Poetic Meter (Written Conventions of English)

POETIC METER (Written Conventions of English)

Meter is the "beat" in a line of poetry. Even natural speech can have meter, but here are some formal "feet" used by poets (note that ^ means a light beat and / a heavy one):

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• Iamb: ^ / "inDEED" This was Shakespeare's chosen meter; with five feet in a line it is called "iambic pentameter": "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?"
• Trochee: / ^ "WAter"  Poe's "The Raven" begins: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary..."
• Spondee: / / "BIRTHDAY" All but "On thy" in these lines by Tennyson are spondaic: "Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!"
• Dactyl: / ^ ^ "YESterday" Dactylic lines often end with a trochee, as in Longfellow's Evangeline: "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks..."
• Anapest: ^ ^ / "underSTAND" Look at this familiar line: "'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house..."

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Lines are also named for the number of feet contained in them (as in "iambic pentameter" above). Some are:

1. = monometer
2. = dimeter
3. = trimeter
4. = tetrameter
5. = pentameter
6. = hexameter
7. = heptameter
8. = octameter

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Synonyms and Antonyms (Written Conventions of English)

SYNONYMS AND ANTONYMS (Written Conventions of English)

A synonym is a word or phrase that means the same or nearly the same as another. These can be found in a book called a thesaurus. For "book" (noun), we find words like: album, manual, novel, paperback, textbook, and volume. As you can see, these do not have exactly the same meaning as book, but you could put book in place of them.

Antonyms are opposites, and come in three types:

• graded antonyms lie on a continuous spectrum, like hot/cold, fat/thin, young/old, and dull/interesting;
• complementary antonyms' meanings do not lie on a spectrum, like push/pull, odd/even, exit/enter, and exhale/inhale; and
• relational antonyms make sense only in the context of a relationship, like husband/wife, doctor/patient, teach/learn, and parent/child.

Here's a fun one: auto-antonyms or "Janus words" can be their own opposites, depending on context:

• sanction can mean to permit or prohibit;
• fast can mean moving quickly or stuck in one place;
• dust can mean put dust on or take dust off;

and so on.

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Upper- and Lower-Case Letters (Written Conventions of English)

UPPER- AND LOWER-CASE LETTERS (Written Conventions of English)

• Upper-case letters = "Capital letters" - A, B, C, D, etc.
• Lower-case letters = "small letters"   -  a, b, c, d, etc.

Capitalize:

• the first word of a sentence: Never sit on a cactus.
• the first word of a quote: He said, "Never sit on a cactus."
• the pronoun I: He sat on a cactus, but I didn't.
• proper nouns: My friend Bill sat on a cactus in Arizona.
• a person's title (sometimes): President Joe Biden, but Joe Biden is the current president of America.
• days, months, historical eras, and holidays (not seasons): Monday, April, the Renaissance, Christmas, but winter
• cardinal directions naming a place: the South, Eastern Europe, but Chicago is east of New York.
• initials and acronyms: J. F. Kennedy, U.S.A. or USA / NATO

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In a title:

• YES: the first word, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
• NO: articles, conjunctions, and prepositions

    To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone with the Wind

NOTE: In informal writing, entire words can be capitalized for emphasis: HE didn't sit on a cactus; YOU sat on a cactus.

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BC/AD vs BCE/CE (Written Conventions of English)

BC/AD vs BCE/CE (Written Conventions of English)

There was a time when the dating system of the western world was comfortable with using

• BC = Before Christ, and
• AD = Anno Domini, "[in the] year of the Lord," meaning after the birth of Jesus.

As the world has become increasingly inclusive, however, it has been realized that not all people--even in western countries, let alone in Asia, Africa, and so on--accept the idea that the birth of Jesus had such an epoch-changing effect.

In fact the use of "Common Era" for the so-called AD epoch has been around for three centuries or so. But using

• BCE = Before the Common Era, and
• CE = Common Era ("common" here means "belonging equally to an entire community")

only became widespread around the start of the 21st century.

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Dead languages (Written Conventions of English)

DEAD LANGUAGES (Written Conventions of English)

In everyday use, the expression "dead language" refers to any language which is no longer spoken by a natural community. But there are actually three categories of such languages:

• dead languages: those which, like Latin, may still be known and used by, for example, scholars or religious communities, but you won't find Latin-speaking households in a Latin-speaking town. Many dead languages have evolved into other languages, as Latin became the romance languages, or Sanskrit became Hindi and other languages of India.
• extinct languages: those which have been completely lost--say, there are inscriptions which no one can read, or all the speakers of a language have died (as with some Native American tongues).
• dormant languages: those which still have a role in a culture, but no proficient users--again like some Native American languages. Such languages actually have a chance of being revived through reconstruction and reintroduction to a community.

Note 1: Languages which are not "dead" in any of these senses are usually called "modern languages."

Note 2: Well-known dead languages include ancestors of modern languages, such as Latin, Sanskrit, Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Old French, Old High German, Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, etc.

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Verse (Written Conventions of English)

VERSE (Written Conventions of English)

Some language is purposely made different from the everyday style we call "prose." Verse might use meter (rhythm) or rhyme, but maybe not. Poetry is a very special kind of verse, more serious in intent--and harder to write!

• Greeting cards might be written in verse, but it's not poetry:

          Roses are red
          Violets are blue
          Sugar is sweet
          and so are you.

• Blank verse is poetry with meter but not rhyme; much of Shakespeare is written in blank verse:

          To be, or not to be, that is the question:
          Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
          The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
          Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
          And by opposing end them.

• Free verse is poetry that's more like natural speech, but cut into poetic lines with an irregular rhythm, like this from Walt Whitman:

          A noiseless patient spider,
          I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
          Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
          It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
          Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

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Roman numerals (Written Conventions of English)

ROMAN NUMERALS (Written Conventions of English)

The Roman system of numbers was used until the late Middle Ages, when it was largely replaced by the Arabic system. But we still see Roman numerals in special applications, especially formal presentations of years (on buildings and films, for example), in outlines and book sections, and so on.

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The system is simple:

I = 1, V = 5, X = 10, L = 50, C = 100, D = 500, M = 1000

• The largest numbers are written first, and numbers are added until we reach the smallest, repeating as necessary. This year is

MMXXII = 1000 + 1000 + 10 + 10 + 1 + 1 = 2000 + 20 + 2 = 2022

• Instead of writing anything four times, though, we skip to the next biggest number and add a smaller one before it. So we count:

I = 1; II = 2; III = 3; IV = 4 (like "1 from 5"), NOT IIII; and V = 5

1999 is MCMXCIX: M = 1000; CM = 900; XC = 90; and IX = 9.

• The numbers to 10: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X
• By 10s to 100: X XX XXX XL L LX LXX LXXX XC C
• By 100s to 1000: C CC CCC CD D DC DCC DCCC CM M

There is no zero (0).

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Four-letter words (Written Conventions)

FOUR-LETTER WORDS (Figures of Speech)

Joe: Hey, Moe. In class they told us that "four-letter words" aren't appropriate in business communications. I don't get it!
Moe: Oh, "four-letter words" is an idiom meaning "swear words."
Joe: And what exactly are swear words?
Moe: Okay, think of a rude word for something you do into a toilet. How many letters does that word have?
Joe: Umm... four!
Moe: Good! Now, how about a rude word for a sex act. Letters?
Joe: Four again!
Moe: And the body part used for that act?
Joe: Still four!
Moe: That's right. For some reason, many of the words used for sexual or bathroom activities have four letters.
Joe: I think I get it! Even if a rude word like those has five or six letters, I shouldn't use it, should I?
Moe: That's right! We also use those words when we're angry, along with milder words like "damn" and "hell" and so on.
Joe: And I shouldn't use any of those in business, right?
Moe: Exactamundo!

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Paragraph (Written Conventions)

THE PARAGRAPH (Written Conventions of English)

A paragraph is a group of sentences dealing with a particular point or idea. One sentence (often, but not always, the first in the paragraph), called the topic sentence, should clearly state the central idea. The other sentences, called supporting sentences, do as their name suggests: they support the idea in the topic sentence. These should be arranged in a way that makes sense: chronologically (in the order in which things happen), spatially (like walking through a room), or in order of importance (either most to least or least to most). Sentences in a paragraph should flow from one to the next, with proper transitions. Often, the topic is repeated in a "clincher" sentence at the end.

• In a document, the start of each paragraph may be indented, or paragraphs may be separated by an extra space, or both.

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