The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

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“Stay ‘unreasonable.’ If you
don’t like the solutions [available to you], come up with your
own.”
Dan Webre

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constitute legal advice. It is for ENTERTAINMENT
PURPOSES ONLY.

Rules for Contributors to The Martialist

Writing Tips and Style Guidelines, by Phil Elmore

We strongly encourage submissions from our readers.
You don’t have to be the best writer in the world. We edit everything,
too, so don’t fret too much. However, if you’d like to make our job
easier, here are some tips and guidelines for better writing. We’re not
the grammar police and I, personally, had a terrible public school education.
Everything I know about grammar and sentence structure I picked up on my own
after the fact. Still, there are some basic rules you should follow that
I also try to follow in my writing.

Make every sentence a complete sentence. This
means every sentence must have a subject, a verb, and a predicate. For
example, read these two sentences: “The CRKT Cruiser is a solid,
dependable knife. A real workhorse.” The second sentence sounds
like it flows logically from the first, but it’s a fragment. The
sentences shoud read, “The CRKT Cruiser is a solid, dependable knife.
It’s a real workhorse.”

The simplest way to determine if you have a complete
sentence is to ask yourself, “Could I theoretically agree or disagree with
this sentence?” The statement, “A real workhorse” is an incomplete idea
you can’t agree or disagree with it because without the rest of the
paragraph you have no idea what it means. It’s like me saying, “A purple
car.” What about it? If, instead, I say, “I own a purple car,” you
could theoretically agree or disagree, if you had more knowledge about my car.
More importantly, you understand what I’m trying to say in the second
sentence, regardless of whether it’s true.

Some sentences might appear, at first, to be incomplete, but
that’s because they contain an unspoken “you” that completes them.
“Choose wisely” is a command, the unspoken component of which is “you.”

Quotation marks are double unless you’re quoting a quote,
and they go outside of other punctuation. Don’t use single quotes
unless they’re inside double quotes. For example, “She called my
magazine ‘a disreputable, wretched rag,'” is correct. Notice that if
there’s a comma or a period at the end of a quote sentence, it goes inside the
quotation marks, not outside. “This is a properly quoted sentence.”
“This is not”, by contrast. Never ‘quote like this’ unless you’re
quoting someone else’s quotation.

Never use “upon” unless it means “up on top of
something.” “Upon” is one of those words that gets abused
frequently. You can almost always substitute “on” for it. “Upon”
is only appropriate if you’re describing something resting on top of something
else, and even then in a lot of cases you can simply use “on.”

Don’t use “since” when you mean because. Don’t use
“for instance” when you mean “for example.” Since means “time,” not
“because.” “I’ve been studying Wing Chun since the school opened in
2002” is correct. “Since I hate him, I rank his threads poorly” is not.
“Because I hate him…” is correct. While we’re at it, always say “for
example” rather than “for instance.” It’s just better.

Use “further” for abstracts, “farther” for physical
distance. People tend to mix these up, but further should be used
when you’re speaking abstractly, while farther refers to travel. “We can
explore this issue further if only you’d be willing to move farther upstate.”

Do not end sentences with prepositions! This
includes prepositions that are positioned in ways they should not be in the
middle of a longer sentence. For example, “That is the art he trains in”
is wrong. “That is the art in which he trains” is correct. “The
art he trains in is Wing Chun Kung Fu” is similarly wrong because the
preposition is improperly placed even though it’s not at the end. “The
art in which he trains is Wing Chun Kung Fu” is better.

A preposition is a locator in time and place.
Prepositions include the words about,
above, across, after, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind,
below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, but, by, despite, down, during,
except, for, from, in, inside, into, like, near, of, off, on, onto, out,
outside, over, past, since, through, throughout, till, to, toward, under,
underneath, until, up, upon, with, within, and without.

A lot of people argue that ending a sentence with a
preposition isn’t an unpardonable sin. These people are lying commies.
They’ll use the example, “That is something I will not put up with,”
explaining that restructuring this sentence leaves you with the awkward, “That
is something up with which I will not put.” Good writers simply rewrite
such a sentence completely to read, “That is something I will not tolerate.”

I’m going to start a gang of writers. We’ll carry
switchblades and our jackets will read, “We are not the people with whom to
fuck.”

“Who” is a subject. “Whom” is an object.
Use whom whenever the “whom” is the object of the sentence rather than the
subject. (The subject is the entity that verbs. The object is the
entity being verbed.) “Who is going to the seminar” is correct because
the “who” is the subject and is doing the “going.” “With whom are you
going to the seminar” is also correct, in this case because the subject is
“you” and you are doing the “going,” whereas the “whom” is being “gone with.”
And don’t write sentences like “gone with.”

Don’t turn people into objects. When you refer
to a person, don’t neuter them. “These people, people that don’t
understand the martial arts, are silly” is wrong because you’ve used “that” to
refer to living beings instead of objects. The sentence should read,
“These people, people who don’t understand the martial arts…”

Don’t capitalize every noun in the article.
Some people have a tendency to capitalize, unnecessarily, ever other word
they write. If I’m writing about the Pistol I bought from the Factory
that is down the road from me, and I’m talking about shooting some Game
Animals with that Pistol, I’ve just annoyed my editor.

Hyphenate the term “self-defense.” Don’t spell
it like a Canadian. “Self-defence” is wrong here in the States.
For that matter, don’t be spelling “realize” with an “s” or “color” with an
“our,” either. (Note the placement of commas in those sentences with
relation to the quotation marks.)

Don’t use a comma before the word “and” unless you’re
making a list. If you’re writing a sentence that uses the word
“and,” there should be no comma before it. “I like to vote Republican
and I like to kick puppies” is correct. “I like to vote Republican, and
I like to kick puppies” is also correct but I prefer to break up long
sentences into smaller pieces if they consist of separate ideas. If the
sentence is long enough that you
need that comma in there, break it into two sentences instead and eliminate
the “and” entirely. Shorter sentences, as long as they are complete,
lower the reading level. The lower the reading level, the more
accessible the text. This is a technical writing lesson drilled into me
by an editor at a previous job, who constantly scolded me for “doing
comma-ands.”

Don’t start sentences with “and.” And I mean
that. Now, what is wrong with that sentence? Nothing, really
people write that way all the time. Avoid it, though. “And I mean that,” when you think about it,
could almost be a
fragment because it seems like it should be connected to something else.
“I mean that” is a complete sentence by itself.

Always use the penultimate comma. “Penultimate”
means “next to last.” When writing a list of things, always use a comma
before the “and” that caps the list. “I study Wing Chun, Kali,
and Silat” is correct the bold comma is the penultimate comma. “I
study Wing Chun, Kali and Silat” is not correct because the comma is missing
before the “and” that ends the list. Newspapers often do not use the
penultimate comma as a matter of style it helps conserve space. The
Martialist is not a newspaper.

Don’t use “and/or.” Make up your mind.
Choose one. Usually, it will be “and.”

Don’t use “dependent” as in “is
dependent on.” Say, instead, “depends on.” The sentence,
“How this works out is dependent on many factors” sounds much better as, “How
this works out depends on many factors.” For the love of all that is
holy, never, ever say “…is dependent upon.”

Use two spaces between sentences and after colons.
Again, modern style guidelines, particularly for newspapers, use only one
space in order to save, well, space. That’s not how I do it because I
was taught to type on a real typewriter. We used correction tape and
everything. In your face, kid.

Use paragraph breaks. Do not indent paragraphs.
Nothing is harder to read than a really long paragraph that goes on and on.
Hit “enter” twice when you start a new idea to break your text into
paragraphs. Always use a blank line of space in between paragphs do
not use the old-fashioned indent or tab to make the paragraph break. For
the love of all that is holy, don’t do both (meaning don’t leave a line of
white space AND indent your paragraphs that’s really annoying).

Do not use “it’s” unless you mean “it is.” This
is one of the most frequently abused terms in the English language.
“It’s” means, always and only, “it is.” If you’re using the possessive
form of “it,” you DO NOT use an apostrophe. “It’s the only way to do it”
is correct. “The monster drooled, its jaws working feverishly” is also
correct.

Do not use apostrophes to pluralize. This is so
frequently done incorrectly that entire societies for the preservation of the
apostrophe have been created. “We sell stick’s and staff’s” is horribly
incorrect. When you pluralize something, you might use an “s” or an “es,”
but you will NEVER, EVER, EVER use an apostrophe. Don’t make me find you
and slap you.

These are guidelines and, except for the bit about the prepositions, can be
broken without committing serious harm. If you adhere to them as often
as possible, however, you’ll turn out better text than if you do not.

Follow these guidelines and
you’ll make your Martialist editor’s life a little easier.

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