We’ve been running a grammar expose this month: tackling first third-person singular pronoun and then the ever-popular (or -unpopular, depending upon your point of view) of serial vs. Oxford comma.
So now let’s go after that other big issue that continues to plague writers, which plaguey behavior—unlike the behavior of the others—actually has a basis in current correct usage:
That vs. Which
But first I am going to stoop so low as to say to a certain tech writer at a certain computer company at a certain time many, many years ago who would not shut up about this: I’m right, you were wrong, you should’ve looked it up.
That vs. which is an issue because it’s based upon the difference in usage between American and British English:
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British English
That and which are pretty much interchangeable. So if you want to say:
They came around the corner and smashed right into my car that was in the road
. . .you can.
Although if I were your editor, I’d probably cut it down to:
They came around the corner and smashed right into my car in the road
However, if you want to say:
They came around the corner and smashed right into my car which was in the road
. . .you can do that too.
The Brits aren’t picky. They’ve been using those words for a very long time, through an awful lot of lingual evolution, so they just let it ride either way.
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American English
However, in the US we make a distinction between a qualifying phrase that is essential to the meaning of the sentence and a qualifying phrase that is not.
(Notice the use of that in that sentence, folks.)
So if you want to say:
They came around the corner and smashed right into my car, which was in the road
. . .you need the comma.
The reason you need the comma is that you’ve set your sentence up so that the whole point can be conveyed without this qualifying phrase. Qualifying phrases that we don’t need we set aside with commas.
This means the sentence gets across its whole point just as well with this:
They came around the corner and smashed right into my car
However, if you want to say:
They came around the corner and smashed right into my car that was in the road
. . .you can do this too. But you leave off the comma. That makes the information—my car was in the road—essential to the whole point of the sentence.
However, again, if I were your editor I’d probably edit it down to:
They came around the corner and smashed right into my car in the road
Now, there’s one other question about that that turns up a lot when editors get together to harangue each other about calmly talk over our differences of opinions, and it’s the use of “that” in general.
It’s called a relative pronoun, and I used it right there in the paragraph above. I used that to connect the question and the fact that it turns up. (Did it again!)
It’s not always necessary. A lot of editors eliminate that as a matter of course. And this urge to eliminate dates back—yes, indeed—to journalism and the journalist’s need to cut any and every word they possibly can for the sake of saving space.
I used to eliminate that unless it was absolutely necessary.
But now I play it by ear. Because the whole point of writing is for the story to move from the page to the reader’s mind magically, as though the words were invisible. And this means that every time the reader is forced to pause and re-read a sentence in order to get the whole point, the words become visible.
This is a bad thing.
If the only way to make your words invisible is to use a few extras like that and in order to, then do it.
Remember: we write our stories in only those words absolutely necessary and no others. Your goal is always the beautiful magic of invisibility.