Curmudgeon's Corner: English is hard.

jmawork | flickr.com | CC 2.0

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in a fast-casual restaurant about a block from the White House, having lunch with my daughter Amy, when I happened to notice the way the restaurant's hours of operation were written on the front door.

"10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. everyday," it said.

I took it calmly. But two days later, I'm still annoyed.

You see, there's everyday and then there's every day. They mean different things. Everyday is a synonym for common or ordinary. It's used as a modifier: An everyday occurrence, for example. Or: The party was not formal, so she wore her everyday shoes.

Every day, on the other hand, means the same thing as daily. For example: This restaurant is open from 10:30 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. every day.

Of course, I complained about it on Facebook when I got back to work. And someone tried to pass it off as the fault of Twitter, everyday having one less character. But I'm pretty sure I've seen the mistake for longer than Twitter has been a thing.

Personally, I believe we can blame it, at least partially, on a charming educational practice that was popular some years back that was supposed to encourage kids to write without bogging them down with rules. These little kids were told to write words any way however they sounded, or however they thought they were spelled. But rules in writing have a point. The idea of written communication -- of any communication -- is to get your point across to others. Whimsical spelling and grammar aren't going to help the other person understand what you're saying. (And eventually the kids had to learn the rules anyway -- why not start them out right, so they don't have to unlearn bad habits?)

Granted, losing a space between every and day is not that big a deal. I mean, I understood what the sign was trying to say. But the words mean different things. Sure, we could just make everyday the standard and have it mean both things, and maybe that's where the language is headed, but I'd appreciate it if we could try not to hasten it along.

And while I'm on my soapbox: What has happened to the past tense in this country? I keep hearing about how football players kneeled during the national anthem. The word is knelt, isn't it? She knelt before the casket? He knelt before the queen to be knighted?

Now that I'm looking into it, Grammar Girl said back in 2013 that knelt ws giving way to kneeled, and it's happening more quickly in the U.S. than in the U.K. Maybe it's finished making the transition over the past four years, in the most sneaking, dirty, underhanded way...

Hmm. Maybe I need a vacation.

In fact, I believe I'll take one. Here's your formal notice that hearth/myth will be on hiatus next week, while my editors and I retreat to the mountains of southern West Virginia. When I'm back on the 22nd, I hope to have publishing news about Maggie at Moonrise -- and maybe another contest, while we're at it.

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These moments of everyday blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell -- who was not kneeling at the time.

Punctuating dialogue.

Two bits of business before we start:

1. I'm honored once again to have one of my books nominated for a Big Al's Books and Pals Readers' Choice Award. Tapped: Book Three of the Pipe Woman Chronicles is up for the award in the category of Fantasy this year. As the name of the award implies, there's a popular-vote component. Coincidentally, voting opened today -- and there are prizes in it for you!  If you're reading these words, would you please click here and vote for my book? (Rafflecopter gets testy with Internet Explorer, so if you have another browser available, it's best to use that one.) A number of other nominated books -- many of them Rursday Reads -- are also worthy of your vote. I'd like to draw your attention in particular to Laurie Boris's Sliding Past Vertical, K.S. Brooks's Night Undone, Carol Wyer's Just Add Spice, D.V. Berkom's Yucatan Dead, and the Brooks/Hise/Mader humor pastiche called Bad Book. Consider giving them a little love while you're at it. Then come on back. I'll wait. And thanks!

2.  Keep an eye on your inbox (or spam filter -- I have no illusions) for a newsletter from me. There's info about the Undertow launch and a special feature or two. I'll be putting most of it on the blog eventually, but newsletter recipients will get it first. Not on my mailing list yet? That's easy enough to remedy -- just head on over to the left and sign up.

Now then. In advance of National Grammar Day, which is coming up on Tuesday, I offer you this post that I wrote for Indies Unlimited. I'm re-running it because the topic keeps coming up -- mainly, I suspect, because schools don't bother to teach this stuff any more. (Don't get me started.)

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“There was something I was going to write about for my Indies Unlimited post this week,” I said to my daughter Kat. “Do you remember what it was?”

“Hmm. Maybe it was punctuation in dialogue,” she said.

“You’re right!” I said. “You were saying that your teachers never went over it in school.”

“Yeah,” she said. “We concentrated on learning the rules for writing essays, because that’s what kids need to know to pass the state-mandated tests.”

I interjected, “Which the kids need to do so the teachers can keep their jobs.”

“Exactly. And there’s no dialogue in an essay.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “So here’s how I think of it. Dialogue is a sentence inside a sentence.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said. “I think you’ll need to give some examples.”

“I was just about to,” I replied. “Let’s use the phrase, ‘do you remember when.’”

She shrugged. “Sure. Whatever.”

“If you’re asking a question, the question mark goes inside the quotes: Do you remember when?” I said. “Same for an exclamation mark: I do remember when!”

“But what if the sentence inside the quotes ends with a period?” she asked.

“That’s a little trickier,” I said.

“I knew this was going to get complicated,” she muttered.

“Nah, it’s not that hard,” I said. “You just have to watch where your attribution is.”

“Your what?”

“Your ‘she said’ or ‘he said.’ If the attribution comes after the end of the sentence, like I’m doing right now, then you replace the period at the end of the sentence with a comma,” I explained. “And the comma stays inside the quotation marks.”

Then I said, “But if the attribution comes first, like in this paragraph, then the sentence inside the quotes gets a period at the end. And just like with the comma, the period goes inside the quotes.”

“And if there’s no attribution?”

“The stuff inside the quotes gets a period – like this.”

“Hmm.”

“And if,” I said, “your attribution comes in the middle of a sentence, you need to put a comma before the first close-quote mark.”

“I think I get all that,” she said. “But it’s punctuating the attribution that seems to trip up a lot of people.”

“That’s because they’re not thinking of dialogue as a sentence within a sentence,” I said. “The attribution frames the quote – it’s all one sentence. I’ve seen what you’re talking about, too; they hang the ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ out there as a separate sentence.”

“Yes, like this.” She said.

I said. “Or like this. But it’s wrong. You need to use a comma to tie the quote and the attribution together.”

“Okay. But there are times when you can end a quote without tying it into the next sentence.” She smirked at me.

“Wipe that smirk off your face, missy,” I said. “That second sentence of yours isn’t attribution – it’s a stage direction!”

“Yes!” she cried. “And now let’s talk about a pet peeve of mine, and it’s something I’ve caught you doing.”

“Oh,” I groaned, “I know where this is going.”

“See? See? You just did it again!” she crowed. “There is no way you could have groaned through that whole sentence!”

I hung my head in shame. “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “I should have put a period after ‘groaned’. That’s another reason why ‘said’ is the safest verb to use for attribution. It sure is a good thing you’re one of my beta readers, huh?”

"It's a good thing for you, yeah," she said, smirking.

(This post originally appeared at Indies Unlimited on September 13, 2013. Happy National Grammar Day!)

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These moments of bloggy dialogue are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell

Between you and me, grammar matters.

First, a couple of bits of housekeeping: You'll notice a new book cover added to the slide show on the left, and a new video trailer on the Book Trailers page.  Yes, the clock is ticking down for publication of Gravid.  We appear to be on track for the scheduled release on March 20th -- which is also the first day of spring.  I expect there will be a contest involved again, although it won't be a three-week extravaganza because, oh haha, I'd have to start it this week and I'm not ready.  Anyway, stay tuned for more details.

Also, Read an Ebook Week starts today, and in observance of the week, all my titles at Smashwords are discounted.  Seized, in fact, is free.  Feel free to send your friends and neighbors to my Smashwords author page -- or, heck, head over to Smashwords and pick up a book for yourself.  I know for a fact that at least one of my Rursday Reads books is on sale. (Hint: it's Drawing Breath by Laurie Boris, and it's free!)

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If ever a genie wants to grant me three wishes, I am all set.  First, I would wish to always stay at the perfect weight, no matter how much I ate.  Next, I would wish for financial security, so that I could quit my day job and never have to take another one.  And my third wish would be for Amazon and Smashwords to insist that every indie title be vetted by a competent proofreader before they will publish it.

I admit it:  I’m picky about this stuff.  It’s probably because I internalized grammar and spelling rules early. Please don’t hurt me, but I was one of those annoying kids in school who always got good grades on her English papers.  I was a spelling whiz, too.  One of my college journalism professors gave his classes a test on commonly-misspelled words at the beginning each semester. I had two classes with him, so I had to take the test twice.  When I aced the thing for the second time, he wrote on my paper, “People in radio don’t need to know how to spell!”  I’m still not sure whether he was trying to recruit me for the student newspaper.  (If so, it’s clear that he never saw my grade in photography.)

Anyway, my point is that sometimes these days, reading is almost painful for me.  Writers drop so many commas that someone needs to start a home for orphaned subordinate clauses.   Writers also use bad grammar or the wrong words – many times without realizing what they’ve done.  

Sometimes, the result is really sad.  I happened to look at some of the posts on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards discussion boards after the first round of cuts this year.  Submissions in the first round are judged not on the book itself, but on the pitch – the advertising copy, if you will, that goes on the back cover of a paperback and in the “book description” of an e-book listing.  It’s also sometimes called a blurb.  In one of the discussion threads, some of those who didn’t win had posted their pitches for critiques.  Should they cut the sentence at the top?  Maybe move paragraphs around? But to me, it was clear what was wrong, and it wasn’t anything that moving the furniture would cure.  One poster’s pitch had her main character quitting her job to “attend” to her ill husband; the verb she wanted was “tend.”  Another pitch included a sentence whose syntax was so mangled that I couldn’t tell who was doing what with whom – nor, I suspect, could the ABNA judges.

What’s so sad is that these authors didn’t know they were doomed.  An e-book is judged not only by its cover, but by its blurb.  Your blurb must be perfect.  It’s your potential readers’ first opportunity to see your writing.  If what they see is that you can’t write a couple of paragraphs without a mistake, they will pass you by.

Indie authors already face an uphill battle for respect.  Granted, the hill has recently begun to level out, but for goodness’ sake, don’t make things any harder on yourself.  Don’t just rely on Word’s spell checker and grammar checker.  Look stuff up if you’re not sure.  Alert readers of this blog know that one of my go-to grammar sources is Grammar Girl.  I like her site because she's very clear about when something is a rule and when it's simply a style choice.  Sometimes my "rules" turn out to be style choices, which annoys me.  But still, it's good to know. 

Grammar Girl sponsors National Grammar Day, which this year is tomorrow, March fourth.  How about if we all agree to observe the day by checking and double-checking everything we write for errors, and by recruiting competent proofreaders to back us up?  

I can’t tell you how happy that would make me. I’d really rather spend my third wish on a hot guy.

This post appeared, in a slightly different form, on IndiesUnlimited.com on March 1, 2013.

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These moments of bloggy writing precision have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.