Word Order Matters

“The burial site is in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek where the couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried.”

Did you just do a double-take? You should have.

This quote came from an Associated Press story, “G.H.W. Bush greets mourners honoring wife,” about the funeral and final resting place of former first lady Barbara Bush, who died on April 17, 2018.

Because I proofread for a living, I tend to absorb material word for word. When I read here that the Bushes buried Robin in a creek, I backtracked several times.

Nope, that’s exactly what it says.

Then I showed it to someone else, who said, “Well, yeah, but they obviously didn’t mean she’s in the creek.”

Indeed.

It’s an excellent example of why word order and punctuation matter. You shouldn’t make readers back up multiple times to figure out what you meant to say, but didn’t.

We have several options to write this more clearly. We could add punctuation:

“The burial site, in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek, is where the couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried.”

Does that feel like trying to squeeze in too much information?

The simplest solution is to separate the two topics:

“The burial site is in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek. The couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried there.”

Keeping the sentence whole, it could read:

“Mrs. Bush will be buried beside the couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek.”

The fourth and cleanest option places Mrs. Bush and her gravesite together. The fact about her daughter is separate:

“Mrs. Bush will be buried in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek. The couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried there.”

In the heat of creation, it’s easy to get the words out of order. The fix is to let the writing cool at least overnight, then reread it slowly as if for the first time. Errors like this should jump out.

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Can Contractions Go Too Far?

Yes, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.

Contractions exist to help written words sound the way we talk because we do not pronounce every letter in every word as if we are robots.

Instead, we drop letters and slide words together, and contractions depict that. But they can get weird if you try to follow speech too closely.

Such as when positive “would’ve” — would have — becomes negative “would’nt’ve” — would not have.

The same goes for for “could’ve” or “should’ve.” Sometimes you see these three expressions as “coulda, shoulda, woulda,” and they mean the exactly same thing. But in business writing I’d never advise turning a standard “could have” into a slangy “coulda.”

Nonstandard English is best confined to dialogue in creative writing where you’re trying to make a character’s speech distinctive. It’s extremely difficult to do well.

One common, simple contraction is “there’s,” but it’s tricky. It means “there is” and it’s singular. However, it’s often used with plural subjects because the contraction for “there are” would be “there’re,” which looks strange and is even hard to pronounce.

There’s people who aren’t going to agree with me about contractions.

Translation: There is people who are not going to agree with me about contractions.

Would you say that? No, I wouldn’t either. So let’s not write it.

On the other hand, we do have “you’re” for “you are.” Go figure. English is so quirky.

We should avoid some contractions simply because they don’t look good written, even if we often say them. One example is “that’ll” — that will — even though Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison used it with great success in a song: “That’ll Be the Day.”

Then there’s “there’ll” — there will — which sends my eyes and ears over the edge.

Conversely, a contraction sometimes doesn’t go far enough. such as on this license plate:

There’s no such word in English as “dont.” Microsoft Word won’t even let me type it that way without automatically inserting the apostrophe.

When at work, as long as you confine contractions to two words and put an apostrophe where letters are omitted, consider yourself on solid ground.