the one about "to be"

The verb "to be" terrifies me.

I try to use it as little as possible. And will avoid it at all costs in this post, unless talking directly about it.

When I worked for a literary agent, he informed me that all uses of the verb "to be" constituted passive voice. He recommended I read The Elements of Style. (Yes, co-authored by E.B. White of Charlotte's Web and everyone's childhood.) I did, because I planned to become the Next Great American Author. It influenced my future writing quite heavily.

Turned out I depended heavily on the verb "to be" and needed to eliminate it from my writing, both scholarly and creative.

To this day it strikes fear in my heart. It does make writing sound boring, germane, and uninspired. Undereducated, perhaps. I worked hard to avoid it, and my already-decent grades remained that way. But sometimes I cannot avoid it. Sometimes avoiding it sounds ridiculous, or unclear. Simple sentences, such as, "Her shirt is green," substituted with "Her shirt appeared green," falter with unnecessary weight.

Last weekend I wrote a paper that didn't want to come out at all. I find it harder to avoid "to be" when in a writing rut. I depend on it. Or everything just sounds awful anyway, so I might as well use the "to be" crutch.

Husband and I proofread each other's papers prior to handing them in. He gives me concrete comments about developing points and including the information I discovered near the conclusion in earlier portions of the paper. He helps me out. Last winter, he had to submit a paper for which the professor would dock one third of a letter grade for each use of the verb "to be." Husband depends on the verb "to be" quite heavily, and had written a biographical sketch of an important figure in his field.  "To be" figures predominantly in those. Rearranging sentences to avoid that verb nearly propelled him into baldness. Thankfully my masterful verb skills prolonged his time with a full head of hair, but not without some strife.

His professor suggested he submit the paper for publication.

The story has a moral: The cranial exercise of avoiding "to be" strengthens your brain and your writing muscles, kids. You'll sound smart, too.  Verbs are neat.

the one about spaces

It has come to my attention that the 2009 version of the MLA Style Guide now demands leaving only one space between sentences in written communication.

The 2009 version also demands that you put the medium of your source at the end of bibliographic citations.  For example:

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntley, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker.New York: Penguin Classics, 1988. Print.

(That's the closest book I have besides a Norton Anthology, and those are less fun to cite.)

No one does that. When I handed in my first grad school paper, desperately seeking to be the most up-to-date grad student five years out of undergrad, I double- and triple-checked my MLA formatting, and my bibliography looked like that. In other words, it looked idiotic.

I have not repeated the transgression. No one has cared.

I have been writing for...many years. I took a typing class my freshman year of high school. I know home row and used to freak people out in college by continuing to type (accurately) while holding a conversation with them (hence looking nowhere near the keyboard and/or screen). Leaving two spaces between sentences is as automatic as putting on pants. It's more automatic than brushing my teeth or washing my face at night. 

I have decided to do what all the kids are doing when writing this blog. I am attempting to use only one space between sentences (and after colons). I cannot even think of a metaphor to explain how this makes me feel. Unfinished. Like not crossing a t or dotting an i. Worse. It's like not using punctuation altogether.

It's like all my sentences are all bunched up together They are uniform and indistinguishable from one another Pretty soon there will be no capitalization like this you see you can't even tell what is a statement and what is a question forget about what is dependent and independent madness i tell you just madness

That paragraph (if it can be called that) hurts my soul. But it tells you a bit about me, without getting all boring and TMI-on-the-Internet-y. Grammar is a symphony to me. Double-spacing between sentences is part of that symphony. It's the tuba in the symphony. Tubas may look awkward, but they are a necessary component of the whole. I realize book formatting only uses one space between sentences. I also know the meaning of words like "kerning" and "leading" and "tracking." I know that books are meant to look like a block of text, and that typesetting is an art form I much admire. In well-executed typesetting, a page will look so uniform nothing stands out whatsoever. Like a page full of lemmings, really. Or teenagers.

Books are pretty. But this blog is not a book. My e-mails are not books. The papers I hand in are not books. Neither Microsoft Word nor anything created by Google has the capability to space properly so that single spaces between sentences look correct.

That completely does not explain why I'm single-spacing this blog. I'm stubborn and I want to try it. End of story. You are allowed to call me out when I mess up. But I'll correct your grammar.