Due to or because of confusion?

The rule for when to use "due to" and when to use "because of " can be made simple. "Due to" is an adjectival phrase, which means it modifies noun and pronouns. "Because of" is an adverb and so it modifies other parts of language, including verbs.

Language is a moveable feast of course, and it may not always be straightforward to identify nouns and verbs. Words and phrases change their functions depending on their position in and relation to the sentence they are associated with. So you can have nounal and verbal phrases that include words that don't look like either.

One simple trick is to see if you can replace "due to" with "caused by". If you can, then you are probably ok. If you can't, you need "because of" or something similar.

It's explained in more depth and with more clarity here. There are a couple of examples too.

That which confuses

There's a common editorial house style rule, often irritating to writers, that the uses of the relative pronouns 'that' and 'which' are distinct. Here are examples of those uses.

• We walked down the road that was covered with Tarmac and turned right
• We walked down the road, which was covered with Tarmac, and turned right.

So the main difference is that 'which' takes commas and 'that' doesn't, right?

Not quite. The main difference is that example A includes a defining clause. The object of the sentence, the road, is distinguished by having Tarmac. To put it another way, while all the other roads at the crossroads didn't have Tarmac, the one we are interested in, the one we are walking on, definitely does.

By contrast, sentence B includes a non-defining clause. In this sentence there was no imaginary crossroads, so there's need to define which path we took; we're just adding the interesting fact that our road happens to have Tarmac slapped all over it.

Some editors who don't mind occasionally irritating writers will insist on hunting out all 'which-es' in defining clauses. That's a bit overzealous in my opinion. In many instances you can use either 'that' or 'which'. To modify example A:

• We walked down the road which was covered in Tarmac and turned right.

'Which' can introduce ambiguity, as it does here (was it the only road or the only road that was covered in Tarmac?). But not always and, even if it does, a slight sense of uncertainty might be intentional. It's the editor's job to work out whether replacing the 'which' with 'that' really is justified or not, not to slap down a blanket ban on the use of 'which' in defining clauses.

So what about non-defining clauses? These clauses are descriptive agents, not necessary ones. In this situation we often make sure that there is a comma, because the comma does a lot of grammatical grunt work in making it clear to the reader that what's coming next is a nice add-on and not integral to the construction of the sentence.

The relative pronoun 'that' does not work with descriptive clauses; only with defining ones. Which is why it never looks right after a comma. To modify example B.

• We walked down the road, that was covered in Tarmac, and ...

So a modified house style rule would be: "always use 'which' for non-defining clauses, and consider the use of commas, and use either 'that' or 'which' with defining clauses.

In American English, the rule is slightly different. The American way is to use 'which' only for non-defining clauses. But the Americans do things differently with commas too. More on that another time.

Life in the old dog?

Just finished editing a large PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint can present (forgive the pun) an interesting challenge to a copy editor, being concerned, as it is, as much with the graphical as with the lexicographical elements of a piece of work.

There is a completer-finisher's pleasure in sending a finished slide deck back to a writer. Everything neatly aligned, images tided up, fonts standardized and spellings corrected.

It's also fun running through the stuff under the bonnet, simplifying and reapplying the layouts and correcting the template. PowerPoint is not only a powerful program; it also appeals to the frustrated techie in me. There's so much in it you can do by manipulating its building blocks, rather than concentrating only on the front end.

You can save yourself so much time if you know a few tricks, for example opening the XML, as I did the other day, and deleting the 100s of extra Themes that had wriggled their way into the template and were distorting the slide layouts, rather than having to go through the Master and delete manually.

Yes, Prezi may be the new kid on the block; yet for all it's snap and fizz, in my limited experience and my 'maker's' perspective, making one is anything but straightforward. Simple, efficient and powerful, PowerPoint is still more than hanging in there.