I laughed out loud at #4 on the list of Top Ten Ways to Torture Your Professor: Hold fast, to your belief that, liberal and seemingly-random, use of, commas in term papers, makes you look, real smart.
Posts Tagged: grammar
Elements of Style
A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject. This is one of my favorite rules. Well. Not really. But I think every high school student should be required to read (and memorize) William Strunk, Jr.’s Elements of Style. I don’t know how you could have possibly made it… Read more »
The English Language
I really get aggravated when people try to argue their way out of what are really meaningless mistakes by saying that the English language is flexible and there aren’t any hard and fast rules and who cares if they’ve spelled something incorrectly because it doesn’t matter as long as you get it and blah, blah,… Read more »
Hate Me for This
A quick lesson on it’s versus its: it’s is a contraction of the two words “it” and “is”; if what you are trying to do is say, “it is,” and you want to do it without using that pesky middle i, use it’s its is possessive; try to think about how neurotic you would be… Read more »
Writing
I am also reminded that there is a reason why I don’t like reading run-on sentences. Why do I continue to write them? Control … I must learn control.