A test of grammar

The magazine Management Today recently published a grammar quiz and a list of tips by my friend Andrew Ingram (who runs Better Business Writing) and me. As MT’s readers are probably a bit less fascinated by this stuff than my blog’s readers are, here I’m reproducing the questions with a more extended discussion of what they mean.

The questions

1) “They decided to quickly recommend hiring her.”
Would you move the word “quickly” to somewhere else in the sentence?

2) “This was a collaboration between the London, Birmingham and Manchester offices.”
Would you change “between” to “among”?

3) “None of the people in that meeting are your friends.”
Would you change “are your friends” to “is your friend”?

4) “You can leave your coats and bags in our cloakroom downstairs.”
Would you change “can” to “may”?

5) “We have so much data that it will take a few weeks to analyse.”
Would you treat “data” as a plural?

6) “Someone older than me would expect to have been promoted by now.”
Would you change “than me” to “than I”?

7) “You’ll never guess who we’ve just recruited.”
Would you change “who” to “whom”?

8) “Anna and Bill wondered which of them would get through all their emails first.”
Would you alter “their” used this way?

How did you do?

As you may have guessed, these questions cover disputed rules of grammar. Some people insist on them, but many people ignore them. Our aim in this test is to show that religiously following these so-called rules can cause more trouble than it’s worth.

1) “They decided to quickly recommend hiring her.”

This is the notorious split infinitive: allegedly, it’s wrong to put the “quickly” (or anything else) between the “to” and the “recommend”. But look what happens when you try to move it in this sentence – bearing in mind that the recommending is what’s meant to be quick, not the deciding or the hiring:

• “Quickly they decided to recommend hiring her.”
• “They quickly decided to recommend hiring her.”
• “They decided quickly to recommend hiring her.”
• “They decided to recommend quickly hiring her.”
• “They decided to recommend hiring quickly her.”
• “They decided to recommend hiring her quickly.”

These are all wrong. In some, “quickly” modifies the wrong verb; in some it’s unclear which verb it modifies. One isn’t even grammatical.

The only way to make clear what’s quick is to split the infinitive.

Some people don’t like this, though. Many of us have heard that splitting infinitives is wrong, although it’s never clear why. Infinitive-splitting is common and it’s been a feature of English for many centuries. The “rule” against it was invented in 1834 and has never had any support from rational argument or the facts of usage.

Whether to split is a case-by-case judgement: do whatever works best for the flow and above all the clarity of the sentence.

You could, I suppose, avoid the issue by reworking the example sentence to something like this:

• “They decided to make a quick recommendation to hire her.”

But it’s longer and the abstract noun makes it a bit starchy, and if the only reason to change it is to follow a superstition that most people happily ignore, why bother?

2) “This was a collaboration between the London, Birmingham and Manchester offices.”

Some people think that “between” should be used only when there are two objects; three or more and you need “among”. But this is another bad idea. Look:

• “This was a collaboration among the London, Birmingham and Manchester offices.”

Does that sound odd to you? It does to me. It’s pretty unusual to talk about a collaboration being “among” parties.

The supposed rule reads too much into etymology. The Old English word “betwéonum” originally meant “by two each”, but for all the lifetime of “between” it has been used to cover any number of things.

“Between” and “among” do have different uses, though. Roughly, when the objects you’re talking about (however many there are) are connected as individuals, each taking its own particular role, “between” is more standard. When they’re connected in a vaguer, more collective way, try “among”.

This might sound tricky, but if English is your first language then you probably know how to do this already (without knowing that you know it). It’s like riding a bike: easy unless you start trying to explain how you’re doing it.

3) “None of the people in that meeting are your friends.”

You may have been told that “none” should be treated as singular, not plural – so you should say “none is”, not “none are” and so on. But it’s widely used both ways, and has been for over a millennium.

Often, it can go either way, although using the singular may make your tone sound a bit more formal and old-fashioned. If that’s what you’re after, go for it – but remember that this is a stylistic choice, not a rule of grammar. It just so happens that many of the people who prefer that style like to think of it as a rule of grammar.

(One place you do need the singular is with mass nouns: “none of the food is ready”, “none of the money has been spent”.)

There may be a subtle difference of emphasis, too – using the singular might suggest the importance of having assessed each member of the group individually, while the plural might suggest a blanket judgement covering them all.

Sometimes, though, there’s a sharper difference of meaning: changing the example sentence to “None of the people in that meeting is your friend” could imply that there is one specific (absent) friend in mind. So I wouldn’t make that change.

If you’re really bothered by it, you could rephrase it to something like:

• “None of the people in that meeting is a friend of yours.”
• “The people in that meeting are not your friends.”

But now the emphasis is different – weaker, I’d say. The original opens with the stark “none” and ends with the clarifying thud of the “friends” you don’t have.

4) “You can leave your coats and bags in our cloakroom downstairs.”

Many of us remember from school that “can” is about ability while “may” is about permission: “Can I go to the bathroom?” “Yes, you can. But you may not.”

That’s true enough, although the two overlap: a lack of permission is a kind of constraint.

And the two words can come across quite differently. In the example sentence, we’re giving visitors the use of a cloakroom. Do we want to assert our status by showing them that permission is ours to give? Or do we want to make them feel comfortable and empower them – literally – by giving them the information they need to find the cloakroom?

You could change it to “may”, but I much prefer the tone as it is.

5) “We have so much data that it will take a few weeks to analyse.”

Originally a Latin word, “data” was the plural of “datum”. Many English grammarians have argued that we should respect that origin, and say “these data are” rather than “this data is”. Others say that it’s now an English word and can freely follow English conventions. After all, would you say “the spaghetti are cold”?

In scientific journals and other technical contexts, plural “data” is still very common. Elsewhere, it’s more usual to see “data” treated as a singular mass noun, like “information”.

In the example sentence, using the plural would give us:

• “We have so many data that they will take a few weeks to analyse.”

Ouch.

As with the other examples, you could paraphrase to avoid the issue. But, as with the other examples, I recommend you not to be driven by fear of a dubious concept of wrongness. Do what you prefer, or what you think your readers would prefer in the context.

6) “Someone older than me would expect to have been promoted by now.”

Arguably, you should say “than I”, but it’s a bad argument. It goes like this: “He is younger than I” is short for “He is younger than I am”. The “am” is implicit. But you wouldn’t say “He is younger than me am”, so you shouldn’t say the shorter “He is younger than me”.

(If you want to get technical, it’s about whether “than” must always be a conjunction or whether it can sometimes be a preposition instead.)

In fact, this distinction isn’t about right and wrong but what Geoffrey Pullum calls formal and normal. What’s more, in this example, using “I” would work out badly:

• “Someone older than I would expect to have been promoted by now.”

This is confusing, because readers are likely to think at first that “I would expect” is a unit. You may be able to get away with an implicit verb missing from the end of a sentence, but here, mid-sentence, the “I” grabs the next verb it can find.

If you wanted, you could change “than me” to “than I am” and it would work. I don’t think I’d bother, though.

7) “You’ll never guess who we’ve just recruited.”

“Whom” trips a lot of people up. Perhaps for that reason, people sometimes use it as a sign of refinement. The flipside of this is that in other situations it can sound stilted and pretentious.

I’m afraid I lack the will to try to explain the niceties of “who” and “whom”. If you’re interested, take a look at what the American Heritage Dictionary and Oxford Dictionaries have to say.

Very roughly, it’s about whether the word is in a subject or object position – but how this convention applies varies between different styles of language.

In this example, you could use “whom” – and some would insist that you must, because the word is an object here. But look at it:

• “You’ll never guess whom we’ve just recruited.”

Does the tone feel right? “You’ll never guess” is clearly casual. After that, “whom” is a bit of a jolt.

In a grander style, it would be more at home: “I daresay you shall be somewhat surprised when you discover whom we have most recently recruited.”

8) “Anna and Bill wondered which of them would get through all their emails first.”

There’s a long history of people complaining that “they”, “them” and “their” cannot refer to a single person of unspecified sex. And there’s an even longer history of people doing exactly that. The complaint dates back to the 18th century, the usage all the way to the 14th.

“He” as a unisex pronoun was once common, but it has increasingly come to be seen as sexist. And in many cases it’s absurd or misleading. In this example sentence it would clumsily imply that Bill was bound to beat Anna. “His or her” can work, but it’s a bit long-winded and here it would be awkward.

There is no consensus on this one yet. Many of us find singular “they”, “them” and “their” not just acceptable but indispensable. These usages seem to have become more common and more accepted in recent decades.

But others still disagree, especially for formal language. You’ll have to use your judgement in each case.

Bryan Garner, in the Chicago Manual of Style, offers nine techniques that can help you avoid gendered pronouns. They don’t always work in all cases, of course.

*

We had a ninth question in the Management Today quiz, but it was a bit of an odd one out. It was on whether to change “less accidents” to “fewer accidents”, and in our answer Andrew and I did recommend this (while adding that “less” vs “fewer” isn’t as straightforward as some people suggest).

I’ve left it out here for a sharper focus. The eight examples above are all cases where applying the so-called rules can make things difficult: less a test of you than a test of those rules.

The eight rules broken by these examples are a mix of superstitions, misunderstandings, pet peeves and a couple of legitimate but far from absolute points. They have their fans – some more than others – but not one of them unquestionably applies across the whole of standard English. None of the eight example sentences is ungrammatical in the way that “They decided to recommend hiring quickly her” is.

You might be better inclined towards some of these rules than I am. If so, I’m not going to damn you for preferring things a different way (although a couple of them really make me despair).

To pass the test, you don’t need to share my prejudices – unlike most online “grammar tests”. You just need to appreciate that not everything people call a rule of grammar really is one, that there are grey areas, that context and audience affect which conventions you should use, and that if you’re not careful, rule-following can lead you astray.

Finally, in the Management Today article, after the quiz answers we gave a list of tips for people who find themselves in the role of office grammar-checker. The tips are essentially Andrew’s, with just a bit of light polishing from me, and I strongly recommend them. I also strongly recommend Jonathon Owen’s ‘12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone Who Writes About Grammar Mistakes Makes’.

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