Ellipsis

What do you call three periods in a row? Take your time, we’ll wait . . .

The Ellipsis

Those three little dots are called an ellipsis (plural: ellipses). The term ellipsis comes from the Greek word meaning “omission,” and that’s just what an ellipsis does—it shows that something has been left out. When you’re quoting someone, you can use an ellipsis to show that you’ve omitted some of their words. For example:

Hamlet asked whether it was “nobler . . . to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles.”

In the sentence above, the words “in the mind” have been omitted from the quote. Occasionally, you might need to leave out part of a quote because it’s irrelevant or makes the quote hard to understand in the context of the sentence. The ellipsis shows that you have left something out.

You can also use an ellipsis to show a pause in speech or that a sentence trails off. This technique doesn’t belong in formal or academic writing, though. You should only use the ellipsis this way in fiction and informal writing. For example:

Andrew, can you, um . . . never mind, I forgot what I was saying. So, do you think we should . . . ?

How Many Dots?

How many dots are in an ellipsis? The answer is three. But, if the ellipsis comes immediately after a grammatically complete sentence, that sentence still needs its own period. So you would end up with a period, plus an ellipsis, which looks like four periods in a row. For instance:

“Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.”

might be shortened to:

“Call me Jonah. . . . They called me John.”

Spacing

Whether you put spaces between the dots or not is a matter of style. The Chicago Manual of Style calls for spaces between each ellipsis point. The AP Stylebook says to treat the ellipsis as a three-letter word, with spaces on either side of the ellipsis but no spaces between the dots. You can use either style; just be consistent throughout your document.

6 Tips for Writing Well on Social Media

There are 1 million links shared, 2 million friends requested, and 3 million messages sent on Facebook every 20 minutes. Twitter users send 9,100 tweets every second. More than 60 percent of all Americans have at least one social media profile — and many use this profile daily. Whether you love it or hate it, communication on social media is a fact of life.

Unfortunately, the nuances of communicating on social media escape many people. This can be frustrating for those who cherish the written word. However, it’s definitely possible to write well and find your voice on any platform. Here are six tips to improve your social posts.

Use Your Casual Voice

Social media is made for the casual voice, even for users on professional networks. The focus is on the social aspect of communication. It’s about starting a conversation and engaging with others in your network. Ask questions, offer insight, and avoid the colorless “business-speak” that clutters so much business and professional writing. Your social voice should feel like talking with a friend — a grammatically correct friend.

Keep It Short and Simple

Social media isn’t the place for deep musings, long rants, or well-reasoned arguments. If you have a long piece you want to share with your readers, link to it, and keep your commentary short. While Facebook allows around 400 characters plus a link, it’s best to stick to around 200 characters, or 40 words or fewer. Of course, Twitter’s 140-character limit makes pithy writing not only a virtue, but a necessity.

Use Action-Oriented Language

The point of using social media in business or at work is to get your followers to do something, whether it’s read an article, watch a video, join a conversation, or attend an event. A good formula for a social media post starts with a thought-provoking question and an invitation for your followers to take action. Try this: “Ever wonder what really goes on in the White House kitchen? I loved this great interview with Exec Chef Cristeta Comerford. Tell me what surprised you the most.”

Use Pronouns

Writing on social media should feel intimate for your followers, even if you have thousands of them. Use “I,” “me,” and “you” in your updates and posts. Social media is a conversation between colleagues or friends, not a lecture from on high. Write as if you’re talking to one person, not a mass audience.

Play with Punctuation and Capitalization

Don’t be afraid to break a few rules to convey emphasis or emotion on social media. While writing in all caps is generally frowned upon in business writing, it’s perfectly okay to emphasize a word or two with capital letters. Using an exclamation point or two is also acceptable to show excitement or emotion. With the space limits on social media platforms, these devices help convey emotion and tone.

Don’t Forget to Edit

You might be tempted to operate in draft mode on social media, but that carries real risk. Writing in a conversational tone to a large audience leaves plenty of room for misinterpretation, especially when your word count is restricted. There’s a good case to be made that social media posts need more editing than formal writing, not less, especially if you’re posting for an employer. At the very least, have a co-worker or friend read your post before publishing to make sure your meaning is clear.

Social media is a powerful tool for networking and engaging with customers, colleagues, friends, and influencers in your areas of interest or expertise. Keep it casual and concise — and be sure to edit for clarity.

Which social media platforms do you use most? Have you ever published a post you wish you hadn’t?

How One Woman Revolutionized America’s Culinary Landscape with Writing

Words are powerful. They can change minds, start revolutions, and even sell ShamWows. For this reason, writers know they have a huge responsibility — the words they use could potentially change the world.

One woman whose words changed an entire field was food journalist Clementine Paddleford. Her groundbreaking career spanned the 1920s through the 1960s. At the height of her career, 12 million households were reading her column. She was a household name.

When Clementine hit the scene in the 1920s, food writing was pretty dull stuff. It was mostly instructional, focusing on recipes and advice, and was presented like a home ec lesson rather than the seductive, beautifully photographed food blogs we’re used to today.

So what happened between then and now?

It turns out Clementine Paddleford changed everything. She turned the status quo on its head and set out to pioneer a whole new approach to food journalism.

Clementine’s writing was lush and vivid with irresistible descriptions of foods and places. She described the shrimp tails in shrimp cocktail as “tip-tilted over the glass like pink commas” and a familiar root vegetable as “a tiny radish of passionate scarlet, tipped modestly in white.”

As market editor at the New York Herald-Tribune, she would scour the markets each morning, hunting for delectable picks. She wrote:

A tour of smells, our daily tramp through the markets of the town. Catch that savory boiling fat from a kitchen on the Bowery? Cheese, smoked meats, the fish market; and the coffee on Water Street the best of all, heavy, sultry and slightly charred.

In another Herald-Tribune column she described her visit to a Bartlett pear harvest:

A wonderful trip through California’s brown hills, tawny hills, made gold and brown by sun-cured grasses, made lavender and gray by sage and green spotted by cactus. … Past the hop fields, the vineyards, the English walnut orchards, past acres of wasteland where gold had been dredged. … These were the Bartlett pears, the pears now pyramiding our huckster barrows, the very pears you can buy this morning at your corner store for five cents apiece.

Clementine’s words sent her hungry readers clamoring to their corner markets in search of the mouthwatering finds she wrote about.

She began to travel extensively around the U.S., interviewing home cooks and researching regional cuisines. She was known as “the roving food reporter” and traveled so much (800,000 miles during her career) that she became a certified pilot and flew her own Piper Cub plane to make her travels easier.

In 1949 she wrote in This Week Magazine:

I’ve just travelled eight thousand miles from the East Coast to the West, into the South, into big cities, little towns, to see how America eats, what’s cooking for dinner…. I have knocked at kitchen doors, spied into pantries, stayed to eat supper…. I have interviewed food editors in 24 cities…. I have shopped corner groceries, specialty food shops, supermarkets, public markets, push carts.

In recent years home cooking has had a huge resurgence in popularity, but in Clementine’s day she was the only journalist reporting on it. She passionately told the stories of how food is connected to people and to places, and celebrated the traditional recipes and details of everyday life that her contemporaries had written off.

Oh, and she actually had to coin the phrase “regional American cooking” because no such term existed at the time!

Fifty years before the Internet, she was popularizing regional food trends and connecting people to far off places and foods they’d never experienced. Because of her influence, people were changing the ways they thought and communicated about food.

Clementine had unprecedented success as a food journalist. She wrote for a slew of impressive newspapers and magazines, published almost a dozen books, and received numerous awards for her reporting (including from Eleanor Roosevelt).

But as a visionary pioneer navigating what was very much a man’s world, she experienced her own share of adversity. Not everyone took her ideas seriously at first or understood what she was doing.

Clementine frequently had to push back against editors who thought her sentence structures outlandish and her word choices too bold. Like the time she used the word “blood” to reference a freshly squeezed tomato and an unimaginative newspaper changed it to the less offensive (and less exciting) word “juice.” Ask any food blogger — Clementine knew what she was doing!

She also persisted through personal setbacks. When Clementine was thirty-three and already in the midst of her journalism career, her doctors discovered she had laryngeal cancer. They performed a partial laryngectomy; afterward, Clementine breathed through a hole in her throat and had to press a button on her throat in order to speak. This gave her voice a deep and raspy sound, which could definitely be a challenge for a journalist who made her living by interviewing people. But Clementine was undaunted and turned her lemons into lemonade. In regard to her unusual voice, she famously said, “People never forget me.”

Today, for those of us who have grown up in the golden age of Food Network and the Travel Channel with (literally) millions of food blogs at our fingertips, it’s easy not to realize how different the food world used to be.

Because of Clementine’s hard work, we now have a much richer culinary landscape and language. She paved the way for home-cooks-turned-celebrities like Julia Child and Rachael Ray, inspiring food writers and activists like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, and trailblazing food adventurers like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern.

As it turns out, one person’s voice can truly make all the difference. Clementine didn’t set out to be a revolutionary, but despite the resistance she faced, she stayed true to her vision. Her mother once told her: “Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.”

So the next time you find yourself going against the flow, and the going is getting tough — take courage. Even if you’re afraid to speak out, know that your voice matters and can be a powerful force for change.

Image Credit: University Archives (http://www.lib.k-state.edu/depts/spec/exhibits/paddleford/awards.html), Special Collections, Kansas State University.

All the Sports Words Only Americans Use

To many Americans, Super Bowl Sunday is synonymous with junk food, cheering, the best new commercials, and possibly the sensation of winning (or losing) a war. People in other countries sometimes wonder if the prize is a very large bowl.

It’s not just the fascination with football that befuddles non-Americans—it’s the very words we use to describe it. That goes for sports-related words in general, especially when we compare certain terms in American English to their British counterparts.

In other words, a Yank may queue for gridiron and go barmy in the stands as if he’s got bugger all to do but watch the match, but lads from Blighty think that’s bollocks. And if you don’t know what that means, we’ve got you covered with this handy list of American sports words and their British equivalents. If you just can’t get enough football (or if you secretly think words are more interesting), this is the list to get you through the sports event of the year.

General Sports Words

Sports vs. Sport That’s right: the language barrier starts with what to call the whole category of athletics. Americans watch sports. British folk watch sport. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

Game vs. Match The Super Bowl is also called “the Big Game.” We can only assume a British championship would be called “the Oversized Match.”

Team vs. Club “My favorite football team is the Raiders,” says an Oaklander. “My football club is the Gunners,” says a Brit rooting for Arsenal (though someone from a rival team might call them “Gooners”). Another British football quirk: many fans call their teams—er, clubs—by nicknames rather than their official titles.

Defense vs. Defence It means the same thing: the opposite of “offense” (or if you’re in the U.K., “offence”). British English just spells some things differently. (Want more British spelling variations? Learn about canceled vs. cancelled, favorite vs. favourite, and other ways our Englishes are different.)

Zero-zero vs. Nil-nil If both teams have good defense, the score might be zero-zero. But if they have good defence (note the British spelling), then the score will be nil-nil.

Shutout vs. Clean Sheet In the U.S., a “shutout” is a game in which one team doesn’t score at all. In the U.K., the goalkeeper (not goalie) is said to “keep a clean sheet” if he’s kept the other team’s score at nil.

Tie vs. Draw It could be zero-zero, nil-nil, or ten-ten (no changes there); if both teams have the same score at the end of the game, that’s called a “tie” for Americans and a “draw” for the British.

Field vs. Pitch The thing you play on, if you’re playing in the U.S., is a field. In the U.K., it’s a pitch—not to be confused by what a baseball pitcher (bowler) throws at a batter (batsman) in the game of baseball (that one’s still baseball, though Brits prefer cricket).

Sideline vs. Touchline Either type of line designates the boundaries of the field. Idiom bonus: if a player is unable to play, you can say “that player has been sidelined.”

Football Words

Soccer vs. Football When Americans hear “football,” we think tackling, touchdowns, oval ball with pointy ends. When Brits (or really, anyone not from the U.S.) hear “football”—sometimes abbreviated to “footy”—they think fancy footwork, goals, round ball. In other words, what Americans call “soccer.” Fancy that.

Pig skin This word has no British equivalent. In American football, it’s what you call the actual ball. If you didn’t know that, “tossing around the pigskin” probably sounds pretty gross.

Gridiron For Americans, a gridiron is the field for football—so called because of the parallel lines marking up the grass. But British folks sometimes use the word “gridiron” to refer to the sport of American football as a whole. It rolls off the tongue nicer than “American football,” after all.

In the Six In soccer, some American commentators say “in the six” to refer to action in the six-yard box—that is, the area immediately around the goal. Not to be confused with…

Pick Six This term is specific to American football—that is, gridiron. It’s what happens when a quarterback throws an interception (or “pick”) and the defensive player throws it back, scoring a touchdown worth six points.

On Frame This is a football Britishism meaning “on target”—for example, a kick straight into the goal would be “on frame.” Americans don’t get it: in the words of one Florida-based soccer blogger, “For me it sounds like hitting the post or the crossbar, I wouldn’t think it was a shot on target.”

Upper 90 vs. Top Corner In soccer, this term refers to the top portion of the goal. American commentators refer to the right angle as the “upper 90” (as in, 90 degrees), and British ones content themselves with describing the general region.

Sporting Equipment

Uniform vs. Kit What you wear to show what team (or club) you’re on.

Cleats vs. Boots (studs) These are what you put on your feet to run in turf. Americans refer to the shoes in general as “cleats,” but the actual cleats are the grippy bits on the sole. The grippy bits in British English: “studs.”

Sneakers vs. Trainers More on footwear: a good running shoe without the studs (or grippy bits) is called a “sneaker” in the U.S.; the British aren’t as big on sneaking, so for them, they’re called “trainers.”

Mouth Guard vs. Gum Shield You’d think that teeth would be more injury-prone. But if you’re in Britain, you protect your gums.

Words for the Fans

Remember this sentence? “A Yank may queue for gridiron and go barmy in the stands as if he’s got bugger all to do but watch the match, but lads from Blighty think that’s bollocks.” Let’s finish translating the Britishisms.

Yank An American. Think “Yankee.”

Queue This is what you stand in while you’re waiting to get into the stadium. Or the bathroom. Or if you want fries and beer (or at a British match, chips and a pint).

Barmy “Crazy.” Not necessarily certifiably insane, just a bit on the loony side.

Bugger All This translates to “nothing at all,” but be careful where you say it: it’s a bit vulgar as a phrase. You’re probably ok saying it on the soccer pitch, though.

Lads Let’s not stereotype: there are plenty of lasses (or girls) who are just as excited about a good day of sport. But say you’re with a group of fellows. They’d be dudes, guys, or bros in the U.S., but in the U.K., you’d call them “my lads.”

Blighty An affectionate term for England herself. The term showed up as a sign of patriotism and homesickness at the time of Victorian rule in India and grew in popularity in the early twentieth century, with songs like “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” causing a tear in many a homesick soldier’s eye.

Bollocks “Nonsense!”

A lot of these words might sound like bollocks to American ears, but if you ever find yourself at a footy match in the U.K.—or are trying to explain gridiron to a lad from Blighty—now you’ll know where to start. Let the games begin!

Not-So-Sweet 16 Game 8: Close Talkers vs. “Well, actually . . .”

March MADness has been long. It has been frustrating. It has reminded us all of those things we don’t like about our office-mates. But, take heart! We are one poll away from exiting the Not-So-Sweet 16 and choosing the Final (Infuriating) Four!

Our last poll of the Not-So-Sweet 16 is a doozy, pitting a classic Seinfeld gripe against the world’s most irritating interjection. Help us determine the fate of office rage by voting below.

Close Talkers

These folks like to get cozy when they’re chatting with others. They seem to be playing a game of “can you guess what I had for lunch?” where the answer is always “Onions.”

“Well, actually . . .”

This phrase is the hallmark of a know-it-all. With a penchant for perfection and an inability to filter relevant details from irrelevant ones, this person never misses an opportunity to correct or clarify themselves and others.

5 Grammatically Questionable Tattoos

Ever make an embarrassing grammatical mistake that other people judged you for? Of course you have; we’ve all made grammatical errors at some point. Now, imagine being stuck with one of those mistakes for the rest of your life. Believe it or not, people get misspelled or grammatically incorrect tattoos more often than you could imagine. How hard is it to do a quick Google search before permanently writing your biggest mistake ever? (Pretty difficult, apparently.)

Take heed of the following embarrassingly incorrect tattoos, and save a friend from eternal shame.

Some Mistakes Are Just “to” Big

The confusion between “too” and “to” has, not surprisingly, been permanently expressed on the bodies of more people than you would expect. It’s essential to remember that “too” means to bring something to a higher degree, while “to” can be used for anything from expressing physical motion to expressing purpose or intention. Avoid the embarrassment of confusing the two similar words; your body deserves better.

Make Better Decisions “Then” Your Friends

Here are two more words that are often confused — “then” and “than.” This gripe is just as unforgiving as the previous one because one word refers to a sequential passage of time, while the other is used to compare subjects. Your “Better Then You” tattoo will serve as built-in irony for all those that see it, so be sure you understand the distinction between the two before branding your body.

“Your” Never Going to Forgive Yourself 

Perhaps one of the most prolific and annoying grammar mistakes known to man  — confusing “your” and “you’re” — makes its way onto the bodies of grammatically challenged people at an alarming rate. If you can’t see the irony in getting a “Your Special” tattoo, perhaps it’s time to read up on possessive mistakes you’ve been making all your life.

“You’re” is the contraction form of “you are,” which should have been used in the previous anecdote. “Your” is a possessive adjective that should be used to assign possession to someone. Knowing the difference between these two common words is essential for avoiding embarrassment.

Your Tattoo and “It’s” Message Speak Volumes

Like “your” and “you’re,” it seems many people are unaware of the difference between “its” and “it’s.” However, the apostrophe has a purpose and isn’t just there for its own sake — “it’s” is always the contraction form of “it is” or “it has.”

“Its” is a possessive determiner, and can be used in the first or second-person. The easiest way to remember which form to use is by knowing that “it’s” has an apostrophe to represent the letter that was removed from its two component words.

Terrible Tattoos Won’t Do You “No” Good

Double negatives are a sometimes overlooked area of grammar, as is evident in the number of tattoos that display them. Your “Don’t Never Give Up” tattoo has a few flaws in its message, which actually contradict your intentions. “Don’t” is the contraction form of “do not,” which “never” then cancels out, leaving your tattoo urging yourself and all those that see it to, indeed, give up. Beware of similar double negatives when choosing an inspiring phrase for your next tattoo, and make sure that you’re not contradicting your own intentions.

As these examples make clear, grammar errors are not exclusive to the digital and print spaces, but are often permanently etched onto human bodies. It’s essential to know you’re grammatically sound in your intentions before attempting to tattoo any inspirational quote on your body.

What’s the funniest grammar mistake that you’ve seen etched on another person’s body?