Grammar Insights from Editor and Linguist Jonathon Owen

Jonathon Owen’s blog, *Arrant Pedantry*, quietly dismantles the dogmas that many editors inherit. His linguist-trained eye spots rules that never had a basis in living usage, and he replaces them with evidence-based guidance that working editors can apply the same afternoon.

Unlike style-manual truisms, Owen’s insights emerge from corpus data, historical grammars, and real-world editing before-and-afters. The payoff is a toolkit that sharpens prose without shackling voice.

Why “Which” Versus “That” Is the Wrong Battle

Editors waste hours swapping restrictive “which” for “that” because Strunk & White said so. Owen shows that elite British and American writers have kept restrictive “which” for centuries, especially after prepositions.

A quick COCA search reveals “the way which we know” in academic prose and “the car which he drove” in edited journalism. The real signal of clutter is the pile-up of nouns and prepositions, not the relative pronoun.

Delete the prepositional phrase instead of swapping the pronoun, and the sentence tightens without sounding robotic.

How to Spot True Restrictive Clutter

Read the noun phrase aloud; if you can drop the modifier and still know which item is meant, the clause is non-restrictive. If the noun is vague without the modifier, the clause is restrictive no matter which pronoun heads it.

Train your ear on pairs like “the policy that expired” versus “the policy, which expired.” The comma, not the pronoun, carries the semantic load.

The Comma-And Test for Coordinate Adjectives

Owen reduces the old “can you insert and?” test to a two-step audition: read the adjectives in reverse order and then with “and” between them. If both versions sound odd, the modifiers are cumulative, not coordinate, and the comma must go.

“A long, angry letter” passes both tests; “a big, old house” fails the reverse-order check, so the comma drops. Applying the test live prevents the hyphen-strewn over-punctuation that haunts marketing copy.

Quick Demonstration with Real Copy

Original: “We craft bold, innovative, user-centric designs.” Reverse test: “innovative bold user-centric designs” feels off, so “bold” and “innovative” are cumulative. Owen’s revision: “We craft bold innovative user-centric designs,” saving two commas and one breath.

Irregular Verbs Are Regular at the Edges

Prescriptivists treat “snuck” as a barbarism, yet Owen maps its steady climb from 3% to 60% preference in American fiction since 1970. Meanwhile, “dreamed” still outsells “dreamt” by 4:1, proving that each verb follows its own sociolinguistic stock ticker.

He advises editors to keep the older form in historical fiction and allow the newer one in contemporary dialogue, but never to flip-flop within a single manuscript. Consistency within register trumps external rulebooks.

Building a Custom Verb Tracker

Create a two-column spreadsheet: column A lists the 30 most common irregular verbs in your current project. Column B logs the ratio of traditional to innovative forms in a 200-million-word corpus slice filtered for the target genre.

Sort by ratio; verbs below 20% traditional get the innovative spelling by default. You now have a data-driven style sheet that updates with every new manuscript.

Data-Driven Singular “They” Onboarding

Owen’s corpus work shows that singular “they” outpaces “he or she” in mainstream journalism by 12:1 since 2015. The shift is not political fashion; it is frequency-driven efficiency.

He recommends a painless transition plan: allow singular “they” for indefinite antecedents (“someone forgot their keys”) but retain name-based repetition for definite singulars (“Alex forgot his keys”) unless the subject has stated a pronoun preference.

This split keeps clarity complaints to zero while honoring contemporary usage curves.

Handling Pushback from Legacy Clients

Arm yourself with a one-page handout: three short citations from APA 7, Chicago 17, and a major newspaper style guide. Add a mini-corpus graph showing the 400% rise of singular “they” in edited prose since 2000.

Most resistance dissolves when decision-makers see that the choice is already house style at top-tier outlets.

Stunt Adverbs and the Zero-Derivation Trap

Owen flags “stunt adverbs”—those formed by tacking “-wise” onto nouns (“timewise,” “moneywise”)—as the fastest route to sounding like a second-rate TEDx speaker. They proliferate because English allows zero-derivation: any noun can audition as an adverb without morphological change.

The defense is substitution, not prohibition. Swap in a prepositional phrase like “in terms of time” or “financially,” and the sentence sheds jargon without lengthening.

Live Revision Example

Original: “Budgetwise, the project makes sense.” Owen rewrite: “Financially, the project makes sense.” The revision is one syllable shorter and avoids the comic echo of “-wise.”

Modal Verbs Hide Uncertainty

Over-reliance on “may,” “might,” and “could” pads academic prose with hedging that readers discount anyway. Owen quantifies the bloat: papers in top linguistics journals average 18 modals per 1,000 words, while grant proposals hit 30.

He trains writers to replace half of those modals with direct statements backed by citations. The tone gains authority, and peer-reviewers report higher confidence scores in blind tests.

Quick Modal Audit

Run a regex search for “b(may|might|could|would|should)b” in your manuscript. Tag each instance with a comment: “Evidence?” or “Rewrite as fact.” By the third pass, most modals evaporate, replaced by data or deleted as throat-clearing.

Relative Pronoun Deletion for Pace

Owen’s fastest line-level trick is dropping the object relative pronoun whenever syntax allows. “The book that she wrote” becomes “The book she wrote,” cutting one word and one decision point.

Corpus data show this deletion occurs in 70% of object relative clauses in fiction but only 40% in academic prose. Closing that gap instantly modernizes stodgy text without touching terminology.

Batch Application in Academic Editing

Use the regex pattern “b(that|which|whom)b” followed by a pronoun or noun. Review hits for object position; delete the relative pronoun if the sentence remains clear. A 10,000-word journal article typically sheds 50 words, tightening the lexile score by two points.

Genitive Apostrophes and the Possession Myth

Owen reminds editors that apostrophe-s does not mark possession; it marks the genitive case, which can indicate duration, measurement, or association. “A week’s pay” is not about ownership but about duration.

Once you drop the ownership myth, edge cases like “for goodness’ sake” or “two weeks’ notice” become predictable: add the apostrophe after the genitive plural, not after every s-sound.

Diagnosing Tricky Plurals

Test the noun in a frame sentence: “We borrowed two ___ car.” If the blank needs an extra syllable (“weeks”), the genitive plural also needs the apostrophe: “two weeks’ car” sounds odd, so you know the form is “two weeks’ notice,” not “two week’s notice.”

Flat Adverbs Are Already Standard

Style guides still label “drive slow” as informal, yet Owen’s corpus trawl finds “drive slow” in 48% of newspaper traffic reports. The flat form is shorter, matches speech, and triggers no reader complaints.

He reserves the “-ly” form for cases where ambiguity looms: “She arrived late” versus “She arrived lately” mark two different adverbial senses. Otherwise, let the flat form stand to avoid an overly polished tone in narrative nonfiction.

Creating an Adverbial Flex List

Make a two-column cheat sheet: column A lists flat adverbs your author favors (“safe,” “tight,” “quick”). Column B lists the corresponding “-ly” forms. Allow column A in dialogue and first-person narration; require column B only when ambiguity surfaces in exposition.

Semantic Bleaching in Intensifiers

“Very,” “really,” and “literally” lose force through overuse, but Owen cautions against blanket deletion. Instead, swap in a contextual intensifier that revives the sense: “palpably,” “measurably,” “visibly.”

These Latinate alternates carry measurable weight because they sneak in sensory detail. “The room was visibly tense” paints a sharper scene than “The room was really tense,” and it costs only one syllable more.

Intensifier Upgrade Workflow

Highlight every “very” and “really” in yellow. For each hit, ask which sense is being intensified: temperature, emotion, size? Pick a sensory adverb that matches the domain. The prose regains specificity without sounding thesaurus-stuffed.

Historical Present and the Reader’s Clock

p>Owen tracks the historical present—“1939. Hitler invades Poland”—in 30 Pulitzer-winning narratives. The device shortens temporal distance, but overuse blurs the timeline.

He caps the historical present at one paragraph per major event, then reverts to past tense for consequences. This cadence keeps the reader’s internal clock accurate while still delivering the cinematic jolt.

Spotting Timeline Drift

Print the chapter and color-code present-tense verbs in red. If red appears in two consecutive paragraphs that describe separate days, shift the later paragraph back to past tense. The visual map prevents the “present-tense fog” that critics cite in debut novels.

Comma Splices as Strategic Beats

Owen’s most contrarian take is that comma splices can serve rhythm, but only when the clauses share syntactic symmetry and semantic parity. “I came, I saw, I conquered” works because each verb phrase is monosyllabic and triumphant.

Avoid the splice when the second clause contains a pronoun shift or negation; the asymmetry triggers a red flag in the reader’s parsing engine. Use the device once per chapter for maximum punch.

Stress-Test Your Splice

Read the sentence aloud; if you can insert “and” without changing the emotional pitch, the splice is probably safe. If the pitch rises or falls, swap the comma for a semicolon to prevent reader whiplash.

Final Micro-Redaction: The Preposition Shuffle

Stranded prepositions rarely confuse, but they can stall rhythm. Owen’s fix is to move the preposition before the relative pronoun only when the move shortens the sentence. “That’s the table I put the book on” stays; “That’s the table on which I put the book” lengthens and stiffens.

Track the shuffle in revision passes dedicated solely to prepositions. A manuscript edited with this laser focus reads 5% faster in eye-tracking tests, a margin large enough to keep modern readers scrolling.