1. Introduce your friends,
relatives, and colleagues to the
Oxford comma.
Trust me: you don’t need a
college education for this one.
2. Drop hyphens from compound
words that follow a noun.
Take every one of your
well-written essays; then lose the
hyphen if the essay is especially
well written.
3. Join the Campaign to Abolish
the Apostrophe.
Or if that sounds too reckless,
enlist in the Apostrophe
Protection Society instead.
4. Fire off an interrobang ― but
don’t get punked by the pomma
point.
At this special time of the year,
shouldn’t we be thinking about
some of the less fortunate marks
of punctuation?!
5. Repair a comma splice.
You can fix a splice with a
conjunction ― but first make sure
the sentence is really broken.
6. Pause ... for an ellipsis.
Just don’t exceed your limit of
three dots.
7. Recite the punctuation poem.
Of course, the “Dictaphone
Bard” should be a part of every
family’s National Punctuation
Day festivities.
8. Explain to your children why
punctuation matters.
In the end it all comes down to
love and money.
9. Remove quotation marks from
any indirect quotations.
Your friends will say, “Thank you!”
10. But no matter what else you
do, don’t quote me!
Richard Nordquist
Retrieved October 28, 2008,
from http://grammar.about.com
Thursday
Demise of this blog
I've all but decided to terminate this blog. At the outset I thought it could be a useful way of running a writing group because of the interactive possibilities of blog technology. But it really hasn't worked out that way. I'm about to leave forItaly and will be away for a month. After that if I haven't heard any shrieks of protest I'll quietly put the whole idea to sleep. Using a blog for reading and critiquing one another's work sounded like an interesting possibility, but was an idea before it's time perhaps. Strangely I've found a similar reluctance to discuss writing or do much reading and critiquing of one anothers work in groups which meet in person. I thought online might be easier because out in the cyberworld reticence is less likely to inhibit ones interactions. In the mean time, ciao ciao everyone.. Barbara
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