Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Grammar Fun

Hey, Readers! As many of you know, I have what you might call a little grammar fetish. I just think that people should use good grammar. Is that too much to ask? I frequently come across blogs, papers, and other forms of writing that commit irritating and obvious grammatical sins. Well, in pondering the pathetic state of spelling and grammar today, I came up with the following all by myself.

(I am so cool.)

There are few grammatical errors more annoying than the comma splice, please don’t use it.

Possibly more annoying is the run-on sentence which joins two or more independent clauses and uses no punctuation and will really drive your reader crazy don't use these either.

Ending sentences with prepositions is an extremely annoying habit, and a problem you should surely deal with.

Please, kids... their really coming down on incorrect spellings of homophones these days. They’re is indeed a difference between these sorts of words, even though you’ll find that there always sounding the same. So pay attention! They’re is no excuse for making these kind of errors, is their?

And considering sentence fragments. So this is important. When writing sentences. Many sentences are fragments. Written sentences. When a prepositional phrase isn’t connected to an independent clause. And how anyone can possibly employ them is beyond my comprehension.

Jane told Joan that they would take her away and lock her up if she obfuscated her sentences with unclear pronoun references. Each person should work to the best of their ability to avoid confusion of pronouns, and also to make pronouns agree in number with their antecedent.

Faulty parallelism makes me want grammatical justice and to catch the perpetrator. In lists or comparisons, don’t mix nouns with infinitive verbs. Also, I’m begging you, when making parallelisms, make sure your verb tenses match. Joe seems to be having difficulty with the concept of parallelism, but John was the real culprit. In making mistakes like this, he not only broke many rules of the English language, but also was making himself look stupid.

The misplaced modifier is a grammatical error that breaks the rules which I find annoying.

Genuine errors in subject-verb agreement is hard for me to comprehend. The people that make these kinds of mistakes must uses their brain very little, if at all.

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