I'm not 100% sure what a strapline is (the little intriguing line on a book cover or movie poster?). That said, could you not avoid the grammatical no-man's-land while retaining the snappiness by just changing the perspective? Or is there some reason the strapline must be in third person? How about 'You all need to watch your backs.'? I could be wrong, but I think that has correct grammar. 'You all' should emphasise that it's plural 'your', not singular. If the strapline aims to attract an audience, perhaps 'you/your' is even more engaging than being obliquely referred to as part of 'everyone'? If you prefer impact over emphasising the ubiquity in the necessity of back-watching, how about just 'Watch your back.'? If I'm wrong about straplines or grammar, please let me know. Otherwise, I'm off to eat my linguinie
@Clive Maguire - You're caught in the middle of an irreconcilable conflict. Everyone is singular, and if you try to make it plural (stretching the rules) it sounds awkward, and can actually lead the reader astray. Multiple backs. On the other hand, if you make it singular, which is technically correct, you have to choose a particular gender. If you want it to sound good AND get the gender problem solved, I reckon you need another approach. If you're writing the blurb for the back of your book ...something like : You need to watch your back. Everybody does.
It may also be exemplary of a reader who has the intellectual horsepower to grasp the message as well as examine the grammar the author used (and misused) to try to convey that message. My point, which you either missed or ignored (most likely the latter), was that blatant errors in grammar or spelling, whether the product of ignorance or intent, may well prevent me (and others) from even getting far enough into your story to where your glorious message is revealed. I assume that most here have had the jarring experience of being jerked out of a story by a misspelled word. I don't know why the same thing shouldn't happen when a blatant error in grammar is encountered.
Just to clarify here, I thought everyone is plural, every one is singular. Like the subtle difference between alright and all right. Maybe and may be.
Everyone vs. Every One Everyone The pronoun everyone may be replaced by everybody. It is used to refer to all the people in a group. The new protocols will affect everyone positively. The new protocols will affect everybody positively. Every one Written as two words, every one refers to each individual who makes up a group, and means each person. My mother would like to thank every one who offered assistance during her illness. My mother would like to thank each person who offered assistance during her illness. For emphasis, you can also add each to the sentence: Students may excel if each and every one is treated with dignity and respect.
No, "everyone" is definitely singular. Compare "Is everyone OK?" to "Are everyone OK?". "Everyone" refers to all people, whereas "every one" refers to all members of any arbitrary group, people or otherwise. They're both singular.
According to Grammarly, every one, refers to each person singularly within a group while everyone refers to all in a group of people. You would say, is everyone OK? to mean the whole group of people. Simple answer, yes (or no). You would say, is every one OK? to mean each person individually, answers include "I am and she is but he's still ill and the boy in the corner has a twisted ankle." Interesting that this only comes up in the written word. Were someone to speak the question, it would be up to the listener to interpret the question how he or she hears it. Their answer (one of the above) would show how they interpreted the question. Ah. The English language - what a fickle mistress she be!
That is no different from the mindset that I described. We read in order to gain something. The only good reason to stop reading something is that you realize that you have nothing to gain from it that would be worth your time. If you stop reading a book because of mechanical errors, then you never had anything important to gain from the book in the first place -- either because the message is uninteresting, or because you read in an intellectually bankrupt way that appreciates style but is oblivious to the message. That experience of being jerked out of a story due to spelling and grammar errors and not being able to get back into the story? That is the result of passive rather than active reading. That is no excuse for an author. I might even criticize an author who writes "everyone needs to watch their backs" more harshly than you would. But I would be damned if I equated "something worth criticism" with "nothing worth praise".
Appreciating style and ignoring message does not equal intellectual bankruptcy. I often read for style over message. I can think of two writers off the top of my head - T. C. Boyle and John Hawkes - whose styles I admire a lot, but whose content doesn't much interest me. I enjoy reading them. I'm impressed by virtuosity, by exquisite craftsmanship. There's more than one reason to read. I wouldn't call any of them "intellectually bankrupt."
I disagree @daemon about 'intellectually bankrupt.' It's not very engaging when the language is all woolly, clumsy and over-crammed with adverbs, adjectives... it happens all the time - off this site, when you are redirected to the Amazon amateur writes...it's often like reading school stuff, and not so nourishing. I mean an editor would strip it all out straight away... 'In the beginning the story began when I started to look out toward the window...' is very tiring on the mind and eye.
I was excluding books that are worth reading for craftsmanship alone because I have a hard time imagining a book that engages the reader purely because it is written so well, and then blunders into a purposeless grammatical error. While I forgive occasional sentences like this, I would probably pretty soon stop reading a book written consistently like this. I would just admit that I am reading lazily, and that I might have missed an opportunity to gain something, instead of trying to justify my action by asserting that the author cannot possibly tell a good story. There is no need to justify it. Just to be honest about it. And there is quite a difference between a consistently awkward style (or lack thereof) and isolated mistakes.
"One should watch one's back." (You may go; see you do not force our royal highness to watch your back as you leave our royal presence.)
Once again, you've missed or ignored my point. I didn't say there would be 'nothing worth praise' in the work in question. I said I would never find out if grammatical or spelling errors rendered the work unreadable. It's kind of interesting that you insist on blaming the reader for the grammatical sins of the author. If a egregious error in grammar or spelling pulls me out of the story, that's my fault for being a 'passive' rather than an 'active' reader (whatever the hell those are)? It seems that if I weren't immersed (or willing to be immersed) in the story , it wouldn't be possible to pull me out in the first place. We've all seen this before, especially in forums like this one. "If you don't think my story is unimaginably wonderful, there must be something wrong with you. It can't possibly be that my laziness or my inability to grasp the simplest rules of grammar and syntax makes my stuff unreadable." Please excuse me now. I'm off to find work @daemon has posted here (if any) to see if his/her defense of sloppy writing is philosophical or personal.
@stevesh Taking a deep breath might re-enable the cognitive faculty for recognizing that this: is not a "defense of sloppy writing". To save you the frustration of spending your day searching through my posts and not finding what you are searching for: I developed a certain philosophy after reading fiction that I greatly enjoyed even though it was written by amateurs who made mistakes. The philosophy is that reading is a process of benefiting ourselves with the aid of text, and if we deliberately read for this purpose rather than the purpose of finding fault with the author, then the author's technical skill with language is an unreliable indicator of how much we can benefit ourselves by reading. All else equal, it is certainly nicer to read something flawless than to read something flawed. But we can notice flaws and, despite them, continue to read for our own benefit. This philosophy has everything to do with how readers choose to read and nothing to do with how writers choose to write. As for writing, I care about technical proficiency and I do not tolerate poor use of language when I edit or when I critique. The simple fact is that the job of an editor is to find and correct flaws regardless of how strongly they impact the experience of reading. Not sure what got in the way of understanding that, since minstrel and matwoolf seemed to understand my posts pretty easily. But in case more help is necessary: You made a comment not about how you write, but about how you read: Which, by the way, is what I mean by equating "something worth criticism" with "nothing worth praise" (i.e. equating "inability/refusal to use language properly" with "no talent for telling a story"). I responded to that comment because it goes against the philosophy I described.
