He is taller than I.

He is taller than me.

I’ll confess that I didn’t answer immediately because I wanted to think about it for a bit first. Even though I wrote in that old post about linking verbs (of which “is” is one) and how they require that the pronoun be in the subjective case (so “I”), I balked at shelling out that advice, probably because the first sentence just sounds so stuffy, almost as if to use the “I” here would be a hyper-correction.

Usually, I’ll write around such a problem rather than confronting it, since if it makes me pause for a moment, surely it does the same for others. In this case, I might rewrite as “he is taller than I am,” which is more explicit and sounds less stuffy.

Flipping through The Elements of Style today to find inspiration for a post, I ran across a brief article on the importance of “ear” in writing. The handbook is here proscribing the use of fancy words (no need to use “beauteous” when “beautiful” or even “pretty” will suffice) and goes on to suggest that sometimes it’s ok to break the rules if the “correct” usage just sounds bad. One example provided is shifting a preposition to the end of a sentence to avoid awkwardness. Another:

And would you write “The worst tennis player around here is I” or “The worst tennis player around here is me”? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment — although the me might not do in all contexts.

So there you have it. Even crusty old Strunk and White sometimes allow for divergence from the traditional rules of grammar. Because the pair of sentences offered in that old comment contain a linking verb, the subjective pronoun is correct, but more often than not, the incorrect usage in this sort of case actually sounds less like an error and is ok to discard.

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jemsweb/7193106/

Providing your readers with a contact form enables them to get in touch with you beyond just leaving a comment on your post. This is especially useful if you’re using your blog to build a business or to get started as a paid writer. Additionally, adding a contact form to your site will allow other bloggers and collaborators to get in touch about all those awesome new projects they would love your feedback on. On WordPress.com, we have a great, built-in way to add a custom contact form to your site. You can learn all about the details here.

Using a contact form, instead of writing your email address directly onto your site, helps prevent spammers from finding your email and WordPress automatically filters any spam messages sent through the custom form for added protection. It’s also a simple and clean way to grab all of the information you’d like from your readers to help you better understand your audience. Messages sent through your contact form are conveniently stored in the Feedback section of your Dashboard, in addition to the emails you receive when someone sends you a message.

What should you include on your contact form? Simpler is better here — you don’t want visitors to your site to feel like they’re filling out a loan application instead of sending a complimentary email to their favorite blogger. Name, email, and a section for the actual message is all you really need.

You can also use the custom form builder to create unique forms for a variety of purposes. Don’t believe it? Check out the guide on how to set up an RSVP system with it.

Photo courtesy of Sara Rosso

Down. We spend a lot of time looking ahead, looking from left to right before we cross the street, looking into the sky for Superman, but not a lot of time looking down. What do you see?

Share a picture that means DOWN to you! 

New to The Daily Post? Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, you’re invited to get involved in our Weekly Photo Challenge to help you meet your blogging goals and give you another way to take part in Post a Day / Post a Week. Everyone is welcome to participate, even if your blog isn’t about photography.

Here’s how it works:

1. Each week, we’ll provide a theme for creative inspiration. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog anytime before the following Friday when the next photo theme will be announced.

2. To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “Weekly Photo Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ tag.

3. Subscribe to The Daily Post so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements. Sign up via the email subscription link in the sidebar or RSS

That there’s also a legitimate word spelled “lead” (as in the substance) doesn’t make the distinction any easier to remember.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewbain/548574614/

If you’re as fascinated by word origins as I am, run — don’t walk — to your library and feast your eyes on the Oxford English Dictionary’s lengthy entry on the etymology of “read.” (By the way, if you’re lucky, you may have access to the OED online through your own local library; although I own the condensed version of the dictionary, which is about 20 pounds of book and comes with a magnifying glass in a built-in drawer, it’s sometimes easier on the old eyes to get at the info online.) It turns out that “read” is one of a few words in old Germanic languages to form the past tense via a process known as “reduplication,” which means basically that the word form doesn’t change, or doesn’t change much, when its tense changes. In other words, “read = read”.

“Lead” just happens to belong to another class of words that forms its past tense according to a different rule. And we’re the beneficiaries of all the confusion that difference causes.

I take some flak around here from time to time for coming off as resistant to language change (when in fact I’m not). So when I post about a usage issue that trips a lot of people up, I’m sure to take a few hits in the comments. So, just to be clear: Incorrectly spelling the past tense of “lead” isn’t generally going to cause anybody to misunderstand you. At worst, it’ll make the odd grammar geek grind his (or her? their? them’s? dangit!) teeth. And maybe it actually makes sense to begin embracing simplifications like the one made expedient by this tricky spelling rule. But some people do seem to like to know what’s traditionally considered correct. If you’re such a person, know that the past tense of “lead” is spelled “led.”

Click the handy dandy arrows to navigate among the recent photo posts.

You may have noticed that we’ve recently given the blog a new look. Just in case you missed it, or in case you haven’t given it much in the way of a test drive, I thought I’d point out a couple of the more useful changes.

Our weekly photo challenge is generally the most popular post in a given week, so we wanted to really highlight those posts by adding a slider at the top displaying recent photo challenges. Click the arrows out to the side of the photo to slide to the next or previous photo post.

If you participated in the daily post challenge last year, you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t been dishing up new prompts here at the blog each day this year. That doesn’t mean that daily prompts can’t be found, though. If you still need a little daily inspiration, you can keep your eye on our new footer widget listing posts from the Plinky service. You can also just follow @plinkyprompts on Twitter.

If you like the site’s new look, you might be interested in checking out Linen, which we’re using in conjunction with the Custom Design upgrade to tweak a few things here and there. Of course, we have many other themes available, both premium and free.

We hope you like the new look!

Precisely what I like about Cleese’s talk on creativity is that it makes me think about everything I disagree with. To me, the idea that we need to be isolated to be creative is antiquated and puts creativity in the hands of those with the luxury to spend extensive amounts of time ruminating on life. Being “in the zone,” collaborating with others, seeking criticism, and feeling distracted are all part and parcel of the creative process. Everything we do is sensory input that can later affect our writing and all that we produce.

In my last post, many of you said that you found inspiration from both online resources and from small moments in your daily lives. For me, I find that modern “distractions” are a great resource for new ideas and information that I may not have stumbled across otherwise, but when the time comes for me to actually create, I need to be alone so I can feel completely uninhibited. That said, I also know that my desire to “go, go, go” all of the time is what pushes me to write, to produce, and to criticize the end result.

What’s your process like? Do you agree with Cleese that creativity requires being uninterrupted and solitary? Or do you thrive on hustle and bustle?

Photo courtesy of Sara Rosso

Regret. Obviously the pigeons are not regretting that this delicious gelato fell on the ground, but whoever dropped it definitely regretted it

Share a picture that means REGRET to you! 

New to The Daily Post? Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, you’re invited to get involved in our Weekly Photo Challenge to help you meet your blogging goals and give you another way to take part in Post a Day / Post a Week. Everyone is welcome to participate, even if your blog isn’t about photography.

Here’s how it works:

1. Each week, we’ll provide a theme for creative inspiration. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog anytime before the following Friday when the next photo theme will be announced.

2. To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “Weekly Photo Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ tag.

3. Subscribe to The Daily Post so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements. Sign up via the email subscription link in the sidebar or RSS

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

The apocryphal quotation is said to have been Churchill’s response to an editor’s correction of one of his sentences to keep it from ending with a preposition.

The old rule dictating that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition comes to us in English on the basis not of any inherent sense but rather on the basis of the Latin words that make up the word “preposition” — “pre” meaning “before” and “position” meaning, well, “position.” Very literal-minded grammarians a few hundred years ago decided that a part of speech whose name means that it must go before something surely can’t go at the end of a sentence, where there is no other word for it to precede. Most of the grammar and usage books I’ve read in recent years have conceded that the rule is stupid and that we need not worry ourselves over it too much, especially in cases in which shifting the preposition around makes a sentence awkward.

Before we charge ahead, let’s back up for a moment and review what prepositions are. They’re words like:

• before
• ahead*
• back*
• up
• for

I vividly remember learning in grade school that prepositions are words that describe where a chicken might go.

The quotation attributed to Churchill is funny, then, because he’s twisting a big knot in his sentence to avoid ending it with the word “with” for precisely the purpose of showing the pedantic editor how silly such rearrangement can be. Rewritten as most of us would write the sentence, it would go something like this:

This is the type of arrant pedantry I will not put up with.

It turns out that there’s actually something else going on here, though. “Put up with” is what’s called a “phrasal verb” — a verb phrase that includes more than one word and in which the auxiliary word is very often a preposition acting as an “adverbial particle.” In other words, although structurally, the words “up” and “with” here are prepositions, functionally they’re adverbs modifying the verb “put” and thus don’t really need to follow the old rule (even for those who insist on trying to follow it).

We use these all the time. Some examples:

• blow up
• come by (as in “he comes by it honestly”)
• deal with
• decide on
• dry out
• get on with
• hurry up

Imagine leaning over to a friend during the long-winded introduction of a speaker you’re eager to hear and whispering “I wish on with it he would get.”

Generally, mangling your sentences to follow the preposition rule isn’t the best idea — it surely doesn’t result in the clearest sentences — and in the case of phrasal verbs, it’s not just a little absurd, but it’s actually not even called for.

* A reader pointed out to me in the comments that these are not in fact prepositions. I should think my grammar through more carefully before tossing out examples willy nilly.

Since most of my email comes from listservs and various websites I’ve signed up to follow over the years, I delete the vast majority of it. But every day, I make a point to read the Poem-A-Day from Poets.org. It’s a nice way to spend at least five minutes a day stirring up my creative juices.

There are only a handful of blogs and websites that I check each day to get my creative fix. Here are a few of them. (They don’t all have the option to sign up for email updates, but you can always add them to your WordPress.com Reader here):

• Brain Traffic - Good advice from an excellent team on content strategy and writing.
• Brain Pickings - I love Brain Pickings. The easiest way to describe it is as a collection of interesting tidbits on artists, writers, and the way things work.
• Contents - Tips from the pros on content strategy and the future of online publishing.
• Open Culture - Free educational resources on culture and history.
• Longreads - Designed to be read online and at your computer, Longreads curates interesting, quick reads every day.

Taking the time to read either tips or creative pieces by other artists each morning is a great way to build your inspiration up throughout the day. Aside from the Daily Post, where do you go to find tips and fodder?

Photo courtesy of Sara Rosso

Sorry we’re a little late with this week’s challenge. We know you’ll forgive us

Ready. This basket, this bike, are ready to be put into motion, to be filled up, to be useful. To start the next journey, the next task, the next action. 

Share a picture that means READY to you! 

New to The Daily Post? Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, you’re invited to get involved in our Weekly Photo Challenge to help you meet your blogging goals and give you another way to take part in Post a Day / Post a Week. Everyone is welcome to participate, even if your blog isn’t about photography.

Here’s how it works:

1. Each week, we’ll provide a theme for creative inspiration. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog anytime before the following Friday when the next photo theme will be announced.

2. To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “Weekly Photo Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ tag.

3. Subscribe to The Daily Post so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements. Sign up via the email subscription link in the sidebar or RSS