Here's something I commented on at Facebook the other day, and it gave rise to a number of possibilities.
- Does that mean English teachers work for the police or for the mob?
- I pull out a red pencil and say, "All right, give me all your split infinitives, dangling modifiers, and adjectives used as adverbs. And while you're at it, hand over your lack of verb agreement, too!"
- Mixed metaphors, the "easy grammar" that leads the unsuspecting on to cliche and punning.
- Certain herbal remedies are good for run-on sentences.
- "I'm just trying to be objective: this is a me, me, me society!"
- "What! You've lost the antecedent of an indefinite pronoun? Round up the usual suspects!"
- "Johnny, if you are ever indulge in improper subordination again."
- He was arrested for scattering superfluous commas in a no-punctuation zone on Facebook.
- "Officer, you've got the wrong point of view! I'm not the person you're looking for."
- Did you hear about the anarchist who wired a bomb in the subjunctive tense? It never went off.
- "Neither a comma splice nor a fused sentence be." --Bill Shakespeare
Copyright 2011 by Thomas L. Kepler, all rights reserved
Tom, I love it! Good timing, too. I just got home from my writer's group where we discovered a lot of punctuation errors in some of the work we critiqued.
ReplyDelete@Diane StephensonI have a friend who says that every time a good editor reads the manuscript, 80% of the errors are found. Obviously, several readings are necessary!
ReplyDeleteI agree with the tip of not trying too hard to imitate the way of speaking. Aside from it's annoying, I think it will just blow their chances. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteGood Score in TOEFL