What's Standard English, Part 8: The F Word

I could get in trouble for this one.

I conclude this series with the word that prompted me to start it. While the F word is far from standard writing in the workplace, it is becoming increasingly pervasive in office speech, and you might find it here or there in writing. I have seen "WTF" in business text messages. You know what that means.

That spread does not mean the F word has lost its shock value. It still seems overtly and inappropriately aggressive, which is exactly why people use it. In speech, it may function as anger, emphasis, surprise, admiration, or even solidarity, depending on who says it, to whom, and under what circumstances. A close colleague may utter it jokingly and strengthen rapport; the same word from a manager in a tense moment may feel threatening or abusive. As with so much language, meaning lies not only in the word itself but in the relationship and context.

One thing for sure: Using the word would have ended a politician’s career a long time ago; now it’s little more than an understandable, innocuous sound bite.

The issue is bigger than one taboo word. It is about the steady migration of informal speech into professional environments. Workplaces now absorb the habits of texting, social media, streaming culture, and casual conversation far more quickly than they once did. What earlier generations would have considered plainly unprofessional may now pass without notice in some offices, especially in fast-moving, high-pressure, or highly familiar teams. The standard has certainly loosened.

It makes sense to remember that expanded acceptance is not the same as universal acceptance. A word that passes easily among peers may damage credibility with clients, offend a reader, or create risk in a difficult Human Resources situation.

Has the F word entered standard English? Not fully. But it has undeniably moved closer to the center of ordinary usage than many people are willing to admit. Standard English changes as culture changes, and professionalism now depends less on rigid rules than on audience, judgment, and timing.

What's Standard English, Part 7: :-) 😀 :-( 👍

The emoticons and symbols in the heading of this post represent the first time I have used them in the 21-year history of this blog—or anywhere, for that matter. I try to let my words speak for me in print. But that doesn't mean I am following some kind of usage convention. The standard is to use them. Such devices, once reserved for text messaging, have been the norm in business email for some time. They have specific meanings known by the writer and reader, so I suppose they count as language.

Still, their rise creates an interesting tension. Emojis can clarify tone in the quick, stripped-down medium of email. A brief “Thanks” may seem abrupt; “Thanks 🙂” may appear warm and appreciative. A thumbs-up can save a whole sentence. In fast-moving exchanges, these marks can do the work that facial expression, gesture, and speaking voice do in conversation.

On the other hand, they also blur the line between informal and formal writing. A smiling face or laughing symbol may seem harmless between teammates, yet the same mark may appear unserious in a difficult message, a disciplinary response, or a communication with a client. As with salutations, punctuation, and word choice, context governs everything. The writer must ask not merely, “Is this common?” but “Is this right for this reader and this moment?”

So are emoticons and emojis now part of Standard English? In practice, yes—at least in many everyday forms of digital writing. They may not belong in every document, and some writers and readers (like me) will resist them, but they are no longer fringe devices. They have become one more way that writers signal meaning, attitude, and relationship. Once again, the lesson is the same: standard English is not fixed. It changes because people do.

What's Standard English, Part 6: Ain't

This post ain't going to take long to read. Ain't might not have become more standardized in workplace writing, but it is becoming more common in speech. And you can bet that standardized speech eventually becomes standardized workplace writing. You can do your own research on this fact.

You'll never get an opponent to concede that ain't is Standard English, but you will win this one: Ain't has a long history of standard usage before it was discredited by prescriptive grammarians, and I completely understand why. We have standard contractions for you, we, and they are not (aren't) and he, she, and it is not (isn't). But we don't have one for I am not, although amn't has a history of standard English usage. Thus, we have ain't.

Since ain't has not disappeared from English for over three centuries, I believe it will become standard in both speech and writing. Ain't is gaining momentum.

What's Standard English, Part 5: Comma Splice

Consider these sentences:

• I am your technical consultant, you can contact me for any problem you encounter with the system.
• Margo is in the conference room, she is checking the technology for her presentation tomorrow.
• Please do not sign out during a break, doing so will make it harder for you to return to the program. 
• Thanks for your help, we will use your guidance throughout the project.

Grammatical purists would call all four examples comma splices, the technical error of substituting a period with a comma to separate two sentences. Yet four strong writers wrote them to me in emails that were otherwise flawless in complying with standard English rules. I am sure they were aware of the miscue, but they might have written them for various reasons, including variety in sentence composition, rebellion against stringent grammar rules, or carelessness amid volumes of writing tasks. 

The speed required of workers who need to process hundreds of emails a day has undoubtedly contributed to the rise of comma splices. For this reason, it is not easy to say any longer that comma splices are mistakes.

What's Standard English, Part 4: Compose / Comprise

If you keep getting it wrong long enough, don't worry. The wrong way will become the standard sooner or later. We learned the distinction between compose and comprise by remembering the whole comprises the parts and the parts compose the whole. Therefore, we might say, "Canada comprises 10 provinces and 3 territories" or "10 provinces and 3 territories compose Canada." Thus, using passive voice we should say, "Canada is composed of 10 provinces and 3 territories." Then "Canada is comprised of 10 provinces and 3 territories" should be considered nonstandard usage.

Really? You can spot is comprised of in respected publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. And once they use it, we all will. In fact, Merriam-Webster considers comprised of a standard phrase. Here is another case of the difficulty in defining and demanding standard English when English standards change.

What's Standard English? Part 3: Over / More Than

In the 1990s, an editor returned one of my articles with a correction. She replaced over with more than in the sentence "Over 1,500 students attend that high school." Even three decades ago, over was in use by pretty much everyone in such contexts. Grateful that my editor accepted my article for publication, I decided not to argue with her over this small point. I did not want to tell her that over has been in use in the English lexicon for more than a millennium.

Grammatical purists seem pleased to put speakers and writers in a linguistic straitjacket with rules that have lain dead for a long time. They fail to consider three historical facts:

1. Language evolution is natural. For cultural, social, biological, and technological reasons, language changes. The world gets smaller, thanks to globalization and technology, so our loan words from other languages increase. Our ability, or inability, to properly pronounce words, such as the Philippine English gigil, now a standard English word, can change the way we spell it.

2. The difference between spoken and written language diminishes over time. Consider the grammatical marker that, as in I know that you know. Our elementary writing teachers would insist on using that in the sentence. But in speech, saying I know you know sounds fine. In time, dropping that in this sentence becomes the accepted writing standard.

3. Usage challenges have a long history. Upon researching etymology, you learn that every word is subject to changes that embellish, diminish, or eliminate them from the language. 

If you ever get called out for using over instead of more than, don't be like me back in the 1990s. Fight back. Believe me: over has been acceptable for over a thousand years.

What's Standard English? Part 2: Salutations

I have written about salutations on one or two occasions in the 21-year history of WORDS ON THE LINE because the topic remains popular among learners in my writing workshops and webinars and readers of this blog. I revisit salutations to show how standards change, which is the focus of this series.

In a post from 17 years ago, I mentioned that commonsense should dictate how you address executives, managers, supervisors, teammates, clients, and vendors. A later post 8 years ago suggested that you should let your organizational culture dictate how you address readers in your emails.

But the point here is we have gone a long way from the medieval "peace be with you, brother" for several reasons, one of them being that for centuries women too have been readers of messages. Another reason is the secularization of the workplace. Technology has also contributed to the need for shortcuts, and globalization has forced our hand to address people politely to compensate for our intentions getting lost in linguistic and cultural translations.

By the nineteenth century, we saw "Dear Sir" or "Dear Madam" become the standard. Then came email, which revolutionized the salutation to "Hi," "Hello," "Greetings," "Good morning," or "Good day" replacing the "Dear," and in most contexts first names replacing last names. Less formality. Then came the complete removal of "Mr." and "Ms." in deference to gender fluidity. Now we address people by their given and surnames, as in "Hi Max Friedman."

Still the questions persist: Is "Dear" in a salutation dead? Is it ever all right to write "Mr." or "Ms."? What if my organization is not as progressive about salutations? The two posts I mention in the second paragraph still hold true, yet no one can reasonably say only one salutation is right. It all comes down to a personal choice.

What's Standard English? Part 1: Overview

It's getting harder to decide what is Standard English today. The global view of this topic is that Standard English is British English, taught throughout Europe, Africa, Australia, and most of the Asia and the English-speaking Caribbean, while American English is taught in the United States, some of Asia, South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm considering what we practice around the world as opposed to what we learned was proper English. In the business world, writers are pushing back against what constitutes a correct sentence, acceptable diction, and customary punctuation. I see comma splices especially becoming commonplace, writers assigning new meanings to everyday words, and new words not only flooding emails but pouring into dictionaries as acceptable usage. I'm beginning to see more violations of the norm than the norm. If that's true, then aren't the violations the norm? 

In this series, I will explore writing "standards" that most people ignore, whether they are driven by factors such as stylistic preferences, time constraints, or globalization and technology. There are many.

"Please call me if you have questions."

Have you ever noticed that some people call you with questions even if you did not close your message with "Please let me know if you have any questions"? And how many thousands of times have you written "Please let me know if you have any questions" without getting questions from your readers? Contrarily, have you observed that sometimes people don't call you with questions when they should, because they clearly don't understand what you told them or mess up on what you have instructed them to do? For all these reasons and a few more, I wonder about the value of that overused closing. 

If you have been in the work world for a while, you know that the daily messages you write could number in the hundreds. We're on autopilot, some of our responses running a single word, like "Done," "OK," "Yes," or "No"; some cutting and pasting previous comments; others embedded in the previous message. We know all the shortcuts. We must, otherwise we would never finish our work. Who has time for anything else? 

I no longer see the point in closing a message with "Please let me know if you have any questions" or its hybrids. I can understand a closing that says, "I look forward to receiving your response" to accentuate the urgency of a message. Or "I will be at meetings all day but at my desk for the rest of the week" to indicate your availability. Or "Since this new procedure will likely require a learning curve, you can click here for the Help Desk" to express support. Or "This proposal will stay in effect for 30 days" to encourage your client to act. Or "If we do not receive a response by Thursday, 12:00 p.m., we will close the case" to cover yourself. Give some thought about the next step for the reader. 

Of course, your reader will contact you with questions, even if you don't tell them to. You might think "Please let me know if you have any questions" is better than nothing. I think not.

A Way with Words, Part 10: Paul's Spiritual Imperative

At the risk of appearing as if I espouse a religious ideology—I am not—I conclude this 10-part series with a quote from Paul the Apostle in Romans 12:2 (New International Version, or NIV) because of its universal wisdom and truth. Two disclaimers before I start: (1) The NIV has taken great liberty in interpreting the King James Version, but then, so has the King James Version taken great liberties with the original ancient Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek manuscripts. (2) The first disclaimer not only leads to the second disclaimer but nullifies my need for even having made the first disclaimer. It is that I look at this biblical quote purely from rhetorical and philosophical perspectives, not sectarian and doctrinal ones. 

Here is the verse in part:

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

From a rhetorical vantage point, notice three strategies behind this beautiful, powerful sentence:

1. The shift from active voice (Do not conform), to passive voice (be transformed). So much for keeping voice consistent within a sentence. In fact, passive and active often work together splendidly. Examples include "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," "She works hard and should be promoted," and "He was pardoned after the court determined the evidence was inadmissible."
2. The use of a command instead of a declaration ("We must conform"), suggestion ("You should conform"), question ("Can you conform?"), or exclamation ("Conform, brothers and sisters, conform!"). These techniques appear elsewhere in the Bible,  but not in this critical demand Paul makes of the Roman readers of this letter. He chooses the simplest way of issuing this order.
3. The choice of the word renewing, which the King James Version also uses. Paul could have written changing, correcting, modifying, revising, or the repetitive transforming. But these other words seem too prescriptive or transitory. Renewing suggests rebirth, which is a central tenet of Christianity. 

From a philosophical position, Paul's statement comes as close to a categorical imperative as one can get. If we are to continue evolving as wise human beings and involving as useful human beings, then we must adapt to our environment, our companions, our circumstances, and our experiences. Life may bring to us an unexpected fate. Our plans may go awry. These misfortunes, however, do not determine how we should respond to them, regardless of how society believes we should respond. Romans 12:2 makes this proposition abundantly clear, affirming our potential to be our own master.  

Here's a 2025 of active reading, writing, and renewal!

A Way with Words, Part 9: James Baldwin's Peculiar Reciprocity

I refer to James Baldwin for at least the fourteenth time on WORDS ON THE LINE, primarily because of the eminently quotable nature of his writing. Here is one paradoxical sentence from a letter he wrote to his agent, Robert P. Mills, dated November 20, 1961, from Turkey:

If you don't learn how to take, you soon forget how to give.

By way of background, Baldwin was explaining to Mills how grateful, and maybe undeserving, he was to have received such generosity from his hosts in Turkey. He mentioned that he had no idea how to repay such kindness, resolving that some people do not want payment, that their payment is the gift of giving.

Over time, I have learned the truth of that statement. My parents raised me as many others have been raised, to never expect or accept other people's giving without earning it. Consequently, the very thought of receiving a "handout" abhorred me. As I grew under the influence of intellectual giants like and old boss Harry Kamish, musical geniuses like Bill Evans, transformative artists like Chuck Close, extraordinary writers like Baldwin, and mostly habitual givers like my sister Elizabeth and wife Georgia, I experienced a reversal in perspective. I now understand that giving and taking in their intended spirit are virtually synonymous. I do not feel the need to explain what Baldwin meant. You would understand if you have experienced the meaning of benevolence.

A Way with Words, Part 8: Robert Frost's Surface Tension

I have returned to the poem "Birches" by Robert Frost at various stages of my life since I first discovered it in college more than fifty years ago, and each time its meaning and value deepen for me. As a college student, I was struck by the image of birches bending either by the weight of a boy swinging on them (unlikely, says Frost) or the more possible severe consequences of ice storms. A decade later, as a father, I was taken by the choice of escaping the troubled world by climbing a birch tree to its highest weight-sustaining point or returning to earth, the only place where one can find love. As my wife and I became  empty nesters, I found heartrending the concluding picture Frost paints of spending one's final moments climbing a birch toward heaven. Later, when I saw one of my grandsons atop a tree on my property, I recalled the moment in the poem when Frost considers country boys apart from companionship, which  they would be able to find in the city, entertaining themselves by creating their own games, such as climbing a birch.      

But one moment in the poem has never lost its vividness and significance throughout my adult life. Recollecting a boy climbing a birch, Frost writes:

                ... He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

The comparison Frost draws is what a scientist would call surface tension, that apparently gravity-defying position that liquid can hold slightly above their container before spilling over. We have all tried that stunt, marveling at how water refuses to drip down our glass even though it exceeds its barrier. Admittedly, I still do so as a challenge on mornings when pouring orange juice into a four-ounce glass. Returning to the lonely boy painstakingly ascending the birch, I delight in the realization that Frost breaks the common belief of youth's reckless abandon. Sure, we can see climbing a tree as reckless, but the boy does so with utmost caution and precision, inclinations we usually do not attribute to children. Even above the brim. I never tire of that moment in "Birches."   

A Way with Words, Part 7: Sharon Olds's Artistic Choice

At the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival in Stanhope, New Jersey some 30 years ago, poet Sharon Olds responded to a question about her bringing into her poetry people from her life, such as her parents, husband, and children. She used the terms silence for omitting real people and song for referring to them in her work. She concluded, "If I have to choose between silence and song, I will choose song." 

Even if we disagree with Olds's choice, we can still appreciate her metaphor, equating the concealment of personal experience as silence and its use as song. We can also extend her statement to the political poetry Ernesto Cardenal, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Pablo Neruda, and to other genres, such as the education treatises of Paolo Freire and the historical criticism of Michel Foucault. Silence evokes closed societies and song open ones. What better way is there to discover how human beings deal with grief, mental illness, and brutal oppression?  

While we may stop short when it comes to showcasing our family members or friends in our writing, the writer's imperative is song. That is our existential dilemma. We need to communicate to learn, to evolve as a culture.

A Way with Words, Part 6: William Faulkner's Singulary Artistry

This 10-part series, "A Way with Words," has focused up to this point on written sentences by notable authors. But for this post, I turn to the spoken word of Nobel laureate William Faulkner from his legendary 1956 Paris Review inerview, which I strongly encourage developing writers to read. The first page alone is worth memorizing as a mantra to guide one's writing life. Here is one such quote in response to a question about the importance of a writer's individuality:

All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't, which is why this condition is healthy.

For this reason, writers grow more metaphysical, painters more impressionistic, and composers more abstract. They continually and dutifully try to attain the unreachable in their artform. During the creative process, the representation of their imagination matters infinitely more to them than the linguistic mindset of their reader, the visual perspective of their viewer, or the aural sensibility of their listener. This creative endeavor, claims Faulkner, is the true work of the artist.

A Way with Words, Part 5: Isabel Allende's Universal Truism

In Isabel Allende's novel, La ciudad de las bestias (City of the Beasts), Kate Cold, the grandmother of the protagonist, 15-year-old Alexander, says: 

"Con la edad se adquiere cierta humildad, Alexander. Mientras más años cumplo, más ignorante me siento. Sólo los jóvenes tienen explicación para todo." ("With age, you acquire a certain humility, Alexander. The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.")

Allende's observation crystallizes a major distinction between the aged and youth. As we move through childhood, our parents, teachers, and other elders give us what we believe to be a reliable playbook of life. We are know-it-alls. But as we evolve from children to adults, experience shows us countless contradictions between what our guardians taught us and what we learned through observation. Our desired outcomes are too often derailed, our relationships are too unexpectedly transformed, our hopes are too frequently dashed. Life is just unpredicatable, full of risks and surprises, some good and some bad. The longer we live, the more untrustworthy we realize the expression, "Now I've seen everything." Now matter how much we wish Kate Cold's comment to her grandson were merely an ironic remark by a bitter, disillusioned old woman, we accept it as an enduring truth. 

A Way with Words, Part 4: Gabriela Mistral's Spiritual Metaphor

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, better known as Chilean poet and educator Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote this sentence in her prose poem "La oración de la maestra" ("The Teacher's Prayer"):

Dame el levantar los ojos de mi pecho con heridas, al entrar cada mañana a mi escuela. (Lift my vision from my broken heart as I enter my school every morning.)

I want to start with the subjectivity and difficulty of translation. I take literary liberties since ojos literally means eyes (I use vision), pecho means chest (I use heart), and heridas means wounds (I use broken). Not all translations agree with me. I realize that eyes can be used metaphorically, as in "Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord," from Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Presumably, Howe's use of eyes alludes to the human spirit, but I feel, rightly or wrongly, that vision is a more expansive, or existential, term for Mistral's ojos where English is concerned. As for chest wounds, I believe the more common English term broken heart is as figurative as the author's intent. 

Now, what makes Mistral's sentence sing so universally is its ascendent humility and unqualified passion for the children she teaches. We have heard the apt expression "Don't bring your work home" and the equally applicable "Don't bring your home life to work." As students or parents, we do not want teachers to allow outside pressures, disappointments, and sorrows to influence the way they teach or treat their students. Whatever bad happens to teachers outside the classroom should stay there.

Mistral's way with words elevates common wisdom to a summoning of her God for granting her spiritual faith, hope, and charity in teaching her students. In doing so, she transforms a simple statement into an essential, transcendent prayer.

A Way with Words, Part 3: Yuval Noah Harari's Parallel Definitions

After taking Yuval Noah Harari's brilliant course, A Brief History of Humankind, now available on YouTube, I decided to read his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The book brought numerous unexpected pleasures, including Harari's fluid, trenchant writing style. 

I am reading Harari's most recent book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, brings new surprises, both in content and style. Note these two sentences from page 119 of Nexus: 

To summarize, a dictatorship is a centralized information network, lacking strong self-correcting mechanisms. A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, processing strong self-correcting mechanisms. 

The premise of Nexus is that since the beginning of time, no one person can change much in our world; indeed, communities (or information networks) are necessary to disseminate, interpret, and act on data for society to flourish. As Dennis Duncan's mostly unfavorable review of Nexus in the New York Times puts it, "In a nutshell, Harari's thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data."

You can see why the two sentences quoted above from Nexus are essential to understanding Harari's proposition. Those sentences taken together sing because of their parallelism in both parts of the statement. The first part of the sentences describes the type of information network belonging to each form of government, and the second part reflects on each government's relationship with what Harari calls self-correction. Communities that commit to infallibility of a central guiding doctrine, whether  economic, political, or religious, do not take well to self-correcting. Such systems are intolerant of people questioning their doctrine. Contrarily, true scientific communities are by definition self-correcting. They have no infallible doctrine and continually seek to advance knowledge and human prospects, meaning they will be quick to overrule an existing standard if someone can disprove it and propose a more fitting doctrine. 

The second part of the 500-page book covers what will happen to self-correcting communities as AI imposes greater influence on the world. I'm not there yet, but I still delight in Harari's thinking and expressiveness. 

A Way with Words, Part 2: G. K. Chesterton's Paradoxical Wit

In "Tremendous Trifles," the first of 36 essays in G. K. Chesterton's 1909 book of the same name, comes this concluding sentence:

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

A quick read of that sentence would make you miss the deep and rich insight of Chesterton's point. A bit of background. In this essay, the author uses a parable of two boys, Peter and Paul, whose wishes are granted by a passing wizard. Paul wishes to be a giant to easily walk across all the wonders of the world in no time, and Peter wishes to be only a half-inch high to endlessly strive for distant horizons of mere meters. You'll have to read the rest of the brief essay (1,316 words) to find how things turn out for the boys.

Think of Chesterton's aphorism in two parts. He begins with the claim that we live in a world of abundance, sometimes overwhelming in its beauty, breathtaking in its excitement, boundless in the experiences it affords us; he ends it with an indictment of a human condition lacking in imagination, enchantment, and inspiration. Also, note his verb choice: starve. Is he talking about a matter of life and death? Indeed, if we think of our mind and spirit as life-affirming mechanisms. Finally, hear the rhythm he creates with his repetition of for want of and near-repetition of wonders and wonder, the s prompting such a prominent contrast in meaning. In doing so, he challenges us to examine our worldview. We do live the life of the mind, as Hannah Arendt put it. And Chesterton underscores this point in the last paragraph of the essay: "everything is in an attitude of the mind."

A Way with Words, Part 1: Albert Murray's Singular Vernacular

With this post, I begin a 10-part series on unusual diction successful writers have used to capture their readers' attention. Let's start by checking out the singular syntax in the first sentence of chapter 4 of South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray. It's an awkward start for a reader of "fine literature," but knowing where Murray's coming from, I wouldn't change a word. Here it is:

The old place you used to come into coming in from Atlanta by railroad was Chehaw, from which you used to take the Chehaw Special on into the campus.

Before dissecting Murray's sentence, let's consider the topic of Murray's chapter, titled "Tuskegee." Few places figure more prominently in American history than this Alabamian city. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Muscogee people who lived there were displaced to Indian Territory. Tuskegee was a site of cotton plantations owned by white slaveowners. In 1881, Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, a historically black land-grant university now known as Tuskegee University. The renowned Tuskegee Airmen who piloted fighter planes in World War II, originated from that campus. Tuskegee was also the location of the unethical and illegal 40-year Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, conducted by the United States Public Health Service, resulting in the death of many untreated black citizens at the hands of duplicitous healthcare workers and scientists. The racist gerrymandering of Tuskegee into a 28-sided voting district disadvantaged the dominant black voter base, leading to Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a 1960 Supreme Court case that found the redistricting violated the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace took a hard stand against the desegregation of Tuskegee High School. Today nearly 90 percent of Tuskegee's 9,000 residents are black with a third living in poverty. This is the Tuskegee Murray was writing about. 

Now, for Murray's 29-word sentence, many stylistic flourishes appear: 

1. Informal pronoun. Murray wants all his readers to feel as though they were listening to him talking to them on a street corner. The tone he sets with this device is remarkably conversational, frank, even endearing. Murray uses the pronoun you twice in the sentence, disregarding rhetorical purists who would eschew such a tactic.

2. Phrasal Verbs. Now Murray twice drops the same phrase in this sentence. He could have written the more concise came instead of used to come and took instead of used to take. I doubt he employed this language because he was being paid by the word. Rather, he again wanted that down-home-in-Alabama effect. 

3. Double prepositions. The phrases in from and on into seem awkward at first read. Yet those phrases reflect the way people speak, especially from Murray's neck of the woods. He was a native of Alabama. 

4. Mid-branching sentence. Murray divides the base clause, The old place was Chehaw, by 11 words: you used to come into coming in from Atlanta by railroad. I'm not sure how many people usually speak like that, but I do. The effect creates an element of suspense. 

I admit that I had to read Murray's sentence twice to understand it. But sometimes that effort in itself is one of the pleasures of reading. He could have written Chehaw was the old place one would arrive from Atlanta by railroad, followed by the Chehaw Special to the campus. This 19-word alternative, a 10-word reduction (35 percent) just doesn't sing off the page like Murray's original—and original he was. The way he wrote that sentence, man, I could taste those words.

On Breaking Parallel Structure

I have written often in this blog about the value of parallel structure in creating fluent, clear, and concise phrasing. Just type the term parallel in the search bar on this page for numerous helpful tips and examples on the topic. 

I have also written about breaking parallel structure to achieve a desired effect in fiction and business writing, and I have shown how great writers like Joan Didion have done so. For another example of breaking parallel structure, simply in the name of plain language, here is a sentence from former US President Barack Obama in a tribute on X to Ethel Kennedy after her death:

Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with a passion for justice, an irrepressible spirit, and a great sense of humor.

If you'd say that sentence seems understandable, I'd agree. But Obama breaks with the parallel convention, which would not have proven as good a sentence. He describes three Kennedy's attributes:

• passion for justice (noun + prepositional phrase)
• irrepressible spirit (adjective + noun)
• great sense of humor (adjective, noun + prepositional phrase)

 Note the inconsistency in the phrasing. Here are three alternative and consistent phrasings based on the context of the original sentence:

1. Noun + Prepositional Phrases: Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with a passion for justice, humanity through an irrepressible spirit, and a sense of humor. 
2. Adjectives + Nouns: Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with passionate justice, an irrepressible spirit, and great humor.  
3. Adjectives, Nouns + Prepositional Phrases: Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with a deep sense of justice, an irrepressible spirit for humanity, and a great sense of humor. 

I hope you agree with me that example 1 seems robotic and redundant, example 2 nonfluent and confusing, and example 3 overwritten and verbose. Obama's usage, on the other hand, seems ironically parallel, although it technically isn't. The three phrases he chooses are more common speech and, therefore, heartfelt and understandable.

My point: Use parallel structure but know when to break this rule.