Welcome to the first Language Ninja article of what is sure to be a blazing hot summer!

Ninja’s beat the heat tip: Switch out your heat-absorbing black shinobi shōzoku for a light-reflecting bodysuit made of mirrors. She’s pretty sure you can find one on Etsy.

Now that the practical advice is out of the way, let’s get started on the questions!

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To put broad strokes on the canvas of writing and editing merely for over-simplification, there are two overarching types of writers and editors: the brats and the angels. How they behave is distinctly different due to their different roles. The good news is, once a writer or an editor recognizes he or she behaves in one of these ways, it’s easy to change—though one way is obviously (at least to us) a better way to go about things.

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If I were

OR

If I was?

Which is correct?

Most of us might vaguely recall a high school English teacher discussing mood, but few of us remember what it means.

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Copywriting is a peculiar thing.

Online copy and business-directed content don’t follow the same rules as other literary and journalistic works. Copywriting is looser in many ways, and it offers more flexibility in tone and style.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can cram your writing with whatever you want and expect it to work for your clients. The goal of most online copy is to educate and engage a readership about a topic, and just slapping words on a screen won’t do the trick.

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Q: Why are the rules of punctuation so strict? When is it appropriate to us a comma? When should one use a comma as opposed to a semicolon, or an em-dash, or parentheses? What is the difference between a semicolon and an em-dash, anyway? What is an em-dash, and how did it happen?

A: The Language Ninja orders you to calm down. Although you seem slightly desperate to have all the answers immediately, they will have to be addressed in a series of posts. Try not to allow your head to explode.

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It’s fairly safe to say that no one knows how to write humor. The great modern humor essayists – Dave Barry, P. J. O’Rourke, and the late Lewis Grizzard and Erma Bombeck, among many others –do it naturally, instinctively knowing just what turn of phrase and clever irony readers will find funny, but they probably couldn’t even begin to explain how they do it. People who are not great humor writers, obviously, don’t know either.

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Editing is the calm after the storm. It’s when the survivors pick through the wreckage, making a semblance of a life again. A little dramatic, perhaps, but it’s apropos. Writing is the storm that messes everything up, throwing words, punctuation, and grammar here and there…and editing cleans it all up.

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Do you ever wonder whether you should use “which” instead of “that” or vice versa? In the United States we use “which” differently than those living in the United Kingdom. I have no idea when or how the usage diverged, but according to our Modern Language Association, there is a correct way to use each.

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Quick, before the Feds kick down my door—let me tell you a story.

This is a case of alleged corruption, unproven fraud, and suspected malfeasance…all made possible by a small grammatical ambiguity.

What if I told you that a missing comma nearly let me slip away with half a million dollars of ill-gotten taxpayer money? Well, “slip away” might be the wrong way to put it—the questionable actions can be justified as perfectly legal…from a certain point of view.

Where to begin?

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In journalism, commas in a list are frowned on (AP Style outright bans them), and simplistic writing is encouraged. While journalists are, by far, some of the best writers out there, they have to adhere to a certain style—and not just AP or inverted pyramid. Their writing itself must be presented a specific way, or the piece gets tossed back at them like flotsam. “Your word count is too high,” is an often-heard complaint from news editors. “Re-arrange your first four paragraphs and cut back on the prose,” et cetera.

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