Tampering with who?

Few things disturb readers more than illiteracy in our writing. And when we mangle grammar in large type, such as "Who to Thank for the Current Crisis in Child Welfare? the reaction is especially heated. Readers are disappointed, even angry; and the wordsmiths and grammarians among them think that are irresponsibly setting a poor example for the next generation of MSWs.

The trouble is (not "Trouble is"), often when a sentence is structured, the writer doesn't know that he or she is using wrong grammar. The idiom "Who do we have to thank for this mess?" typically comes to the writer's mind in the sentence above. Since the idiom is always rendered ungrammatically, this theory holds, so the headline should be, too.

Think about the logic at work here. The argument that an illiterate idiom must produce an illiterate headline ignores the difference between spoken and written English. It assumes that there is only one way to write a bright, interesting sentence for a long article or report. Most important (not most importantly), the argument overlooks the tone and tradition of MSWs, whose tradition is well-educated literacy. Our goal is easy, conversational, but always grammatical--English. The dignity brought to our writing by literacy and the enduring quality it suggests are essential to our franchise. And with our university audiences, which is an important part of the future of our work in the years ahead, comes a special responsibility toward the people whom we serve.

With that in mind, you can tell every time the traffic reporter says "the alternate route," he/she means to say "the alternative route"; when the reporter writes "regime" for an administrative program or system or a diet, he means to say "regimen"; that a sentence denoting a negative takes "or" to avoid double negatives, with "nor" only used if the following is a clause:

Right: When the flash flood struck, there were no cars or people on the road.

Wrong: When the flash flood struck, there were no cars; nor people on the road.

Right: When the flash flood struck, there were no cars; nor were there any people on the road.

"Either" is often misused when you mean "each" or "both."

Right: There were lions on each side (or both sides) of the aisle.

Wrong: There were lions on either side of the aisle.

Right: There were lions on both sides of the aisle.

By No Means

Almost every time you omit even a single negative, you help your reader.

"Say only what you want the reader to see," cautions novelist C.J. Cherryh. Wise advice, President Nixon said, "I'm not a crook," and readers remember crook.

What do you see here?

"The Senate Appropriation Committee rejected an amendment that would have killed the Food Stamp Program."

What echoes in the mind is killed the Food Stamp Program. What slips from the mind is Committee rejected. Both killed and rejected are negatives. When you must use such negatives, a couple of strategies will improve quality.

* Break the sentence into two sentences. Put as few negative ideas as possible in each one. An amendment was proposed to kill the Food Stamp Program. The Senate. ... Committee rejected it.

* Rescue the sentence in the order events happened. The mind, then, has less backing up and filling in to do. An amendment that would have killed the Food Stamp Program was rejected by the ... Committee rejected it.

Even one negative sometimes demands re-reading for understanding. The brain seems to stick as it shifts from forward to reverse to forward--those who are familiar with legal writing, accounting rules or the Federal Register know what I am talking about. We often make our readers flunk reading.

Here is another, with three negatives. I failed to make sense of it:

"The justices struck down, 9-0, campaign finance restrictions that a lower court said prevented national political parties from assuming some fund-raising power. ... "

Any sentence that begins with a version of the court overturned a lower court's denial of has the reader in deep trouble. Almost always, the higher court's overturning is the news, but let it come at the end of the sentence telling what was overturned.

Try this one:

" ... the First Circuit has now become the second federal appeals court to hold explicitly that 'communications' prohibited by a protective order restricting the dissemination of information obtained through court-ordered deposition qualify for protection under the First Amendment." Can you tell what journalists won with that momentous decision?

This sentence suffers from its lawyer language, nouns and adjectives made from verbs (communications, protective, dissemination, information, deposition, protection), but its main fault lies in the reversals the reader must do to get past the maze of two negatives.