Writing for Style: Be Specific

Specific language makes an impact far greater than the shadowy double-speak that embarrasses many academics and bureaucracies.

Not “a period of unfavourable weather” but “it rained every day for a week.”

Not “he showed satisfaction as he realised his market gains” but “he grinned as he sold the stock for a profit.”

George Orwell showed the difference best when he took Ecclesiastes 9:11 from the King James version of the Bible and drained it of its blood:

“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into account.”

You probably remember parts, or all, of the original:

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

If you’re having trouble writing directly and concretely, lean back in your chair and ask yourself, “What am I trying to say?” Your first answer is probably the way you should write it.

Call a one-person earth-moving implement a spade.
Let’s face it. Vitally challenged or chronologically stunted is still dead.

My Work: City Mice - Part 5

We took down a mile of electric fence and replaced it with split rails, scrounged here and there with a lucky treasure found at a golf course that had just bought the adjacent farm for expansion. A mile of fence takes a rail a foot, 5,000 rails. Three trips transporting them to the farm by logging trucks cost as much as buying them in the first place.

After checking with potential meat customers, we added Scottish Blackface sheep. Small, smart, and hardy, both sexes have horns that are very handy for catching them with a rope loop, then persuading them to stand still. Nothing cleans pastures like Blackface. They are used to grazing and browsing on next to nothing in the Scottish highlands.

We kept one pasture ahead of them the first year, cutting out thickets of wild cherry that, some say, is toxic to sheep. When they are little, they are a pain in the neck because they disregard split rail fences, wriggling under and crashing through in some places, but they require little care otherwise. I never used to like lamb until we started raising our own, and I think the wonderful taste is a combination of the Blackface genetics, clean pastures, and Susan’s skill in the kitchen.

This year, Herefords are teaching us about cattle, and we will have our own beef, lamb, poultry, and eggs with no pesticides, no antibiotics, no growth hormones. Plus enough to sell, custom cut and wrapped, to our customers. With that and our gardens, we complain about all the work but we do fine.

Writing for Grammar: Capital Letters - Part 2

This resource was written by Purdue Owl.
Last full revision by Chris Berry.
Last edited by Karl Stolley on August 20th 2006 at 8:23PM

7) Titles preceding names, but not title that follow names

She worked as the assistant to Mayor Hanolovi.
I was able to interview Miriam Moss, mayor of Littonville.

8) Directions that are names (North, South, East, and West when used as sections of the country, but not as compass directions)

The Patels have moved to the Southwest.
Jim’s house is two miles north of Otterbein.

9) The days of the week, the months of the year, and holidays (but not the seasons used generally)

Halloween
October
Friday
winter
spring
fall

10) Exception: Seasons are capitalized when used in a title.

The Fall 1999 semester

11) The names of countries, nationalities, and specific languages

Costa Rica
Spanish
French
English

12) The first word in a sentence that is a direct quote

Emerson once said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

13) The major words in the titles of books, articles, and songs (but not short prepositions or the articles "the," "a," or "an," if they are not the first word of the title)

One of Jerry’s favorite books is The Catcher in the Rye.

14) Members of national, political, racial, social, civic, and athletic groups

Green Bay Packers
African-Americans
Anti-Semitic
Democrats
Friends of the Wilderness
Chinese

15) Periods and events (but not century numbers)

Victorian Era
Great Depression
Constitutional Convention
sixteenth century

16) Trademarks

Pepsi
Honda
IBM
Microsoft Word

17) Words and abbreviations of specific names (but not names of things that came from specific things but are now general types)

Freudian
NBC
pasteurize
UN
french fries
italics

For more information, refer to CP Caps and Spelling, The Canadian Press, 15th Edition, 2000.

Writing for Grammar: Capital Letters - Part 1

This resource was written by Purdue Owl.
Last full revision by Chris Berry.
Last edited by Karl Stolley on August 20th 2006 at 8:23PM

Use capital letters in the following ways:

1) The first words of a sentence

When he tells a joke, he sometimes forgets the punch line.

2) The pronoun "I"

The last time I visited Atlanta was several years ago.

3) Proper nouns (the names of specific people, places, organizations, and sometimes things)

Worrill Fabrication Company
Prince Edward Island
Supreme Court
Tamworth, Ontario
Atlantic Ocean
Mothers Against Drunk Driving

4) Family relationships (when used as proper names)

I sent a thank-you note to Aunt Abigail, but not to my other aunts.
Here is a present I bought for Mother.
Did you buy a present for your mother?

5) The names of God, specific deities, religious figures, and holy books

God the Father
the Virgin Mary
the Bible
the Greek gods
Moses
Shiva

6) Exception: Do not capitalize the non-specific use of the word "god."

The word "polytheistic" means the worship of more than one god.

For more information, refer to CP Caps and Spelling, The Canadian Press, 15th Edition, 2000.

My Work: City Mice Part 4

In the spring we turned our attention to outside, and I bought books on chickens, pigs, sheep, and cattle. We cleaned up piles of rubble in black flies so thick I couldn’t breathe. We took a truckload of old newspapers and a truckload of metal to the recycle depot. We got an old ambulance from Ray to use as a chicken coop and bought Barred Plymouth Rock chickens for our own fresh eggs. We reorganized one of the sheds for White Rock meat chickens, found a great black Labrador dog at the Humane Society and barn cats along the road.

This was more like it.

One sunny morning I was sitting on the ground next to the chicken’s outside run, listening to their gentle ta, ta, ta, when I realized we were in the middle of our dream. I was so pleased I dozed off right there. We planted a main garden, a berry garden, and a kitchen garden. We plowed a field and planted corn. We bought pigs.

It started when I mentioned to Ray that I didn’t think you could really live on a farm without having pigs.

He put down his wrench. “I’ve kept pigs from time to time and there is no more stubborn critter in the world than a pig. My Uncle Berk says they are the only critter with their head on backwards. You want them to go this way and they go that way, that’s for true. I was loading pigs one day and a four hundred-pound sow didn’t want to get into the truck. Instead, she went right through the barn window, four feet off the ground, broke all the glass out of it. We chased her around the yard for an hour trying to get her back in the barn. We finally roped her and dragged her back with the pickup, kicking and squealing. She made a furrow a foot deep across the yard where she braced her feet against that truck. Good thing I got four-wheel drive or I doubt we could have pulled her.

“Another time I had a boar inside and a sow in heat outside in a pen made from four-foot pallets half buried in the ground, then a second row of pallets lashed on top of them. That made a fence six feet high. “Well, this sow kept getting out and trying to break down the door to get to the boar inside. I thought there was a hole in the fence somewhere, so I went around and around that fence looking for the hole. Couldn’t find one. “Then I was standing in the kitchen one morning and I saw her hoist herself up and over that fence. She just climbed those pallets like you would climb a ladder, up and over. The only difference was that she weighed twice as much as you and had shorter legs.

“That’s the only time I’ve seen a pig go up and over. Usually they go under. A regular fence is no good, they will get their nose under it and lift fence posts right out of the ground. The best thing is electric, turned up high. Pigs are smart, some say smarter than dogs, and if you can train them when they’re young, they won’t try to go through an electric fence later, even though they could if they wanted to.” We followed his advice in an old corral in front of the barn that was fenced all around with six foot-high page wire; heavy checkerboard strands about six inches apart. We put up one solar panel, added ten more batteries, and hooked up an electric fencer to jolt those porkers if they got too close.

The kids went with me to get the piglets in the pickup. On the way, I had Conor read me the part of the pig book that covered buying piglets. “A thirty to forty-pound pig should be six to eight weeks old,” Conor read, “A thirty-pound pig ten weeks old is a runt and may always grow slowly. The animal you buy should be active with clear eyes and not sneezing or wheezing. It shouldn’t shake or limp when walking. It shouldn’t be skinny, or flat-sided with an end-on appearance of a loaf of bread.”

“Yeah, I don’t think we should buy a loaf of pig,” Charlotte giggled.

Conor gave her a stern look and went on, “Watch out for swollen joints and abscesses. Be sure to check that they don’t have a bulge beneath their bellies or in the groin, that indicates a hernia. Pinch an ear gently to make sure there is no delay in blood flowing back quickly that could indicate anemia. Eyes should not be dull or sunken. Avoid a pig with drooping head or tail.” I was ready to avoid the whole business.

I asked the farmer for four pigs with some color on them. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, then went in his barn. There was scuffling and squealing and he came out with a red piglet in his arms.

I checked the belly, legs, and eyes and put it in the truck. We added a white pig, a Hampshire-looking pig with a black band all around it’s middle, and a spotted pig. Easy to tell apart. On the way back, we talked about names. I had been warned not to let the kids name anything they were going to eat, so I favoured naming them for cuts of meat. We finally settled on Pork Chop for the white, Hammy for the spotted, Hickory-Smoked for the black-banded, and Peameal for the red.

Four months later I looked at our hogs, now three hundred pounds each. Back in the days when most people had pigs, it wasn’t unusual to hear of a farmer who slipped in the mud or fainted in the pigpen, then was trampled and eaten by his pigs, and more than one farm family has sat resting on the porch in the evening breeze and seen an old hog run by with a child’s arm in his mouth.

While I was standing there, Charlotte came up behind me and warned, “Now Dad, don’t get too attached to those pigs. You know we’re going to kill them.”

So much for her attachment.

General Writing Tips

Follow these simple writing tips and your prose will have a distinct style that will never be forgotten:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
3. The adverb always follows the verb.
4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
6. Remember to never split an infinitive.
7. Contractions aren't necessary.
8. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
9. One should never generalize
10. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
11. Don't be redundant; don't say the same thing twice.
12. Be more or less specific.
13. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
14. The passive voice is to be avoided.
15. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
16. Who needs rhetorical questions?
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. Don't never use a double negation.
19. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
20. A writer must not shift your point of view.
21. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
22. A preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.
23. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!!!!!
24. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
25. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
26. Never use a fancy word when a simple word could be utilized.
27. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; they're old hat.

My Work: City Mice Part 3

We moved in November.

Snow on the ground and the worst month of the year for solar power production. We all lived in one room amidst boxes stacked head high and arranged to provide a narrow path from the door to the two beds. The radio telephone specifically designed for remote locations that looked perfect in the brochures didn’t work properly for six months.

The power system was hopelessly inadequate for two adults and two teenagers, so we often carried kerosene lanterns and candles around that first dark, cold winter. My computer wouldn’t work. Weeks of calls to help desks and a parade of technicians couldn’t fix it. The only heat in the house was from an ancient wood furnace in the basement. The only time I was warm was when I was first in the bath, and we all had to take turns because we didn’t have enough power to run the water pump very often.

We had a propane stove that worked well and a propane refrigerator that dropped its freezer door every time the fridge door was opened or closed. We cut our own firewood, froze around the tree that first Christmas morning, put plastic on all the upstairs windows, and told each other what fun we were having. I escaped for two or three days a week to Toronto, writing enough to bankroll our relapse into the nineteenth century, but Susan and Conor and Charlotte were country mice all the time. While I had a chance to take long showers and leave as many lights on as I wanted, they soldiered on. I winced every time Susan called me, wondering what else had broken down this time.

In that first year, our country dream resembled a nightmare and every one of us gave up at least once. I drove four kilometers to the neighbor’s telephone with my new laptop computer so I could communicate with my clients. Susan took care of the house, the kids chopped wood and huddled around the kitchen vents above the furnace to do their homework.

By February, Susan and I were able to move to our own bedroom and Conor to his. Charlotte raised her arms in the air and shouted with glee, “Hooray, my parents are moving out of my room.” We skied and sledded and walked on our own land. We saw bear and coyote and deer and osprey. And we slowly made some headway.

I had a three-page single-spaced list of essential projects and some were getting completed. A kitchen wood stove helped take the frost off the inside of the windows, then we installed a propane boiler with hot water piped throughout the house. No more getting up at four a.m. to stoke the furnace, or worrying about leaving the house with a fire going.

Next was the power system. Solar power requires panels to generate DC electricity, batteries to store it, and an inverter to turn the DC power into the more common AC current we all use. Renovations and construction were powered by a propane generator, but we couldn’t keep the house batteries charged well enough. We added more panels and a new inverter with a powerful battery charger that ran off the generator. We were fine on sunny days, and on cloudy days our generator could now power the house.

Eventually we replaced every major system: heating, septic tank and drainfield, new well, refrigerator, windows, water tank and water heater, but we never would have made it without our neighbor. Ray let us install one end of our radio telephone at his place, and was always there with encouragement good cheer, and expertise. He is a mechanic of genius. Anything he can’t fix, he can build from scratch better than the original. He sold us a good truck with a new Lincoln engine, fixed the tractor and snowblower, kept our cars running, and was always willing to help with the generator, water pump, or chain saw.

Writing for Grammar: Adjective or Adverb?

Whether you are writing a marketing brochure, a newsletter, presentation slides, or a business letter, your writing will not be persuasive unless you add proper adjectives and adverbs to your writing skills.

This resource was written by Purdue OWL (see links).
Last full revision by Paul Lynch.
Last edited by Karl Stolley on February 8th 2007 at 12:23PM

1. Bad or Badly?

When you want to describe how you feel, you should use an adjective. So you'd say, "I feel bad."

Saying "I feel badly" would be like saying you play football badly. "I feel badly" would mean that you are unable to feel, as though your hands were numb. Here are some other examples:

• "The dog smells badly." Here, badly means that the dog does not do a good job of smelling.
• "The dog smells bad." Here, "bad" means that dog needs a bath.

Sometimes people say "I feel badly" when they feel that they have done something wrong. Let's say you dropped your friend's favorite dish, and it broke into a million pieces. You might say, "I feel really badly about what happened."

2. Good or Well?

Good is an adjective, so you do not do good or live good, but you do well and live well. Remember, though, that an adjective follows sense-verbs and be-verbs, so you also feel good, look good, smell good, are good, have been good, etc.

So:

• "My mother looks good." This does not mean that she has good eyesight; it means that she appears healthy.
• "I feel really good today." Again, this does not mean that I touch things successfully. It means rather that I am happy or healthy.

Many people confuse this distinction in conversation, and that's okay. You will hear people say, "I feel well" when they mean that they feel good. However, if you're taking about action verbs, you'd say "well." "I did well on my exam." "She plays tennis well."

3. Sure or Surely?

Sure is an adjective, and surely is an adverb. For example:

• "He is sure about his answer." Sure describes he.
• "The Senator spoke out surely." Here, surely describes how the senator spoke.

Surely can also be used as a sentence-adverb. For example, "Surely, you're joking." Here, surely describes the entire sentence "you're joking." The sentence more or less means, "You must be joking."

4. Near or Nearly?

Near can function as a verb, adverb, adjective, or preposition. Nearly is used as an adverb to mean "in a close manner" or "almost but not quite." Here are some examples that demonstrate the differences between various uses of near and nearly.

• "I'll be seeing you in the near future." Here, near describes the noun "future."
• "The cat crept near." Near is an adverb that describes where the cat crept.
• "Don't worry; we're nearly there." Here, nearly describes how close we are.

Near can also be used as a verb and a preposition.

• "My graduation neared." Here, neared is the verb of the sentence.
• "I want the couch near the window." Near is a preposition at the head of the phrase "near the window."

And surely that’s nearly enough.

Writing for Fun: Fractured English

It's hard enough to write properly in English, but the quirks of our language make it even harder for non-native writers; sometimes with hilarious results.

Tailor shop in Greece: Order your summer suit now. Because is big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation.

A Thailand dry cleaning service points out: Drop your trousers here for best service.

In an Athens hotel: Visitors are expected to complain at the office between 9 and 11 a.m. daily.

A Norway hotel: Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.

A Rome laundry suggests: Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time.

The water in Mexico may be questionable in some places, but an Acapulco hotel assures its customers: The manager has personally passed all the water served here.

A sign on a steep trail in China warns: Those who suffer from high blood pressure, mental disease, horrifying of heights or liquor heads are refused.

An early Japanese motorcycle manual: HORN-BUTTON - Tootle horn melodiously at the dog who shall sport in roadway. If he continue, tootle him with vigour.

But we don't have to pick on only on those who write English as a second language.

A job ad in Kirsty Powell's Canadian pub: Required: person to come in twice a week to wash dishes, and two waitresses.

Alarming account of confused amorousness on the CNN website: Sharka, a two-ton white rhino, got amorous with Dave Alsop's car when he stopped to take pictures of the animal mating with his partner Gloria at the West Midland Safari Park.

A news release from the government makes one wonder in how many places a man might die: Flags should be lowered to half-staff on Tuesday, January 13 and Wednesday, January 14, 2004 to honor former Court of Appeals Judge Gary McDonald who has died at the following locations: Provincial Courthouses, Libraries, Administration Buildings, Detention Centres.

Music lovers in Guilford, Vermont are tough. The Friends of Music reported a recent event in their newsletter Continuo: The lunch was delicious and folks munched away merrily on folding chairs.

The fine print on a U.S. CD case promises: Unit automatically becomes portable when carried.

I’m still not sure what to do after reading this sign on a London train bridge: Do not alight here pass through the train.

And, from the North Shore Times, Sydney Australia, This Isn't What We Intended Department: Bowels might not be the topic of polite conversation ordinarily, but doctors are hoping this week they'll be on the tip of everyone's tongue.

My Work: City Mice Part 2

He's got this dream about buyin' some land
He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he'll settle down in a quiet little town
And forget about everything
Gerry Rafferty, Baker Street

First we lived in Toronto on a lot fifteen feet wide and a hundred feet long. Then we moved to a suburban half-acre and our garden was bigger than the Toronto lot, plus we had twenty-five fruit trees. We also planted grapes, strawberries raspberries, and blueberries, then built a gambrel-roofed two-story shed and playhouse that looked like a real barn that had shrunk in the rain. Compared to our neighbors, we looked like farmers.

We had twenty bales of straw delivered one fall to cover the berries and mulch around the fruit trees. A neighbor wandered over and asked me what it was for. “The pigs,” I replied. He just walked away, then probably called the bylaw officer...

Our dream was to buy some land and build a solar-powered house. We wanted clean air, soil, and water so we could really raise our own animals. My parents measured success by having the money to buy from the store instead of relying on homemade. I measured success by having the time to grow and make my own. We wanted room to stretch out. We have all that, now that we live in Jack’s house, but if we had known how much work it would be, we might never have made the move.

Lots of people dream about moving to the country, but we found that the romantic notion of idyllic rural life and the gritty reality are as far apart as the earth and the stars. There are tremendous rewards from living in the country, especially the way we do, but they come at a price. The country has made me ten times more angry, discouraged, tired, and bug-bitten than I ever was before.

We looked at twenty or so properties over three years. The ones we could afford were too small or too close to highways and railroad tracks. Then we found some land north of Tamworth. No power or phone lines; just soil, rocks, and water. We knew we could make our own power from the sun and wind, but we thought a phone line would be nice until we heard the price for poles and wires - $25,000. We couldn’t buy the property unless we found others to share that cost, so we wrote to everyone living further up the road to se if they might be interested in phone lines, too.

The property fell through, but we received a reply to our letter. A man named Jack wrote back that he would normally be willing to share the cost, but he had put his property up for sale. So we went to look at it. Eighty acres, a good small barn, two ancient log shacks, a man-made pond, and a solar powered house with a foot-thick foundation. After a battery of soil and water tests that all came back clean, we bought Jack’s farm.

Of course, the house needed renovations to accommodate a four-fold population explosion, and we had big plans: another bedroom, a family room, a basement shop extension. We allowed four months and half the equity from our suburban house and we weren’t even close. It took a year and all our equity.

Welcome to the country.

My Work: City Mice Part 1

Listen to the fiddler play when he’s playin’ ‘til the break of day
Oh me, oh my, love that country pie.
Bob Dylan, Country Pie

Installing an outside faucet for the hose proved to be a bigger job than I wanted. The basement walls of the farmhouse we bought were a foot-thick mass of concrete and rocks. Drilling a half-inch hole took most of the morning.

“Yeah, I built those walls,” laughed Jack when I complained to him, “It took some time, too. When we homesteaded this place, we lived in a tarpaper shack for the first three years while I built the house. We blasted the basement out of bedrock. Granite. Pre-Cambrian shield, the oldest rock on earth. Then I built the forms for those walls. I mixed concrete one wheelbarrow at a time; ten hours a day, seven days a week for four months to fill those forms. Would have taken longer if I hadn’t thrown in all the rocks I could find. My wife, Muriel, helped as much as she could, but she had the baby to look after. I stuck to it, though, and finally we had a basement.

“Then we got a bulldozer to push dirt up around the walls. That’s what made that pond in front of the house now. We almost lost the ‘dozer. It was oozing around in that black jellylike muck. Rubbery clay, squirting out from underneath the treads in big flappy sheets. When we hit the springs under the pond, they began filling the hole with water. We got the ‘dozer out just in time.

“When we started the log framing, I had about ten friends come out from the city to help. Word spread to my neighbor, Asa, who lived a few miles down the road that I was building a house. He came with his two sons in their old station wagon, and in the back of that car he brought 30 pies that his wife had baked for the house raisin’. I guess he expected a bigger crowd.

“We all ate as much pie as we could, about one apiece, and he still had twenty left that he took home with him. I don’t think I ate pie for a month after that.

“We moved in with only the main floor finished and, in some ways, it was the happiest time of my life. One day, though, when I was at work, our daughter crawled over and fell down the basement stairs and was knocked unconscious. Here was Muriel all the way up here, no car or nothing, she didn’t know what to do. One of the neighbors saw her running down the road, crying, with our baby in her arms. She was on her way into town, fifteen miles to get help. I guess the isolation was too much for her. She took our daughter and left me as soon as the house was built.”

Sometimes the country was more than I bargained for, too.

Writing for Grammar: Comma, not Coma

There is only one letter difference between comma and coma; that’s because discussions of punctuation can lead to rapid loss of consciousness.

We’ll tackle this one nevertheless.

A comma is the equivalent to a roadside SLOW sign, much like a period equals a STOP sign. The main function of a comma is to prevent sentence parts from colliding into one another unexpectedly, causing misreadings as in the following:

If you cook Elmer will do the dishes.

While we were eating a rattlesnake approached our campsite.

Commas will prevent Elmer from being cooked and that rattlesnake from being eaten.

1. Use a comma between two independent clauses. An independent clause is a complete sentence, with subject and predicate, that can stand on its own.

Good Example: We firmly believe in the value of good writing, and we can produce writing that gives our clients a competitive edge.

The most common mistake is to add a comma even though only one part of a sentence is independent.

Bad Example: The newlyweds toured the town during the day, then went dancing in the evening.

2. Use a comma after an introductory word group.

Good Example: When choosing a car, know what you want before stepping into a dealership.

3. Canadian usage calls for a comma between all items in a series. U.S. usage does not, so there is enough confusion here to cause red-pen duels at close range.

Good Example: The companies that declared profit increases were Alcan Aluminium, American Greetings, Rubbermaid, and Excite.

Without the last comma, the final company name becomes “Rubbermaid and Excite”.

4. Set off a nonrestrictive clause (which is a string of words that can be enclosed in parentheses while the rest of the sentence still has meaning) with commas. Nonrestrictive clauses typically begin with a relative pronoun (who, whom, whose, which, that) or a relative adverb (where, when).

Good Example: Set off a nonrestrictive clause, which is a string of words that can be enclosed in parentheses, with commas.

5. Use a comma between coordinate adjectives but not cumulative adjectives.

Two or more adjectives are coordinate if each modify a noun separately. The clue is if you can change the order and not change the meaning.

Example: Bob Roberts is tall, red-haired, and wears glasses.

Two or more adjectives are cumulative if they depend on each other for the final meaning. The clue is if you change the meaning of you change the order.

Example: Some mutual fund companies used to offer 100% RSP-eligible international funds.

In the end punctuation counts. Consider the difference in meaning of the following sentences:

A woman without her man is nothing.

A woman; without her, man is nothing.

For more writing tips, go to: www.moorepartners.ca/writingtips.