneering at). The point: In fiction, do not use the relative