Consistency, Parentheses and Cookie Monster

While working on the “House Style” portion of my scrapbook, it occurred to me how important consistency is in any form of writing. There are “grey areas” in defining correctness because there are multiple ways of writing the same thing. I could write possessive “Lukas” as “Lukas’s” or I could omit the last “s.” (I personally prefer the latter so as to keep the “ass” out of my name.) Both of these are stylistically correct and accepted. However, last week it occurred to me that if I don’t consistently use the same form when I’m indicating possession, my writing is more problematic on paper. The same applies for whether or not I drop the last comma preceding “and” when listing items. Aside from just being inconsistent, I would have a more self-assured personalized style of my own if I decide on these little quirks of writing. Having choices can be a liberating or scary thing, depending on how one approaches them. (As a completely unrelated side note, I had to revise those last three words; it had read, “how you approach them,” but I hate being accusatory in my writing just as much as I can’t stand reading writing in the second person, where people dictate my actions.)

Another thing I have gotten into my head in the past week is that with pronouns, and with other word classes, it is helpful to strip down a sentence and see if it still makes sense. I didn’t think about it much, but when “I” vs. “me” were pointed out on page 149 of Nitty Gritty Grammar, I realized that I may be using the wrong words at times. Is it, “Tracy and I ate the cookies,” or “Me and Tracy ate the cookies?” If I strip it down and get rid of Tracy (sorry, Tracy), The sentences become “I ate the cookies” and “me ate the cookies.” Now, unless I’m cookie monster (who I’ve been told *GASP* doesn’t even eat cookies anymore), stripping down the sentence makes it clear which form is grammatically correct, and I definitely see the value of using this meat-and-potatoes approach to sentence analysis when I am teaching in the future.

As another note on the subject of consistency, I find myself putting periods and apostrophes on different sides of parentheses depending on what I want to say. I made a conscious effort to be uniform in even this short blog and I ended up going inside the parenthesis on some and outside on others, with some parentheses enclosed in the previous sentence, and others standing alone. Evidently I still need to work on standardizing my use of parentheses considering their prevalence in my writing.

So, my question for the week is: is there a line between being consistent and taking grammatical issues (like the parenthesis issue) as case-by-case situations? I feel that each way I use parentheses reads a little differently for the most part, but does anyone see any problems with how I have (oh, so abundantly) used them in this blog?