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Did Merle Haggard Marry Two Men? Another Reason to Use the Oxford Comma

Did Merle Haggard marry Kris Kristoferson and Robert Duvall?

Of course not! Don’t be stupid!

But you might not know it if you look at a newspaper clipping from an unnamed newspaper (which was originally posted on James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway blog, “Merle Haggard and the Gay Serial Comma“). The clipping features a photo of the country music star with the caption, “The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.”

Look very carefully at the last 9 words — “his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.” The sentence, as it’s written, looks like Rural Merle was married to Kristofferson and Duvall.

That’s because the newspaper forgot to put the Oxford comma after “Kristofferson.” If they had, it would look like the documentary interviewed four people: two ex-wives, Kristofferson, and Duvall.

But the Associated Press typically does not use this device, and as a result, most newspaper writers and editors have taken it to mean “There will be NO Oxford Commas EVER!” What they forget is that the Oxford comma may be used if it will clarify a confusing sentence. And the sentence about Merle Haggard’s marriage partners is about as confusing as it can get.

Adding the Oxford comma would have told us that Kristofferson and Duvall were not part of the previous group, “his two ex-wives,” but rather, were two additional people. It’s exactly like the book author who dedicated his book “To my parents, the Pope and Mother Teresa.”

I may have the occasional argument with an editor or punctuation stickler about the use of my beloved Oxford comma, but I have never seen an instance where using the Oxford comma caused confusion. On the other hand, there are occasions where blindly adhering to the “no Oxford comma” rule can cause all kinds of confusion. Or at least raise some interesting questions.

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Five Uncommon Grammar Errors To Avoid

Grammar is a huge PITA.

It’s like your lawn. You know you need to keep it well-maintained, but there are little trouble spots that give you fits. Sometimes there are spots you don’t even know you missed, until it overgrows and the neighbors start complaining.

There are plenty of “grammar error” posts that will point out the obvious errors that most people make, like the there/their/they’re or its/it’s errors. But these are a few of the lesser-known errors that you may be making and not even realize it.

I feel like a grouchy teacher when I write these posts.

1. Who/That

Other than a fun little cheer for the New Orleans Saints, this is a common one people make when referring to people or companies.

  • Wrong: Companies who practice green manufacturing can get government grants.
  • Wrong: People that like peanut butter and bologna are weird.
  • Right: Companies that practice green manufacturing can get government grants.
  • Right: People who like peanut butter and bologna just have different tastes, that’s all.

2. Singular vs. Plural Matching

This is always a tricky one for me. I always get tripped up when a phrase uses both a singular and plural item, like neither of these sandwiches. In other words, is it “Neither of these sandwichesis” or “Neither of these sandwiches are vegetarian?” My first inclination is to make “sandwiches” match the verb “are.”

But I would be wrong. According to Purdue’s Online Writing Lab, since “neither” is singular, treat “neither of these sandwiches” as a singular noun and make the verb match — “neither of these sandwiches is vegetarian.”

3. Not all adverbs need to end in -ly.

On an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, Donald Trump wrongly corrected Cindy Lauper when she said “I feel bad.”

“Badly,” corrected Trump. But he was badly mistaken.

Action verbs will often add -ly to the end of a verb: “He sings badly.” “She writes sloppily.” “They argue loudly.” But adverbs that modify linking verbs — like “to be” (I am, you are) — don’t use ly. In other words, you wouldn’t say “He is tiredly” or “She lies downly.”

When Cindy Lauper said “I feel bad,” “feel” was a linking verb. The easiest way to tell if a verb is really a linking verb is to substitute “am” with the verb in question. If the sentence still works — “I feel bad” = “I am bad” — then the verb is a linking verb, and the adverb should not end in -ly.

In fact, the only time you would say “I feel badly” is if you have lost the ability to touch things with any kind of dexterity or success.

4. Good vs. Well

This is another tricky one, because people use”good” and “well” interchangeably.

    • Wrong: I sing good.
    • Wrong: Dinner tastes well.
    • Right: I sing well.
    • Right: Dinner tastes good.

The difference is whether well/good is an adverb or an adjective. Good is an adjective, but well is an adverb. Remember, an adverb modifies a verb — How do I sing? I sing well — but an adjective modifies a noun — What tastes good? Dinner tastes good. That’s because an adjective will also follow sense-verbs and be-verbs, so you can look good, smell good, feel good, be good. But you don’t look well, smell well, feel well, or be well, unless you’re discussing your ninja-like prowess at these skills.

5. Me vs. I

This one drives me crazy, not because people use the wrong word (okay, that too), but because the rule is still erroneously taught in our schools.

Which is correct:

    • “Would you like to go to lunch with Doug and I?”
    • “Would you like to go to lunch with Doug and me?”Believe it or not, it’s Doug and me. Here’s another one.
      • Doug and me went to lunch.
      • Doug and I went to lunch.

      That one is a little easier. It’s Doug and I.

      I could explain the rule about how it all has to do with who is the subject and who is the object of the sentence and blah blah blah. But that doesn’t matter. Here’s the easy way to figure out whether to use I or me in a sentence:

      Take out “Doug and,” and see what sounds correct.

      • “Would you like to go to lunch with me?”
      • “I went to lunch.”The problem is, we have been hammered to say “Doug and I” by our elementary school teachers for so long that the rule is firmly, but mistakenly, wedged into our brains (and they’re still doing it). Just remove the “_____ and” in your head, and you’ll have your answer.

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A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

Sure, the reverse is true — a picture is worth a thousand words — but I think the words, in many cases, are more valuable.

Because if I say the word “baby,” “tree,” or “friend,” each of you immediately had a picture flash in your mind of a particular baby, tree, or friend. Maybe it’s your own child or your baby pictures. It’s the tree you climbed when you were a kid. It’s the friend you haven’t kept in touch with.

When I hear 'baby,' I think of my son.

We think in words. Our internal monologue is based on language, not pictures. Even when you flashed on the image of your errant friend, you probably thought, “I haven’t seen her in so long. I should call her.” You didn’t follow up her face with images of a sad face, a telephone, and a scene of the two of you, smiling and laughing, eating lunch.

Language is so ingrained in our way of thinking that it’s actually part of how we learn. In fact, many childhood experts say that it’s not until kids start talking through problems that they can direct their own learning and solve their own problems. According to an article from the National Association of School Psychologists, Motivating Learning in Young Children:

Preschoolers (age 3-5 years) are beginning to be more involved with verbal problem solving skills. They direct their own learning through speech and use vocal communication to direct their own behavior to solve problems. Young children are often heard talking themselves through a series of actions that lead to the solution of a problem. As children get older, this “talking out loud” will become an internal monologue. This newly developing ability to problem solve is the basis for motivation at this stage. Having the self confidence to know that one can solve a problem motivates the learner to accept other new and challenging situations, which in turn lead to greater learning.

Think about your own methods in working through a series of complicated steps, like trying to follow driving directions to an unfamiliar location. You turn off the radio, shush the kids, and start mumbling quietly to yourself:

“Okay, that’s 3235, and we want 3340. So it’s going to be on the other side of the str—dammit, I missed it!”

But that problem solving, that normally-internal monologue is based on our use of words, not pictures. We learn in words, we think in words, we solve problems in words.

Don’t get me wrong. I love pictures. I love photographs. I think people like Casey Mullins and Paul D’Andrea take some stunning photos that I’ll never be able to manage </sucking up>. Admittedly there are instances where mere words cannot do justice to the images of certain photos, and I don’t think we should even try.

But pictures can’t tell the entire story. Words can. Or at least do it better. Photos can’t explain, teach, educate, inspire, or persuade the way words can. Even when we see the most poignant or beautiful photos, we still need words to tell us what the photo is. Who’s in that photo? Where was it taken? What was he thinking when you took it?

What do you think? Do words conquer all? Is the pen mightier than the lens? Or are we visual people who gather and process information by what we see, not what we read? Leave your comments (or photos).

——
My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

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Finding a Working Definition of Ghost Blogging

With all of the controversy that seems to swirl around the acceptability of ghost blogging, I realized we weren’t really arguing about the same thing. The acceptance seemed to be based on their definition of the term.

Is it writing a blog post with the full input approval of a client? Or is it writing a post that doesn’t have any input, but does have approval? As I read descriptions and arguments by Jason Falls, Lindsay Manfredi, and other blogging luminaries, I realized it was the definition that was the problem.

So we created a short little survey to figure out what the most widely understood definition of ghost blogging to be. Survey respondents were given 5 different options of what ghost blogging might entail, and then asked to rate them on a 5 point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree). These are the results out of 51 responses, out of a 5 point scale*:

  1. CLIENT writes a post, YOU proofread, edit, and publish under CLIENT’S name: 4 people disagreed or strongly disagreed (7.9%), but 43 people agreed or strongly agreed (84.3%). Rating: 4.41/5
  2. Interview CLIENT and write a post based on their answers. CLIENT approves before article is posted. 1 person strongly disagreed (2%), 47 agreed or strongly agreed 92.2%). Rating: 4.49/5
  3. Write a post for CLIENT using their ideas and past statements. CLIENT approves. 4 people disagreed 7.8%), 44 people agreed or strongly agreed (86.3%). Rating: 4.29/5
  4. Write a post on behalf of CLIENT, using their ideas and past statements. CLIENT does NOT approve post. 31 people scored SD or D (62%), while only 15 people scored A or SA (30%). Rating: 2.5/5
  5. Write a post for CLIENT, using YOUR ideas. CLIENT does NOT approve post. 40 people scored SD or D (78.4%), 8 people scored A or SA (15.7%). Rating: 1.86/5

(*These numbers won’t add up to 51 in this description, because I left the “neither agree nor disagree” out of this text for simplicity and brevity. The actual numbers are at the bottom of this post.)

From these results, we can infer a few basic ideas about ghost blogging’s acceptability:

  • Ghost blogging is acceptable to most people as long as the client approves the posts before they are published. In fact, this was the most important factor in deciding whether ghost blogging is appropriate or not.
  • Ghost blogging is acceptable, as long as the client has input (#2), or at the very least, the ideas used have been addressed in the past (#3). Option #2 is akin to a copywriter sitting down with a client, and synthesizing the client’s thoughts and ideas into a piece of text. Option #3 is similar to a presidential speechwriter who is already familiar with the president’s stance on certain topics, and can write about them with authority.
  • At least 8 people thought it was acceptable to essentially put words in the client’s mouth without their knowledge. Personally, I can’t think of any instance where this would be acceptable, in business or government, let alone blogging. Even when I was writing speeches for the Indiana State Health Commissioner, everything had to follow her vision. Her administrative may have assigned the speech or project, but I had to know the Commissioner’s stand on the issues.
  • Conversely, 4 people thought it is wrong to even proofread and edit a client’s writings, and then post it on the client’s website on their behalf. While I’m a little worried that nearly 16% of the respondents thought it’s okay to pose as a client without the client’s knowledge, I can only wonder at how rigid the beliefs are of the people who are opposed to editing and then copying, pasting, and clicking “Publish.” It also worries me what they would think if they knew I had four editors poring over my book before the publishers printed it for me.

Because the first three options all scored above a 4.4, I can conclude that most people will accept the idea that ghost bloggers need the client’s input and approval before a post gets published. Anything that does not have at least the client’s approval crosses the line of acceptability, and anything that has both input and approval.

So, that is our baseline for acceptable ghost blogging. The next step is to find out how strongly people feel about it, and see if we can get a bigger group to respond. More on that later.

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Social Media Makes Us Citizen Journalists

Social media doesn’t just make us consumers of news, it makes us part of the news.

We’re no longer relying on the mainstream media to inform us. In many cases, we’re reporting it ourselves, or at the very least, spreading it beyond the traditional media’s original reach. I can’t count the number of stories I heard about on Twitter, Facebook, or a friend asking me, “hey, did you just hear about __________?”

In some cases, it’s just a link that points back to a story in an online newspaper. It could be a tweet from @IndyStar, it could be a retweet of a story in another part of the world, or it could even be a blogger reporting on news with national ramifications that is still only making ripples in their local media.

My point is we are starting to create our own media. While the mainstream media may sneer and look down their noses at bloggers as citizen journalists, the fact is they are coming up with some interesting stories, often breaking the news before the professionals.

In fact, the Associated Press has gone so far as to not only acknowledged the existence of bloggers, but will even now cite them as a source.

“We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website, broadcaster or blog; whether or not it’s U.S. based; and whether or not it’s an AP member or subscriber,” said the Associated Press’ September 1 online press release.

In other words, they may not like it, but they have to follow their own rules about us.

This is just one more indication that citizen journalists are becoming more important to informing our communities and discussing the things the professionals don’t. This is also one more reason why citizen journalists need to act like real journalists, and not the half-assed rabble rousers they assume us to be.

Want more proof that citizen journalism is continuing to grow? There are a growing number of sites that aggregate our citizen journalist news for us, so we can read more stories about our favorite topics in one location.

  • Newsvine: Community driven news. They reprint wire content, and some members have their own blogs. This one has all the same sections as a traditional newspaper.
  • NowPublic: A citizen journalist network where users do their own reporting, upload videos and audio.
  • The American Reporter: The Internet’s first original content alternative daily newspaper. They publish news from journalists and citizen journalists from around the world. They were the first to break the story about the A.A. Milne estate suing Disney for royalties of Winnie the Pooh. (Disclosure: I have been AR’s humor columnist since 1997.)
  • SB Nation: A collection of sports news, blogs, and scores. It’s done in conjunction with Yahoo Sports, but also a collection of 278 sports blogs from around the country. It’s easy to see a single network — ESPN, Sports Illustrated — covering sports this thoroughly, but SB Nation is able to put it together for a fraction of the cost.
  • Autospies: A collection of automotive news organized by and for automotive enthusiasts. If you are an automotive professional, you may hear breaking news here before you get it in your other industry publications.
  • Tip’d: A finance, investing, and business site that works like Digg. You read a story, “tip” it, and then discuss it.

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10 Blog Writing Lessons Learned from Authors, part 2

Yesterday, we covered the first half of 10 Blog Writing Lessons Learned from Authors. Here are the next 5 lessons I have learned from some of my favorite book authors.

6) Not everything is going to be a hit — Joseph Heller. Heller wrote 7 novels, and 6 of them sucked were not critical or commercial successes His very first one, Catch-22, is considered one of the best books of the 20th century, and is my 3rd favorite book. It was hysterical, absurd, and filled with enough satire to make George Carlin weep with envy. The rest didn’t do so well, but he kept writing. He wrote 3 plays, a series of short stories, and 3 screenplays, all of which had some success, but never reached the pinnacle of Catch-22.
Still, Heller didn’t go all J.D. Salinger on the literary world. He kept trying and plugging away. You’re not going to hit a homer with every post you write, so don’t give up. (But hopefully you’ll have a better success ratio than 14%.)

7) Piss people off — Anthony Bourdain — The Nasty Bits. Anthony Bourdain is great at pissing people off. He will unleash his ideas and his venom on anyone who gets under his skin. I just finished reading The Nasty Bits, and he has a go at everyone from fast food burger joints to fat people on airplanes to pretentious food snobs like Woody Harrelson, who will only ever eat raw fruits and vegetables, no matter where in the world he is who it inconveniences, or which restaurant owner he insults. Bourdain doesn’t pull any punches, and is willing to put even his more acerbic views in writing. You should too. (And don’t be a such a raw food jerk, Woody.)

8) Know the grammar rules. . . so you can ignore them — Elmore Leonard. Someone once told me “you can’t start your sentences with ‘and.'” I pointed out that things had changed since she was in 5th grade English — like the invention of the printing press — and that people have been starting sentences with “and” for a few decades. And since I was the professional writer, I ignored her. I have since found this quote by Elmore Leonard, and keep it in my notebook for future encounters: “(I)f proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”

9) You have to go to where the action is — Ernie Pyle. Pyle died doing what he loved: writing. He was a correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper from 1935 – 1945, when he died in combat. Pyle actually won the Pulitzer in 1944 for his work, and became the patron saint of newspaper columnists and the National Society for Newspaper Columnists(I was a member for a couple years). But the only way he could have done all this was by being where the action was. You don’t have to put yourself into dangerous combat situations to write your blog, but you do have to get out from behind your computer, and see the things you’re writing about. When you use photos, use your photos. When you write about places around the globe, write about your visits. It’s one thing to write about things you’ve found on the web, but try getting out in the world and see what inspiration you can get out there.

I once asked Dave Barry to read some of my humor columns. He sent me this photo instead.

10) Humor makes you memorable — Dave Barry. It’s the humor writers, not the political columnists who are the most remembered by their readers. I know people who still remember Dave Barry’s piece on the Lawn Rangers precision lawn mowing team or the time he played a corpse in the Eugene (Oregon) Opera’s production of Gianni Schicchi. No one remembers the piece David Broder wrote for the Washington Post about the guy who did the thing at the place. They remember things that are funny. So, if you can pull it off, use humor in your posts. If you can’t, avoid it, because otherwise people will remember you, and not in a good way.