An interesting problem often presents itself when one employs an anarthrous nominal premodifier.

A what who which?

“Anarthrous nominal premodifier” is usage-ese for “false title,” one of a handful of other more user-friendly ways to describe a job title that is not a job title. A description of this concept that is, I think, better still is epithet (a versatile word meaning, in this case, “characterization”), and that’s the one I use here and elsewhere on this site.

An epithet — in which, for purposes of clarification or edification, a person’s name is preceded by a concise description of that person — is often derided as a coarse conceit of journalistic writing, but it appears quite often in books and other forms of publication as well, and it serves a useful purpose, eliminating the need to follow a person’s name with a more distracting (and often more extensive) parenthetical description.

Unfortunately, too many people form the epithet-name construction incorrectly, as in this sentence: “The essay was written by humanities professor, Paul A. Robinson.”

This is one of the most egregious mechanical errors a writer can make; few other such infelicities distinguish the amateur from the professional, and it is one of life’s mysteries how such an obvious error has come to be so persistent as well as pervasive. (The correct form, of course, is “The essay was written by humanities professor Paul A. Robinson.”)

The mistake probably stems from confusion with the nearly identical form in the more traditional sentences “The essay was written by a humanities professor, Paul A. Robinson” and “The essay was written by Paul A. Robinson, a humanities professor.” (These forms are preferable to those who find epithets antithetical to good writing.)

The distinction here is that in the corrected sentence, the phrase “humanities professor” is a restrictive appositive. (An appositive is a noun phrase that defines or modifies another noun phrase, and a restrictive appositive is one that applies to only one other noun phrase.) In this sentence, the only humanities professor the phrase can refer to is Paul A. Robinson.

The presence of the indefinite article in the other variations is the crucial indicator that they each include a nonrestrictive appositive, one that refers to any example of the appositive’s description; Paul A. Robinson is just one member of the class “humanities professor,” and the punctuation signals that fact.

The restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction in appositives should be observed when referring to inanimate objects as well. A common error is to insert punctuation between the appositives in “Have you read the book, The Bestseller?” If a generic reference to the book has already been made, this sentence is correct; the title is an elaboration. However, when used on first reference, this construction presumes that the sole example of the concept “book” is The Bestseller. Because The Bestseller is, in fact, only one example among countless others, the comma is omitted to indicate that “the book” and “The Bestseller” are identical.

The same principle applies to any form of composition (film, television program, and so on) or any other thing: “I went to the amusement park Funland.” (“I went to the amusement park, Funland,” in the absence of a previous reference, implies that only one amusement park exists. “I went to the world’s largest amusement park, Funland,” by contrast, is correct, because only one amusement park can be the world’s largest one.)

If you oppose appositive epithets, this post isn’t for you. But for the many writers who accept the construction as proper usage, I recommend that you use the proper usage properly.

There are so many ways to help — at least eighty-five, I discovered. Here are that number of synonyms and idiomatic phrases for the verb help:

1. Abet: to actively help with an endeavor
2. Accommodate: to offer something, especially to help meet a need or want
3. Advance: to speed up the development of an initiative or cause
4. Advise: to recommend or warn
5. Aid: to provide something necessary to help
6. Alleviate: see relieve, and to help correct or remove a problem
7. Ameliorate: to make better or more manageable
8. Amend: to help by improving
9. Assist: to supplement an effort
10. Attend: to stand ready to help
11. Back: to help with actions or words, or to help financially
12. Backstop: see bolster
13. Bail out: to help someone suffering hardship; also, to abandon an enterprise
14. Ballyhoo: see hype
15. Bear a hand: see “lend a hand”
16. Be of use: see benefit
17. Befriend: to become a friend of
18. Benefit: to be helpful
19. Bolster: to help in order to strengthen
20. Boost: to physically help one up from below, or to help publicly; also, slang for “steal”
21. Buck up: see bolster
22. Buttress: to strengthen figuratively or literally
23. Care for: to help someone recover
24. Champion: to advocate or protect
25. Cheer: to make someone feel better through deeds or words; also, to applaud vocally
26. Comfort: to provide hope or strength, or to console
27. Contribute: to give financial or material help or to provide services
28. Cooperate: to proactively offer help, or to compromise
29. Counsel: see advise
30. Deliver: to convey something to another
31. Ease: to make easier
32. Embolden: to give courage to
33. Encourage: to inspire, or to help by offering a positive comment or making a helpful gesture
34. Endorse: to approve or recommend
35. Facilitate: to help enable something to occur
36. Favor: to give partisan help to someone
37. Forward: see encourage
38. Foster: see encourage and nurture
39. Further: see encourage
40. Go to bat for: see back
41. Guide: see advise, or to show or demonstrate
42. Hearten: see encourage
43. Hype: to provide extravagant publicity
44. Intercede: to become involved on another’s behalf
45. Launch: to help someone start an enterprise
46. Lend a hand: to provide material help
47. Meliorate: see ameliorate
48. Mentor: see advise
49. Minister to: to give help to, especially in terms of emotional or physical needs
50. Mitigate: see relieve and mollify
51. Mollify: to assuage, soften, or soothe
52. Nurture: to help develop
53. Oblige: to indulge a request for help
54. Open doors: to provide help through influence or recommendation
55. Palliate: to reduce discomfort or pain, or to excuse
56. Patronize: to provide help through influence or financial support
57. Plug: see promote
58. Promote: provide help by advertising or by enabling publicity
59. Prop up: see bolster
60. Push: to help in reaching an objective
61. Reinforce: see encourage, or to strengthen
62. Relieve: to remove a burden or obligation, or to take one’s place in performing a task
63. Remedy: see relieve
64. Rescue: to help someone or something harmed, in poor conditions, or in financial straits
65. Restore: to improve by returning to a previous, better condition, or to help rejuvenate
66. Revive: to bring back to life or former improved circumstances
67. Root for: to publicly make positive comments, or to applaud vocally
68. Sanction: to approve, especially in an official capacity; can also mean to ratify, or to censure)
69. Save: see rescue
70. Second: see assist and reinforce
71. See (something) through: to help accomplish or complete a task
72. Serve: to satisfy or supply needs or wants
73. Sponsor: see patronize
74. Stand by: see back
75. Stick up for: see back
76. Stimulate: see restore
77. Stump for: see promote
78. Succor: see relieve
79. Support: see assist and promote
80. Sustain: see assist and relieve
81. Take under (one’s) wing: see patronize
82. Treat: to care for
83. Stand one in good stead: see bolster
84. Uphold: see assist
85. Work for: to help accomplish a goal

The effectiveness of any nonfiction manuscript is contingent on at least three factors: the writer’s level of expertise in the subject matter, their reportorial aptitude, and their writing ability. (By extension, the performance of other potential contributors — a developmental editor, a copy editor, a proofreader — in the execution of their responsibilities is also significant. Consider references to “the writer” here to mean the editorial “committee” that participates in the development of a given formally produced writing project.)

Subject-Matter Expertise

The writer’s level of expertise may be at one of three levels: expert, learner, or amateur.

The subject-matter expert may or may not have professional or scholarly credentials. However, the writer is assumed to be knowledgeable about the writing project’s topic to the extent that no further corroborative research (fact-checking) is necessary.

The expert may benefit from some guidance from a developmental editor regarding the need to acquire additional data, but they are virtually self-sufficient when it comes to collecting and utilizing background material. An example of an expertly researched project is a work of scholarly writing produced by a university professor that pertains to their area of expertise.

The subject-matter learner is a generalist who has a well-developed facility for acquiring the background knowledge and an aptitude for understanding the topic to the extent that they can write about it authoritatively, although a moderate amount of fact-checking may be necessary.

A developmental editor may need to consult with the learner about additional or more effective research methods and the extent to which sources are utilized, but the learner has a good grasp of the necessity of thorough research and documentation. An example of a learner’s writing is a magazine article written about a new technological breakthrough by a lay writer who covers such subject matter.

A subject-matter amateur, however, also a generalist, may lack the skill to develop a sufficient understanding of the topic and may therefore produce an inadequate manuscript, and the writing project may require extensive revision based on additional research, if such a step is taken at all.

The amateur may need to be reminded about backing up the manuscript with corroborating research, and may require extensive guidance as to how to acquire the necessary data. An example of this level of writing is a newspaper article about the controversy surrounding a complicated legal issue by a reporter with no background in legislation or public policy.

Reportorial Aptitude

The same three levels of competence apply in terms of reporting skills.

An expert reporter understands the scope of the manuscript assignment and how to obtain information from sources, whether people or documents. They also have the expertise and training to successfully draw valuable material from interview subjects and other sources of information. The expert usually requires little or no guidance from a developmental editor in organizing their approach to obtaining direct information.

A learner reporter may need some guidance in strategizing how to determine who to interview, and how, but has an aptitude for comprehending how to gather data, insights, and comments, and will be able to competently carry on a conversation with people in possession of the information they need.

An amateur reporter may be largely ignorant of the significance of the topic and may be at a loss as to where to begin and where to progress from that beginning once it is discovered, and may not have a knack for preparing for interviews and, worse, for digressing from stock questions to follow interesting new tangents. A developmental editor may need to provide extensive advice about obtaining firsthand information.

Writing Ability

A writer’s skill in composition can also be judged on these three levels.

An expert writer is able to seamlessly integrate background research with information collected in the course of consulting with interview subjects and, just as important, has the aptitude for crafting a deftly organized and eloquently and elegantly written manuscript with a consistent tone, an authoritative voice, and an effective argument or presentation. The expert will likely need a minimum of assistance in developing a manuscript.

The learner writer, although they have not necessarily mastered the craft of writing, recognizes the fundamentals of assembling a manuscript from raw materials and, possessing some talent in ordering their thoughts and expressing them effectively, should need no more than a moderate amount of developmental aid.

The amateur writer often requires extensive coaching in the art of writing. The amateur may lack a command of the basic rules of grammar and syntax, and is likely to have only a modest vocabulary and an insufficient amount of creativity to craft effective prose, failing to understand how active sentence construction, concise description, and vivid word choices enhance a composition.

Conclusion

Before a book proposal is accepted or a book manuscript is commissioned, or an article is assigned, one of the tasks of an editor charged with coordinating the publication is to, at least informally, determine where on the matrix of subject-matter expertise, reportorial aptitude, and writing ability an author’s level of competence lies. (Think of a scorecard with a three-by-three grid, like a tic-tac-toe box, as an evaluative tool.) The degree of competence may differ in each of the categories, but the author’s comprehensive skill level will generally rest in one of the three degrees (expert, learner, or amateur).

Diagnosing the author’s competence in the three components of comprehensive authorial talent will help an editor predict how much developmental and line editing and fact-checking a given manuscript will require — and how viable the project is, or whether it is viable at all.

When dual and duel go head to head in a usage fight, the one that wins, as is often the case, depends on the field of battle, otherwise known as the context.

The adjective dual derives from the Latin term dualis, related to duo, the Latin word for two. Duo, of course, was borrowed directly into English and remains a synonym for two. The related term duet, which refers to a performance by a pair of singers or musicians (who may constitute a duo), comes from duetto, an Italian diminutive form of duo.

Oddly, though there are similar words for increasingly larger groups of performers, each of which employs the Latin word for a number from four to eight and the suffix -et — quartet, quintet, sextet, septet, octet — there is no term corresponding to a group of three; for that, the word trio, adopted from French and Italian use and based on the Latin prefix tri-, must suffice. For musical groups of more than eight (and sometimes less), a more general term like band, ensemble, or orchestra is employed.

Terms in which dual is a root include duality and dualism, each of which refers to various schools of thought or principles about human behavior or about phenomenology. The adjective dual-purpose refers to something that has two distinct functions, dual-action is a similar term frequently employed in product names, and the slang term variously spelled dualie, dualy, duallie, or dually (plural: dualies or duallies) identifies a pickup truck equipped with two side-by-side pairs of wheels for greater strength for carrying or towing.

Duel, it turns out, isn’t etymologically related to dual. It stems ultimately from the Latin word duellem, a variation of bellum, meaning “war.” (The latter Latin term is the origin of the root of antebellum — “before the war” — often applied to the culture of the American South before the Civil War, and of belligerent and bellicose, both of which mean “aggressive,” or “warlike.”)

Duellem acquired a meaning of one-on-one combat by the unwittingly incorrect association of it with duo. Duello, the Italian word for duel, is also a rarely used synonym in English that also refers to the traditions of dueling observed by aristocrats — counting out paces, the presence of seconds, or assistants, and so on.

Use of quotation marks for dialogue is fairly straightforward; several posts on this website that deal with the topic can by found by searching for “quotation marks.” This quiz deals with other uses of these emphasis markers.

Read the following sample sentences, determine the problem with the use of quotation marks, and devise a solution. (Note that I use single quotation marks rather than double quotation marks because of my custom of framing the entire sample sentence in a pair of the latter.) Then, take a look at my revisions and explanations at the bottom of the page and see how they compare with your changes:

1. “The IQ evaluation provides a ‘snapshot’ of a child’s cognitive skills at a particular point in time.”

2. “Perry is connecting with a growing number of Republicans because of his uncompromising rhetoric and his back-slapping, guy-who-married ‘the first girl I dated’ persona.”

3. “Consider the glass ‘half full and not half empty.’”

4. “The old fixer-upper looks like it was designed by “The Amityville Horror” house architect.” (This example is from a newspaper; many such publications use quotation marks, rather than italics, to denote titles of films, books, and other self-contained compositions.)

5. “They reviewed cross-border reproductive care, or “medical tourism,” as an increasing phenomenon in respect to egg donation.”

6. “Our waterworks have reached the classic ‘run to failure’ moment.”

7. “He used scientific reasoning to show that singing and dancing could cure melancholy by stirring up the ‘secretions’ in the human ‘machine.’”

Answers and Explanations

1. The informal usage of a word need not be excused with what are sometimes called apologetic quotation marks (what I refer to frequently in these posts by a more common label: scare quotes): “The IQ evaluation provides a snapshot of a child’s cognitive skills at a particular point in time.”

2. This sentence attempts to allude to erstwhile presidential candidate Rick Perry’s pride that he married the first girl he dated, but the writer, after a promising start in which they began stringing the relevant words together in an extended hyphenated phrasal adjective, fumbles by attempting to employ a direct quote. The best solution would be to abandon the attempt at direct quotation and fold a paraphrase into the adjective string: “Perry is connecting with a growing number of Republicans because of his uncompromising rhetoric and his back-slapping, guy-who-married-the-first-girl-he-dated persona.”

3. This reference to the idiomatic metaphors for optimism and pessimism implies that there is an idiom consisting of the phrase “half full and not half empty.” However, only the distinct antonyms “half full” and “half empty” are valid, and there is no reason to enclose them in quotes (also, a comma seems more effective than the conjunction and): “Consider the glass half full, not half empty.”

4. Here, the writer is attempting to employ the first word of the movie title as a direct article for the framing sentence, but it cannot serve double duty. In this case, it is acceptable to transfer the to duty with the sentence and leave the title temporarily bereft of the direct article that begins it (“The old fixer-upper looks like it was designed by the ‘Amityville Horror’ house architect”). However, the sentence would read more smoothly if it were relaxed, including the insertion of a couple of additional direct articles and the retention of the full movie title: “The old fixer-upper looks like it was designed by the architect who designed the house in ‘The Amityville Horror.’”

5. This sentence is doubly irritating. As in the first example above, the scare quotes are extraneous. In addition, it seems illogical to me to introduce the gloss (brief definition) of the phrase “medical tourism” before it; why, then, bother introducing the idiom at all? Use a term-then-gloss structure: “They reviewed medical tourism, or cross-border reproductive care, as an increasing phenomenon in respect to egg donation.” (A compromise is to explicitly identify the idiom as such following the literal description for the topic in question: “They reviewed cross-border reproductive care, known popularly as medical tourism, as an increasing phenomenon in respect to egg donation.”)

6. The phrase “run to failure” may be a partial quotation from someone, but unless it is a clever coinage heretofore unfamiliar to readers (and even then, use the explanatory solution in the fifth example, above), the phrase should simply be strung together as a phrasal adjective: “Our waterworks have reached the classic run-to-failure moment.”

7. Trick question — in the original context, as least, it’s clear that “secretions” is a direct quote. Sometimes, it’s best to indicate that an unusual word was actually written or spoken by the source, and sometimes, scare quotes are helpful (as in the case of those framing machine, which may well have also been a direct quote). In this case, I’d leave the sentence as is.