Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some questions that people have asked about grammar, effective writing style, or effective communications, followed by my responses.

If you have a question not answered here, email it to me. I’ll get back to you and will also add to this page those questions and answers with the widest application.

As I say in my book, Writing to Clients and Referring Professionals About Psychological Assessment Results: A Handbook of Style and Grammar, I intend to make writing style and grammar as clear as possible. So, I will answer based on accepted common usage, not strict adherence to any one of the dozen or more writing manuals available.

Commas

Question:
I get lost writing long sentences that explain my thoughts about a topic or try to make a case for something. I’m always unsure about commas and I think I add them when they are not needed. Advice?

Answer:
Shorter sentences! Truly, if you break your ideas into smaller chunks, you won’t have to rely on as many commas. Know precisely what you want to say and allocate a short sentence to that idea. And then the next. Once you are comfortable with this approach, you can begin linking short sentences into longer ones – with semicolons, colons, and yes, commas. Modern writing style avoids unnecessary commas, but some are necessary, so a good reference book will be useful for those times when you have to use them.

Hyphens

Question:
Is there some formula that says when to put a hyphen between words?

Answer:
Hyphens trip up many writers, even experienced ones. Words alter over time, as they make the transition from two words into the hyphenated form, and then, often, into a single word. Remember that contemporary writing avoids hyphens when possible. No formula covers all situations. However, a general approach is that if each word describing a noun could stand alone with it, you likely don’t need a hyphen ("tall slender girl"); but if they can’t stand alone and still make sense, link them ("red-haired girl"). Dictionaries give the current accepted hyphenation of words – though even they may differ from each other.

Question:
I still get confused about when to use a hyphen with prefixes, especially after re. Any easy rule to follow?

Answer:

Use the hyphen after the prefix re when
– re means again and
– when omitting the hyphen would cause confusion with another word.

Examples:
1) Did the man have to be restrained at the hospital? (Re does not mean again – no hyphen)
2) Did you re-strain the berries before you canned them? (Re means again, and omitting the hyphen would have caused confusion with another word – use hyphen.)
3) Did you rewrite the report? (Re means again but would not cause confusion with another word – no hyphen.)

Subject-verb Agreement

Question:
I frequently encounter situations where I see a noun with a verb that doesn’t seem to fit. For example, "The staff are…" just doesn’t sound right to me. Shouldn’t it be "The staff is…"?

Answer:
Yes – and no. In your example, staff is a collective noun – it describes a unit made up of individuals. For that reason, the verb can vary depending on whether you are talking about staff as a single unit (The staff has worked very hard on this project) or staff as the individuals who make up the unit (The staff have gathered for the meeting). In the latter case, you might make the verb sound better to your inner ear, if you silently insert the word "members" after staff: "The staff members have gathered for the meeting."

Question:
Someone wrote to me, "Over the next couple of weeks, when either of you is near my office…" Why did the writer use "is" and not "are"? Is that correct?

Answer:
It’s correct because the word "either" is the subject of the phrase ("when either of you is near my office") and that defines the verb usage. If you put the sentence in 3rd person, it’s a bit clearer: You would say, "When Dave is near my office or when Juli is near my office." Shifting back to 2nd person, it becomes "when either of you is near my office." In this usage, both people don’t have to be there; if your writer was talking about both people showing up, it would then be "when Dave and Juli are near my office."

Question:
My copy editor took out the apostrophe after the word clients in the following sentence: "Similarly, all C/TA practitioners recognize that clients’ coming for a psychological assessment is very different than their coming for a blood test." But I think the copy editor is wrong. Shouldn’t it be possessive to be parallel to their?

Answer: 
You are right. You are using the verb form as a noun, so it takes the possessive, both in itself and in the parallel structure you mention. In informal English, this type of possessive is often dropped, but in published material, formal is usually better.

Spelling

Question:
In assessment reports, should I capitalize the names of diagnoses or diseases?

Answer:
Capitals are used only for proper nouns in diseases or conditions (e.g., Asperger’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, Ebola virus) – so the name of the person or place it is named for is capitalized but not the rest. However, a letter to the editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry from 1991 (yes, over 20 years old!) refers to the “creeping capitalization” that was occurring in professional writing. A quick survey of professional books in the psychological field of today shows some that capitalize the whole diagnosis and some adhere to the only-proper-names rule. Because I received the same question this many years later, it appears that the question is alive and well. As a writer, I vote for capitalizing only the proper name.

Question:
In your book, you mention problems with relying on spell check. Here’s another little quirk I ran into: Word marked the spelling “enroll” as incorrect and suggests “enrol.” Outlook finds “enrol” wrong and suggests “enroll”!

Answer:
Dictionaries say either is correct, but the word with one “L” is used more often in British English and the word with two “LLs” is used more in American English.

Writing Style and Voice

Question:
Is it really OK to write a report or other professional document in first person? I’m not comfortable saying "I" – it feels unprofessional to me.

Answer:
Yes, it’s really OK from a writing perspective to use first person in many professional situations. After all, your name is somewhere on that document, so it’s no mystery who wrote it, and "I" doesn’t have to be overused.

However, if you are uncomfortable writing as yourself, start by figuring out why. It might be that your reading audience – a school district, a professor, a court, or an old-school professional – expects everything to be "objective" and they translate that to mean written in third person (he, she, they, etc.) If that’s the case, and you have evaluated your audience correctly, your discomfort might come from breaking those rules to no avail. That is, you might know that the document would be sent back for revision and so pushing that envelope would likely be counterproductive. In that case, sticking with third person is likely best for that audience.

But if your discomfort is simply because you haven’t tried it yet, choose your audience carefully; then express directly what you have to say in first person and active voice. See how that feels and how your audience responds.

Question:
How do I know when a sentence is in “active voice”? Why is that better than using "passive voice"?

Answer:
An active sentence is the clearest for your reader. No question about who does what in this sentence: "The man drove the car." The man took action (drove) and the car is what he drove. Passive voice, however, makes the reader take an additional step in understanding: "The car was driven by the man." That shift to "was driven by" has the reader pausing to translate who did what. If you write primarily in active voice, then you can also make a choice to use passive on occasion – either to give variety or to shift emphasis in the sentence. Passive voice has its uses, but it should be used consciously and judiciously.