Welcome back, I guess

I'm about to embark on my first project in over a month. Apparently the author is just as excited as I am because his book title has an exclamation point in it. Seriously. 

So that's kind of a bad sign. Also a bad sign: his biography.

[Author] was born on a dark and stormy, cold and wintry night in1956, the scene fittingly and fleetingly lit by powerful and blinding flashes of Lightning, almost immediately followed by the deafening rapid cannon-fire explosions of Thunder. His sweat soaked and red-faced mother looked down upon her new-born son for the first time with a gentle, smiling and tender look, and then screamed!

I often debate the appropriateness of swearing profusely on my blog because I feel like I should probably be able to come up with more creative ways of expressing myself. But then sometimes this happens.

Fuck. Seriously. Just...fuck.

How to use a semicolon

This is not hard.

Semicolons are used to connect two complete sentences.

Take two complete sentences, put a semicolon between them, and voila! You're a literary genius! I'm not sure why this baffles so many people; it's as easy as using a period.

Please get this right, guys. Please.

Punctuation?

"They're most likely coming to hurt or kill you and I got it"

Why bother with pesky punctuation marks? There's no chance this sentence could be interpreted any other way than exactly how the writer meant it:

"They're most likely coming to hurt or kill you, and I got it."

Right? 

WRONG! The writer has not limited himself to punctuation issues in this sentence. What he really means is:

"They're most likely coming to hurt or kill you and I. Got it?"

But of course this is wrong as well. So the sentence should really say:

"They're most likely coming to hurt or kill you and me. Got it?"

And even this is sticky and somewhat convoluted. 

The moral? Use punctuation or your editors won't know what the hell you're trying to say. Also, be a better writer. 

The case of Brackets v. Parentheses

It was brought to my attention that in my last post I was wrong about the use of brackets, so let's have a little lesson, shall we?


Here's the paragraph in question:


"The drums went by my house. I didn't know about (the protest) until then, so we jumped up, hung up on the phone with my aunt, and jumped in,” said Elise Taft.


My argument (and one I considered to be relatively nitpicky) was that the use of parentheses was incorrect in this case, as brackets are usually used when you're changing a quote like this.

Awesome news reporting

This is an example of an actual article printed on our local NBC news website. You would think journalists would be able to write at least remotely well, given the fact that they're journalists, but NBC does a nice job of proving that wrong. Some of their journalists have absolutely no grasp on the English language, let alone how to write well. Here's the article (with my notes).


Protestors Speak Out Against Gov. Walker's Proposal
We're off to a great start with a word misspelled in the title.

A rod is playing third

I'm sure this mistake has been made about a bazillion times before (side note -- my spell check didn't pick up "bazillion" as a non-word. This disturbs me), but I just saw this headline, and it made me laugh out loud.

Cameron Diaz Is Back in Her Bikini For a Hawaiian Getaway With A Rod!