A Grammar Girl podcast from March 2018 in celebration of National Grammar Day detailed 10 common grammar myths. Some are plainly incorrect, some are overgeneralizations, and some are points of disagreement between different stylebooks. Even good writers (and editors) get it wrong sometimes!
I’ve seen authors use the term “run-on sentence” to describe a sentence that, while grammatically correct, may have overstayed its welcome. Medical articles are full of long sentences: when adding a word, a clause, or parenthetical numerical values makes the meaning clearer or renders a statement more scientifically accurate, we’ll do it! As Grammar Girl points out, “In a run-on sentence, independent clauses are squished together without the help of punctuation or a conjunction. If you write ‘I am short he is tall,’ as one sentence without a semicolon, colon, or dash between the two independent clauses, it’s a run-on sentence even though it has only six words.”
Use of the passive voice (GG’s myth No. 6) falls under the category of overgeneralizations. The active voice is often your best bet. According to the AMA Manual of Style, “In general, authors should use the active voice, except in instances in which the actor is unknown or the interest focuses on what is acted on.” When I first started working in the field of medical editing and my manager advised me to avoid the use of the first person in abstracts even if it meant rewording to use the passive instead of the active voice, it blew my mind a little. I certainly understood when a perplexed author took me to task for edits that changed the wording of a sentence in his abstract from active to passive. (I also learned the value of a comment specifying why I’ve made a change when it’s something that might not be obvious to an author.)
To further confuse things, different style guides have different rules, and when the guides disagree, a variation can seem like a mistake. Myth No. 7 deals with possessives and the apostrophe-s. AMA style is to omit the final s in the possessive form of a name that ends with s, using only an apostrophe. However, even editors sometimes have the admonitions of long-ago English teachers stuck in their heads. In college I learned that an ‘s was always added, except for classical or biblical names. So the phrase, “Harold E. Varmus’ discovery of retroviral oncogenes,” for example, sets off alarm bells in my head. Yet per AMA style, it’s absolutely correct.
My favorite of Grammar Girl’s myths was No. 3: “It’s incorrect to answer the question ‘How are you?’ with the statement ‘I’m good.’” When someone asks me how I am, and I say “good,” and when I ask them how they are in return they say “I’m WELL,” it feels like a citizen’s arrest, and I don’t love it. But I’ve always thought these scoldilockses were technically correct because the verb am should be modified by an adverb, well. Not so! GG points out that “‘good’ isn’t modifying ‘am’ in the sentence ‘I am good.’ Instead, ‘good’ is acting as the subject complement and modifying the pronoun ‘I.’” This one was news to me—turns out even editors fall prey to grammar myths sometimes!—Heather Green