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Grammar rules everyone should followFollowing the inaugural Bad Grammar awards, Thomas Jones lists ninegrammatical conventions that, depending on context, you may sorry, might aswell adhere to

Almost everyone is guilty of the occasional greengrocer's apostrophe. Photograph: Frank Baron for theGuardian

The Idler Academy's inaugural Bad Grammar award was bestowedlast week on 100 academics who wrote an open letter to MichaelGove in March criticising the education secretary's revised nationalcurriculum. The letter reads at times as if it was written by committee,but does it really display "the worst use of English over the last 12

months by people who should know better"? Hardly. Like many suchgongs, up to and including the Nobel prize for literature, the BadGrammar award looks suspiciously like the continuation of politics byother means. One of the three judges was Toby Young, whose latestbook is How to Set Up a Free School; Gove apparently told fellowguests at a Spectator party last year that he'd like Young to stand asa Tory MP. "The 100 educators have inadvertently made anargument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter isopposing," Young said. Steven Pinker(no soft leftie) put it slightlydifferently in The Language Instinct20 years ago: "Since prescriptive

rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access tothe right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths,differentiating the elite from the rabble."Despite all that, it's still the case that some ways of writing are clearerand more elegant than others, and some of the shibboleths are worthfollowing for the sake of clarity, elegance and consistency (I'm fairlysure I don't think that just because I'm an editor at the London Review

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of Books). They're conventions not rules, however, and differentconventions apply to different kinds of discourse: constructions thatare unacceptable in so-called Standard English and wouldn't findtheir way into the LRB or the Guardian a reinforcing doublenegative, say are more than fine in other registers (eg "I ain't gonnawork on Maggie's farm no more").Bearing all that in mind, here are nine conventions (the number asarbitrary as everything else) that are more or less worth adhering to,depending on context, though none of them are hard-and-fast rules(and, yes, I have tried to discreetly break most of them in thispreamble).

1. Dangling (or unattached) participle "Going to the shops, a dogran in front of my bike." The dog must have been worried they were

about to run out of bones at the bone shop. Dangling participles arebest avoided because they can change the meaning of a sentence.And while it's true that most readers will be able to understand whatyou're getting at, it's still worth saying what you mean. So: "As I wasgoing to the shops" or "On my way".2.That/which"Which is appropriate to non-defining and that to defining clauses,"HW Fowler wrote in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926)."The dog that ran in front of my bike had floppy ears." "The dog,which had floppy ears, ran in front of my bike." It's often a fine

distinction, and was very possibly invented by Fowler, but it cannonetheless be useful. As with dangling participles, it's about sayingwhat you mean.3. Split infinitiveOne of my English teachers once told us that the critic HelenGardner's last words were: "My dear, try never to split yourinfinitives." A nurse had asked her: "Would you like me to gently propyou up?" Split infinitives are worth avoiding to keep pedants at bay,but there's nothing actually wrong with them, and a split infinitive is

preferable to an inelegant alternative. "To boldly go" is resoundinglyiambic, the alternatives "boldly to go" or "to go boldly" eitherflighty or leaden. The rule against splitting infinitives was supposedlyinvented by Dryden, by analogy with Latin, in which the infinitive is asingle word.

4. Who/whom

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Whom is on the way out, and won't be much missed. There's nothingwrong with saying: "Who am I speaking to?" The stiffer formulation"To whom am I speaking?" can be useful if you want to be stiff. Butno one would ever say: "Whom am I speaking to?"

5. Ending a sentence with a prepositionLike beginning a sentence with a conjunction, this is alwayscompletely fine. As Winston Churchill never actually said, it's the kindof pedantry "up with which I will not put".

6. Due toThe idea that "due to" is wrong, but "'owing to" is OK is bogus.They're both wrong if used to mean "because of" and both OK if usedto mean "the result of". "Due to unplanned engineering works, thetrain to Basingstoke has been cancelled" is a mistake. "The train to

Basingstoke has been cancelled; this is due to unplannedengineering works" is fine. Still, "due to" is best avoided because itleads to formulations such as "due to the fact that", which is a reallyclumsy way of saying "because".

7.Greengrocer's apostrophe"Carrot's" and "apple's" are not so common, but almost everyoneoccasionally writes "who's", "it's" and "you're" for whose, its and your.That's the problem with following rules such as the rule thatpossessives are distinguished from plurals by an apostrophe sometimes they don't apply.

8. Different from,nottoorthan There's no very good reason forfollowing this rule, but then there's no reason not to, either.9. Using the subjunctive in conditional clauses

And finally, another one that's worth paying attention to, becausealtering the mood alters the sense. The subjunctive is used todescribe a state of affairs that isn't the case. "If the dog were hungry,it would run to the bone shop." This means the dog isn't hungry, aswe can tell because it isn't running to the bone shop. "If the dog ishungry, it will run to the bone shop." This means the dog may behungry, we'll have to wait and see.