“President Obama said Wednesday he would go to Europe.”
Is Wednesday the day he is going to Europe? Or the day he announced his travel plans?
A little word can make that sentence clearer: “that.” But its placement can make a difference, too: “President Obama said that on Wednesday he would go to Europe” means he is leaving for Europe on Wednesday. “President Obama said on Wednesday that he would go to Europe” means he announced on Wednesday that he was going at some unspecified date.
Many journalists are taught to excise most “thats” as unnecessary. But while some “thats” are indeed superfluous, some make a sentence clearer.
“That” has an awful lot of uses for such a small word. We’ll deal with one this week, and others next.
Style guides differ on whether to use “that” after verbs alluding to speech, where it acts as a conjunction. Garner’s Modern American Usage says “the conjunction that should usually be maintained to introduce clauses following verbs such as acknowledge, ask, believe, claim, doubt, and said, because without the conjunction what follows might be taken to be a noun complement.”
The Associated Press Stylebook has a different take:
That usually may be omitted when a dependent clause immediately follows a form of the verb to say: The president said he had signed the bill.…- That usually is necessary after some verbs. They include: advocate, assert, contend declare, estimate, make clear, point out,propose and state.
The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage has an even better explanation:
After a verb like said, disclosed or announced, it is often possible to omit that for conciseness: He said he felt peaked. But if the words after said or any other verb can be mistaken for its direct object, the reader may be momentarily led down a false trail, and that must be retained: The mayor disclosed that her plan for the rhubarb festival would cost $3 million.
In other words, without “that” in the previous sentence, a reader might think, even momentarily, that the mayor had disclosed her plan, not that she had disclosed the cost of the plan.
When there is a time element following that verb, as in our opening sentence, “that” becomes more essential. Says the Times stylebook: “When a time element follows the verb, that is always needed to make quickly clear whether the time element applies to the material before or after it: The governor announced on Tuesday that he would organize a knackwurst fiesta.
If you find those “rules” hard to follow, read a sentence only two words past the verb “said,” “disclosed,” etc., and ask yourself what you think is coming next. If you find yourself confused, you need a “that.” Think of it as a separator between the act of speaking and what is being spoken about, or as the conjunction joining them.
“President Obama said Wednesday he would go to Europe.”
Could I ask for the source of this sentence?
As it stands, it seems to me highly unlikely that anyone familiar with English would interpret it as meaning that Obama would be going to Europe on Wednesday.
One way to test it would be to search: "said Wednesday he would go," in Google, substituting other days as well.
Perhaps a more important question involves the style guides mentioned, as compared with the COBUILD English Grammar and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, made to work together. My recommendation is that journalism schools keep style guides on the shelf as historical curiosities, but teach the COBUILD and Longman systematically.
My student who learned how to write the best sentences going into university worked on the COBUILD guide to reported clauses. He wrote sentences for all the words in the boxes, after looking them up in a corpus dictionary. (It is valuable to practice distinguishing "that" reported clauses from "that" relative clauses, whether "that" is deleted or not).
It is also a good idea to choose real text to illustrate grammar points. My current one is "The Hunger Games." (The Penguin Student Edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is exceptional as background).
Can we condemn Americans for insensitivity to English grammar and be allowed to set up an imaginary Scarlet Letter pillory to deal with them? I am afraid that it is all too true.
I have received assurances from Scholastic that there will be an answer from Suzanne Collins's American editor as to why the explanation of the grammar of "The Hunger Games" as stated below is so inaccurate:
Suzanne Collins on "The Hunger Games:" "When I sat down to write this
series, I assumed it would be like 'The Underland Chronicles,' "
Collins told the 'New York Times' later. "Written in the third person
and the past tense. I began writing, and the words came out not only
in the first person, in the present tense, in Katniss's voice. It was
almost as if the character was insisting on telling the story herself"
("The Hunger Games: The Official Illustrated Movie Companion," 10).
Now, quite obviously, the brilliant tense texture of "The Hunger Games" does employ historical present. Almost equally in effect, it foregrounds powerful past description, with good use of background tenses, such as past continuous and past perfect. Katniss's future tense projections are good too. How could people in America still be unaware of the facts? Is grammar taboo there?
Reality is Fiction.
Fiction is Reality.
1984 Hunger Games.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 25 May 2012 at 07:30 PM