This article is the latest in a series that the author has been writing for the Journal on usage in language. He discusses briefly the misuse of words by Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, then goes on to demonstrate that malapropisms are found in contemporary writing, including writing for the various professions.

There is nothing mysterious about punctuation. It is based upon simple principles. The “rules” which one can find in all sorts of books are usually true enough, but they tend to make the matter seem unnecessarily complicated, and they do not show why they are true. The more practical approach is to consider certain typical situations and what they naturally require. The important thing, of course, is good sentence-structure. What correct punctuation does is to keep that structure unmistakably clear for the innocent reader who does not know what is coming.

A sentence should have from the beginning a definite plan to be kept clearly in view. When a writer becomes tangled in his grammar and goes off the track, we may believe that he started without being sure of what he wanted to say. Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1849: “A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.”

We seem naturally to think of “words” as definite units of language. Yet, on every hand there is continual confusion as to what constitutes a word. It is something quite different from a mere group of letters—unless or until a word is made out of them. And there is no clearer distinction in the structure of English than the difference between a compound word and a phrase. In much printed matter nowadays, however, these distinctions are largely ignored.

Over a long period of time, among people interested in writing, there has been endless discussion of the “split infinitive.” Both those who castigate it and those who are disposed to accept it have generally missed the point. Whatever one may think of its importance in itself, it can furnish an interesting approach for examining the real principles of sentence-structure and the logical arrangement of words.