![]() ![]() there was a headline a few months ago: ‘Abu Qatada arrested ahead of deportation attempt’. Fortunately It seems the journalists take little notice – e.g. The Style Guide itself, in its entry for ‘ahead of’, used to say ‘avoid’ later editions are a little less decisive but not much. He claimed that ‘before’ is becoming “an endangered species” and that it’s time for it to “make a comeback”. For example, there’s a Guardian blog in which their Style Editor, David Marsh, posted a piece entitled “This craze for ‘ahead of’ has got to stop … before it’s too late” (March 2011). In a post I wrote for Macmillan in July, I was talking about the useful preposition ‘ahead of’ and I referred to bloggers who complain about the use of ‘ahead of’ instead of ‘before’. Hi Stan, The Guardian Style Guide is often oddly prescriptive. And the muddle is passed on to readers.Īfter a prompt on Twitter by the account graciously conceded that I “may well be right”: ![]() It replaces judgement and grammatical awareness with uncertainty, anxiety, and mechanical behaviour. The that/ which rule is a spurious invention that goes against the standard usage of centuries of good writing. If writers and editors are led to believe that a comma must precede relative pronoun which as a matter of correctness, some will adopt this erroneous edict and apply it incorrectly – a misstep apparent in the example up top, and in this Language Log post where Geoffrey Pullum calls the rule “a complete disaster”. They don’t need commas before which, nor do they need which changed to that. Ostrovskaya was earlier cited as a critic of my book The Whisperers in the “controversy” which Ascherson mentions.Ī picture published by the Sunday Sport which her lawyers described as a “fake up the skirt photo”.Īll these phrases are fully grammatical and intelligible. We don’t know what position we are going to have in a Europe which is much more tightly integrated as a result of the eurozone crisis. We can be grateful for the many other instances of restrictive which in the Guardian that have not suffered an intrusive comma. So the quotation above, though not a dire failing, is telling: it shows how communication is undermined through misguided deference to a bogus rule. But the Guardian style guide includes the distinction, seemingly in the name of clarity and elegance. The that/ which rule is more typical of US style elsewhere there is usually no problem with restrictive which. Punctuation, instead of lending structure, has warped it. ![]() Whether the comma came from the writer or from a sub-editor trained in the totally fake that/ which rule, the sentence is unwittingly spoiled. ![]() Readers are being made to work unnecessarily for a straightforward point. The ambiguity is quickly resolved, but it ought never to have arisen. The clause led by which is restrictive, so there should be no comma before it.* Adding one makes the clause non-restrictive and obscures the antecedent – what the relative pronoun which refers to. The article should read “a role which is much more significant”. And then they’ll realise they’ve miscued because of a rogue comma. Readers may briefly infer that what is “much more significant” is not a role but Petraeus’s fashioning a role for himself, or they may infer that top generals don’t normally have a role during wars. The former general fashioned for himself a role, which is much more significant than top generals have during wars. There is another lesson to the Petraeus affair. From a Guardian editorial of 14 November: ![]()
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