Those of you who use social media are used to seeing comments from sticklers who object to any deviation from the grammar rules they learned. The following sentences would not likely pass their inspection. Can you tell why?
Sentence 1. At the donut shop she had trouble getting her order out.
Sentence 2. Hopefully, none of the donuts are gone.
Sentence 3. But etiquette forced me to share the donuts.
People who are fuzzy on the rules might fail sentence 1 for ending with a preposition, sentence 2 for beginning with hopefully and treating none as a plural instead of a singular subject, and sentence 3 for beginning with but and containing a passive.
The problem is, however, that they would be wrong on every count.
Sentence 1. Although out often serves as a preposition {He hurried out the door}, in our sentence it is an adverb. And in any case, ending a sentence with a preposition is perfectly correct grammar (as was starting this sentence with and—in case you were tempted to point that out).
Sentence 2. At some point in recent grammar history the rule that hopefully cannot be used as a sentence adverb became popular in spite of there being no basis for it. We accept other sentence adverbs that are identical in usage (actually, seriously). Why pick on hopefully? Similarly, the idea that none cannot be plural has crept into general acceptance. Linguists and lexicographers find no support for this rule, however, and authoritative dictionaries list none as both singular (for “not a one” or “no part of”) and plural (for “not any”).
None of the pizza is left.
None of us is to blame or None of us are to blame.
None of the pizzas were left.
Sentence 3. By now you’ve probably guessed that, like and, but may begin a sentence without violating any rule of grammar. And despite appearances, forced is active, not passive. It’s good to weed out use of the passive when it is weak and colorless or when it hides the actor {Mistakes were made}. Passives can have plenty of power, however {My notebook had been shredded and set on fire in the night}, and actives can hide a perpetrator {The notebook burned before I could save it}. The point here is that it’s more effective to monitor the amount of energy and agency in your prose than to simply outlaw the passive—especially if you can’t actually identify a passive when you see one. Even the beloved grammarians Strunk & White say that the passive is “frequently convenient and sometimes necessary” (The Elements of Style, 18).
Of course, sometimes it doesn’t matter whether a rule we learned isn’t really a rule; if we think our readers will call it an error, we don’t want to allow it. The problem is knowing whether a usage or construction has become acceptable yet to our expected audience. Editors are wise to be conservative. Unfortunately, this means that copyeditors are responsible for perpetuating a lot of nonrules—and annoying writers with what they see as needless restrictions. The best editors keep abreast of language trends and are able to judge when the time is right to abandon a long discredited rule.
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Photo: Performance installation by William Forsythe and Kendall Thomas, United Nations Office at Geneva.
This post originally appeared at The Chicago Manual of Style Online Shop Talk blog on July 23, 2015, © University of Chicago.