Get an Education and Pay Attention Along the Way

I used to have problems with which and that, until I took an advanced editing course and learned the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. That is how I cleared up that issue. The subjunctive was something I had never heard of until I took a grammar and usage class, then I knew what it was and how to use it. If I were still a freshman in college (note the use of the subjunctive), I still would not know this rule. Possessives also gave me trouble. But, again, getting a degree in English cleared up my confusion through various classes.

I can tell you the problems other working adults often have because of the pages I have tabbed in my copy of The Chicago Manual of Style from my time as an editor. I constantly had to explain these rules to my coworkers so they would stop attacking me for applying them. The first tab is "which & that." The next one is "possessive proper nouns." The third is "adjectival compounds." This one always throws people off because they want to hyphenate adverbs that occur before nouns. In other decades, we were allowed to hyphenate words that ended with -ly. But, this can occur no longer. The newness of this rule is the reason people get confused. The next tab in my book is "capitalizing hyphenated compounds." And, the last tab is "decades & apostrophes." People often like to add an apostrophe before the "s" in, say, 1980s, but the decade is not possessive, so this apostrophe is not necessary.

So, I guess my point is that I dealt with the grammar rules that gave me trouble by getting an education and paying attention along the way. Now, in my writing, I just need to make sure my pronoun references are clear and that I stop using pointless prepositional phrases. These issues are my current focus in the quest for writing that is clear and tight.