I have removed blog chapters 1 and 2 until I can figure out how to get the messed-up text fixed. Bear with me. lee
Grammargrinch: Issue 3
I neglected local writers’ grammar to go after Pinellas school superintendent Dr. Clayton Wilcox’s marginal literacy. I ratted out his thesis errors to the new president of Nova to see how the guy will deal with Wilcox’s departure from the university's putative strict grammar requirements cited on Nova’s Web dissertation pages.
Nova has a reputation in the academic world of being something of a diploma mill; Dr. Wilcox’s error-ridden, marginally documented, slender thesis will test the validity of that reputation. If the president is mum, I move up the food chain to the accreditation Gestapo.
I learned how to migrate through bureaucracies in the Women's Movement. The trick is to understand that male lawmakers have put on the books equal-opportunity laws that they think nobody will bother to carry out. You call their bluff.
My patience won women's right to apply for officer jobs in the Tampa Police Department--heretofore closed to them. I tackled the EEOC on that outrage against women and leafleted the agency until it gave in and carried out Title VII.
My husband and I attended the graduation from the police academy of its first woman officer. Here name was Thelma. A single mother, she couldn't support her three children on the nurse's-aide salary of the job she held but could on a police officer's salary.
To open the
Anybody can do stuff like this if he or she is willing just to keep writing the bureaucrats until victory emerges to shut you up.
Dr. Wilcox picked up his Ed.D. from Nova about thirty minutes before the Pinellas board dingdongs hired him for close to $200,000 despite grammar and punctuation’s being a mystery to him. He also got a car in a system in which teachers start at $34,000 and have to take a literacy test to nail down their job while superintendents whistle by this roadblock with no literacy test to impede their employment, $200,000, and the car.
After this side excursion with Superintendent Wilcox's illiteracy, I am back on my regular Grammargrinch job and ready to look at Mr. Bill
Mr. Bill
Mr.
Mr.
This paragon, however, falters, so he needs the grammar equivalent of that slave who stood behind the Roman conquering hero as he returned to the roar of the crowds who lined the streets to see the chariot pass in which stood the hero with a slave at his back whispering in his ear, “Remember, you are only a man.
I play slave in this grammar production.
Mr.
From Mr.
Black critics of Imus are hypocrites
I have come to believe the reason newspapers affect go-to-hell capitalization of titles is to avoid learning the rules.
By BILL MAXWELL Published
Although I do not like Imus the man, I watched his show because it delivered infotainment with the rapier's edge of powerful satire.
“The man” is a nonrestrictive appositive and gets commas on both sides. Strunk & White would nix “powerful” as superfluous modifier. In addition to the advice of S&W, there's the matter of the music of language. Anybody attuned to it can read that subordinate clause and hear the bump in rhythm “powerful” causes.
The adjective “powerful” is inaccurate in addition. Aristophanes and Swift produced powerful satire. Imus slurred low asides for those addicted to his smirky sneers. Mr.
I avoided the show for aesthetic reasons. I did not want to encounter the aesthetic poisoning of my mind’s flitting to the specter of those graceless love scenes enacted in the Imus boudoir after Imus married a young woman a third his age and produced a Viagra child--no doubt a feat that required besides IV Cialis several pulleys, lifts, and Archimedean levers as romantic props for coital positioning, given the arthritic conditions of such geezers’ joints, not to mention other age-blasted anatomical accoutrements.
I also wanted to sidestep thoughts of the unlovely phantasmorgia of Imus’s winter-of-discontent production of a child because I believe that a geezer’s begetting a child constitutes a form of child abuse that involves the youngster’s being drooled on by his ancient sire from birth and ends with the youngster’s having to take his pops big bales of Pampers to his assisted-living abode. The child abuse ends only after the pilgrimage of this teenage offspring to show his aged father the lad's high-school diploma. This valedictory visit marks the time and place from whence the abused Viagra child escapes Pampers duty by fleeing to college. Only time and the Stanford Binet will tell whether the offspring suffers intellectual dyscrasias from sprouting from a spermatazoan that gimped to the egg on a crutch.
Because I am a journalist, who is dedicated to freedom of speech, and because I am a former college professor, who is dedicated to academic freedom, I have no serious problem with Imus' epithet. Given his genre, his venue and his voice, he behaved true to form.
Here appear three errors of which Professor
“Imus’” should be “Imus’s.” With words of more than one syllable's ending in an “s” sound, one uses apostrophe "s" for possession if he or she can pronounce the extra syllable with a straight face. Try it. You can say “Imus’s allure.” Hence, you use apostrophe "s" for singular possession. So should Mr.
You see, Imus is white, while the overwhelming majority of gangsta rappers are black, tattooed, swaggering, thug wanna-bes pretending to portray authentic black life in their vile renderings.
No comma after “while”: it cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause.
The reason that this comma is redundant involves normal syntax, which is subject-verb-object (if there is one), adverbial modifier(s). The adverbial modifier at the end of an independent clause occupies its normal syntactical position; thus we should not put a redundant comma before it. Only if we disturb syntax and move adverbial modifiers to the beginning or middle of the sentence do we use commas with them: they remain restrictive in those positions but merit commas from the move that disturbs syntax.
People afflicted with a smattering of grammar savvy will natter about certain subordinating conjunctions’ signaling trailing non-restrictive adverbial clauses; they aver that such as “although,” “even though,” and “unless” signal a nonrestrictive adverbial clause at the end of a main clause. I have yet to see one that I count nonrestrictive in the end position no matter the subordinating conjunction that begins it. Syntax trumps is my conviction.
If Mr.
Mr.
I can’t understand why Professor
These are not the antics of amateurs, but the serious efforts of multimillionaires infecting black culture in ways from which it may never recover.
Strunk & White would nix “serious" as a redundant modifier. So would a person who hears the flaw it produces in the music of the sentence.
Not everybody hears the music of language; there are no rules for it. It comes from instinct.
I also imbibed the poetry of The Grand Ol’ Opry on Saturday nights because that was my father’s favorite program. And don’t sneer at the poetry of hillbilly music. The lyrics of its ballads have their own verbal magic as much as my beloved Wagner's do.
Moreover, I sent a record of our spat to the
Mr.
He can’t do that and remain among the punctuation adept. “But” is a mere coordinating conjunction joining two equal nouns as predicative nominatives. We use a comma when a coordinating conjunction joins two independent clauses, not when it joins compound predicate nominatives.
I shall have to ask Professor
Leaving Professor
Creative Loafing
Gordon Davis: "I can make it happen."
BY BRIAN RIES
Brian’s piece has a portrait of him. Ben Affleck’s reputation is safe.
I have tried to enlarge the picture so that one may more easily admire the beauteous Brian's form but have made him fat instead and can't figure out how to fix it. It was an accident due to my lack of graphics skills. Honest.
Who? Gordon Davis, 55, is the force behind the rapidly expanding Ceviche restaurant group that originated in South Tampa, as well as former owner of
Never mind any introductory clues. Brian plunges us into the melee in medias res. We sink or swim as the tides of language dictates to Brian.
It doesn't help reader comprehension that the food-fight press has decided to make its mark on the literary world of journalism by abandoning quotation marks--even single ones--altogether. So the reader must rescue the direct quotes as best he or she can and to hell with writing civility.
Food-fight auteur Brian must not flatter himself that he can provoke Ms. Grammar Grinch into calling him a pretentious twit for this punctuation. No. That will never happen. I do not stoop to such low behavior. Brian can just do his worst. "Na, na, na" will never escape my lips.
The redundant comma after “
Davis expanded the Ceviche restaurant concept across the Bay last year and will soon open locations in Orlando and Sarasota, with the help of several longtime employees who have bought into the company over the past few years.
The comma after “
I [recently] taught a class called restaurant doctoring, and the first thing I told them is to get a good shrink and really think about what they're doing, because it can't be profit-motivated.
The quotation marks have disappeared. Intuition tells the reader that Le Davis speaks. The food-fight press gives away its quotation-marks game by clinging to brackets around an editorial interpolation in this quote as if it clutched a punctuation security blanket and is not yet brave enough to let go altogether. It's like leaving home to live on your own: one foot in the door, one out.
The Tribune has dropped back to single instead of double quotation marks around direct quotes. I may have to report these punctuation cut-ups to the Chicago
The brackets around “recently” betray this's being a direct quote. These punctuation renegades have to stop somewhere or reduce their communications to semaphore.
They came to me and said, "Gordon," (they knew I was going to retire) "we think this is the most exciting concept we've worked for, please don't leave, we want to see how far we can take it." You were in on the ground floor of "
Here there appears a chicken-out with quotes used around a direct quote. It's hell to stay pure. And the quotation marks around “
The parentheses above should be brackets in quoted material. The comma goes after the brackets. The comma after “for” marks a comma splice. It should be a period. The comma after “leave” marks another comma splice. It should be a period. A writer's committing repeated comma splices while messing around with quotation marks is like pondering another stationary style for template when a rattle snake lurks under your keyboard.
Comma splices, fragments, and misspelling are grammar felonies in the punctuating-abiding world outside the swashbuckling food-fight-Creative- Loafing press. These foodie press rebels fool nobody with their messing around with quotation marks to pose as linguistic sophisticates. Its faux swashbucklers don't know how to punctuate, and they are trying to cover up this deficiency with the quotation-marks diversion. If these big babies want to be real writers in the big time, they have to make friends with the little squiggle marks that go in between words known in the grown-up world as punctuation marks.
I started
We are back in the punctuation badlands of no quotation marks.
The comma after "
I hope the super-confident Mr. Davis is not here claiming to have coined the word “
There are horrible obstructionists here. I'd rather build a new business in any community other than
There is nothing that wrings one's heart like a misunderstood concepting restaurateur in midst of people who don't understand him. The quotation has no quotation marks around it naturellement. Ces grands bébés ont des mauvaises humeurs de ponctuation encore.
There should be another period after “be” for the end of the sentence preceding the ellipsis. The “it” in the quoted exit sentence points back to nothing. Mr. Davis probably means “cooperation doesn’t exist right now.” Brian should put “cooperation” in brackets after “it” and then depart at once to get a haircut.
Beach Beacon
Indecent exposure cases under investigation
By TOM GERMOND
Article published on
In both cases, a white male exposed himself to two adult females in a lewd manner, according to police.
The comma after “manner” is redundant. The “according to police” is a restrictive prepositional phrase. The police, not the guy who rakes the beaches in a tractor each morning at
The suspect was described as
This guys sounds like he could have gotten a date with either or both of the women instead of exposing himself. All he had to say was, “Let’s go down to
The police department used K-9s for each incident and contained the area while a thorough search was conducted.
Hauling out the k-9s twice for exposed behinds and pudenda is too much. That’s cruelty to animals. These dogs are used to tracking murderers; exposure addicts are too raunchy for their canine psyches and will produce emotional trauma. The ASPCA shall hear of this.
Anyone with information about this suspect is encouraged to contact the Treasure Island Police Department at 547-4595.
See those “was conducted” and “is encouraged” passive verbs? Such are signature of the lackadaisical writing the beach beat induces in reporters with no iron in their rhetorical spines.
Sociological aside: since the St. Petersburg Times bought out this wholesome family newspaper, all exposure stories go above the fold on page one especially if they involve glutei. A psycho-sociological-fiber-content analysis of this phenomenon would probably produce forensic evidence that someone on the city desk is a glutei fetishist. The Centers for Disease Control has conducted conclusive studies that show that this psychosexual affliction turns up with predictable frequency on city desks of cities such as
But this scientific insight offers no comfort to long-time beach residents, who lament, “ It’s no wonder our beaches have acquired the name Striptease Strip with all these above-the-fold St. Petersburg Times stories on exposure sickos." ”
Article published on
Bondi 'Loves Being Prosecutor'
By KEITH MORELLI, The
Published:
We have below in Mr. Morelli’s specimen displaying a recent trend that I have noted in some papers of throwing out double quotation marks and using instead single quotation marks, the ones that standard punctuation says signal a quote within a quote. Food-fight Creative Loafing has ditched quotation marks altogether. The Tribune engages in gradualism.
One infers that this trend represents an extension of newspaper quidnuncs’ incursions against Standard English that began with omitting the last comma in items in a series, moved on through throwing out the capital rules for titles, and now engaging in probing the corrupting of quotation marks. All the pukey blue-green type below marks evidence of this new outrage from the Fourth-Estate defilers of language.
It's pretty clear that all these food-fight Creative Loafing and Tribune press guys hated their English teachers, of which I was one. Sigmund Freud said that omitting quotation marks was diagnostic of the prodroma to this phobia.
Here follows Reporter Morelli’s hagiography of La Bondi:
'Once they see how articulate she is, how knowledgeable she is, the news stations compete for her presence,' said Bondi's boss, Hillsborough County State Attorney
Change wimpy passive verb to active: "The governor appointed
I saw Mr. Ober campaigning for office in
Candor requires that I report him to have knarled knees and knotted calves. To be fair, I noted no varicosities. These knarled knees and knotted calves make clear that Le Ober was not the model for Phidias’ Zeus in 5th-centruy B.
I aver it safe to follow the maxim that any man with legs as ugly as Mr. Ober’s forfeits the right for people to take his word on any subject whatsoever.
'She's walked the walk. She's somebody who's been in the courtroom, who knows the business.'
As a prosecutor for 16 years, Bondi provides a law enforcement perspective on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, through shows such as 'Hannity & Colmes,' '
TV shows don't get quotation marks, much less single quotation marks. The names of shows get italics; episodes get quotation marks. The refusal to use italics even though it's easy to set them on a computer is another of the press's peculiarities. The comma after "MSNBC" is redundant, cutting off a restrictive prepositional phrase.
I infer this abjuring italics finds its roots back in old typesetting when doing italics was hard. Those times are long gone. It's time to use the potential of computers to do italics. The only excuses for not observing italics protocol is press orneriness and laziness.
Bondi, Ober said, 'has never shied away from anything. She's not afraid of anything. ...
'People don't appreciate the great strain of a trial like this, the preparation, the national spotlight and the living away from home,' Ober said. His lawyers in the Panhandle are 'living out of a suitcase.'
'We were having a conversation. He knew Pam and what an asset she was to my office,' Ober said. 'He said, 'I'll trade you two very seasoned prosecutors for Pam Bondi.' I chuckled and I told him, 'Pam has a no-trade clause in her contract.''
Here there is a slip-up of the quotation marks-rebels: there are the regulation double quotation marks closing the last quotation instead of single ones. Some worthy 9th-grade English teacher pounded quotation-marks rules into this recalcitrant reporter's head, and his comma synapses snapped back in this end punctuation slip-up. Give us teachers the specimen when he or she is young, and we will drill down through the dura mater, pia mater, and arachnoid mater to seat those comma rules to last until hell freezes over. Those vile scientists may have wiped out everything else from Bourne's memory, but not the quotation marks. They are in there somewhere and will resurface anon when least expected. That's what the next movie will be about: the return of Bourne's quotation marks.
A comma goes after “chuckled” for a compound sentence joined by a coordinating conjunction.
Bondi also provides expert TV commentary on out-of-state issues, such as the false allegations of rape involving the
The comma after “issues” is redundant: it cuts off restrictive prepositional phrases.
Bondi ended up settling with the family, shipping the dog back but retaining 'visitation rights.'
'I think Pam is fiercely loyal to the people she works with,' Cohen said, 'and she's got an innate sense of fairness about her.'
From what he saw of her in the dog case, Cohen said, 'she's a very sensitive and loving lady. When she saw Noah on TV and he had just come back from Louisiana, she went out and sat on a cement floor and, when he was filthy dirty from that hurricane, hugged him and kissed him and let him drool all over her.'
There should be a comma after “floor” before the coordinating conjunction joining the compound sentence.
He has never faced off in court against Bondi, but if he did, Cohen said, 'I'd run away.'
Poynter Institute
By Thomas T. Huang
Mr. Huang is a good writer. He has a sure sense of the shape of a sentence; he makes few punctuation errors and no grammar errors. He writes better than does Dr. Roy Peter Clark, who occupies Poynter’s cushy job of head of faculty despite
For those who question the Web's reach within ethnic communities, consider this: The
Replacing the passive verb would produce a cleaner sentence: “The African-American Blogosphere spurred the discussion of the
The digital world can help the reader gain an understanding of people in other communities. It can help communities build bridges with one another. Again, we in the traditional media need to take advantage of that.
The writer refers to two things with the demonstrative pronoun "that": gaining understanding and building bridges. “That” should be “those things.”
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The comma before “as well” is redundant. Commas for marginally interruptive adverbs have almost disappeared in the trend toward minimal commas. So these redundant commas give off an out-of-date aura. See William Follett for the reduction in commas over the last four-hundred hears. “If you will” is padding. The author should dump it.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
“It turns out” is wordiness. The comma after "site" cuts off a restrictive participial phrase.
The program is based on a 1950s radio program hosted by
Active verb instead of passive produce a stronger sentence: “A 1950s
"We are not listening well, not understanding each other -- we are simply disagreeing, or worse.
The comma before “or worse” is redundant. It separates a compound verb with the second verb’s being elliptical: “simply disagreeing or [doing] worse.”
The Web site is a finalist for the 2007 Online Journalism Awards, as is another Web site I admire, washingtonpost.com's "onBeing" project.
No comma goes before the restrictive trailing adverbial clause "as is." Both "On Journalism" and "onBeing" get italics.
A mentor and mentee joke with each other, describing how they've become family.
The “describing” present participial phrase is restrictive: it modifies two general nouns preceded by "a." There are more than one mentor and mentee in the world.
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The trend in commas is minimalism, so "as well."equivalent to "too,' does not get commas.”If you will" is wordiness" that merits jettisoning.
The digital world gives journalists the tools to tell narrative stories in multi-layered ways, with the
"Narrative stories" is pleonasm. Stories are narratives by definition. The comma after “ways” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
I've always admired "This I Believe," which can be heard on National Public Radio.
Passive verb: “…which people can hear on National Public Radio” The TV program gets italics.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
Dump wordy "it turns out." The comma after "site" is redundant before a restrictive present participial phrase.
La Gaceta
“Silhouettes"
Paul Guzzo
She identified Pam Iorio as the remaining candidate she thought could best help the city, and joined her campaign.
A redundant comma splits a compound verb.
…if she believes a candidate truly wants to help better the community.
It’s the last phrase that truly defines Rifkin.
Guzzo should take the pledge on eschewing “truly”; Strunk & White forbids these redundant, hackneyed adverbs. "Truly" is the worst.
“I’m just a
The past participial phrase “born…” is restrictive: no comma before it.
She is Italian on her father’s,
Guzzo is in over his head in the above mangled sentence. If he wants to keep this syntax, he must make the appositive possessives line up with the nouns they rename: “She is Italian on her father’s,
It's never a disgrace to back up and recast if the syntax of your original sentence defeats you.
“It was like being a mom and pop hardware store….”
Hyphenate this three-word adjective before a noun.
“But no matter how good a grass-roots campaign you run if you don’t have money you’ll never win.”
Comma needed for long introductory prepositional phrase.
“…and to reach each voter four times, whether through commercials or mailers.”
No comma before "whether': it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
“When I’m in the middle of an election I’m working seven days a week, all day and all night.”
Comma after “election” is obligatory for an introductory adverbial clause. Comma after “week” is redundant: the “all day…” is restrictive appositive. She works not half the day and night seven days a week but all day and night.
New Feature: Truculent Letters to Journalists
Fittingly for a column on Dr. Wilcox’s reification at
I don’t know enough about how the press splits up jobs to say for sure, but I infer that
Mr. Tobin:
I wish you were within reach. I would box your ears—not because of your grammar-punctuation but because of your selectivity in reporting Dr. Wilcox’s appearance at
And don’t natter about objectivity: that’s an epistemological and psychological impossibility. The selection of details to include in your article and those to omit comes from your gauging of your bosses’ prejudices; that’s par in jobs everywhere: Kiss up to the boss.
You made only one comma error—“…we can educate Black kids and in very high numbers, and also in very high levels.”
The comma after “numbers” is redundant: it splits a pair of compound adverbial prepositional phrases modifying “can educate.”
Only one comma error is excellent.
But the style is oatmeal. Try getting past your unimaginative editors some occasional vivid diction or sentence with unorthodox syntax. Don't go hog wild. Be abstemious with these maneuvers but slip a few in for flavor.
Better, try the daring move of telling the truth for a change about the people on whom you report. You might have done so on the
What makes me want to puke is your selection of details to portray the superintendent as Cato the Elder. Misleading readers is worse than bad writing. It’s lousy ethics.
Why didn’t you mention the first man’s question about Dr. Wilcox’s failure to reduce the administrative bloat? The superintendent flimflammed the answer to a faretheewell. Press bias is always in favor of the official roster of rascals in positions of power. Power mesmerizes the press as it does citizen sheep that go along with whoever wears the crown. That’s how we got into war with
lee drury de cesare
board@pcsb.org ; wilcox@pcsb.org wilcox@pcsb.org
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 1:25 AM
Dr. Wilcox:
You evaded the first question at Tiger Bay today from the man who cited your promise to reduce administration bloat when you entered your job and asked how you had done so.
You hemmed and hawed, but one could infer that what you said behind the verbal smoke screen was that you had not reduced administrators but had moved them around.
Then, if I understood you correctly, you said that grant monies immured certain administrative jobs.
Why in the world is the administration writing grants to support yet more administrators when you already have too many?
Why don’t you sponsor writing grants to hire teachers to teach beginning Greek, beginning Arabic, and beginning Chinese?
I infer the schools already have Latin; they need Greek too for the smart kids to have the intellectual stimulation of a road that reaches back to the beginning of the 6th-century B.C. civilization starting democracy and laying down the basis for Western culture.
The schools engage in much discussion of bringing the scores of the underperforming students up. And that is a good goal to be sure.
But what about the smart children? Do they just fend for themselves? They need special attention too. Studies in classical languages would be one way to fulfill this need. In addition, tomorrow’s citizens must interact with the Arabic culture because we are now revving up for the long-simmering
The leaders of schools should have sufficient intelligence to discern such needs and to devise ways to deal with them. Smart students should not have to wait until they get to college to sample these subjects.
To repeat: the school system needs not only to see to the needs of the under performers but also to the needs of the gifted. These latter are the ones whose contributions move our world forward, but schools like those run by you in Pinellas County confine their obsession to raising scores of underperformers while neglecting smart students.
An intellectually superior superintendent familiar with the contours of Western civilization would see this need. That is one reason for which the board should hire an intelligent superintendent. I don’t believe that you are he, sir. I am sorry to be frank, but I must speak as I find.
I regret you avoided calling on me today. You evaded my hand because you thought I was going to nail you on another of your grammar errors. No, I did enough of that in the handout I gave to some fifty members of the club. I will be interested to see how the president of Nova responds to my email to him about the rigor of Nova's degree standards.
I planned to follow up on the fellow’s administrator-bloat question and add my recommendation for the cited language courses for superior students.
You called on your buddies in the audience and had no better sense than to name them as if the event were old home week for you and those guys.
That was bad manners, sir. Stop that offensive practice. It makes the other people think that you are shunning them and makes you look as if you were raised in a barn.
Lee Drury De Cesare
Confirming my suspicions of shoddy oversight of doctoral dissertations came this email from a part-time professor at Nova; he got one of my handouts at
Sent:
Subject: What's Wrong With Schools?
Mr. De Cesare;
Let me begin by thanking you for your spot-on critique of rigor absent on the part of those responsible for editing the doctoral theses of their candidates.
I clearly recall my draft chapters of my dissertation coming back with red markings where some error in writing protocol was evident (
Your commentary and critique are important to me because after retirement (23 years as a college-level instructor of political science) from the classroom,
I am currently on staff at Nova as an adjunct professor; I conduct undergraduate courses in Comparative and American Government.
That said, it should come as no surprise that I report that from the beginning of my tenure at Nova, I have been extremely critical of the writing skills of students enrolled in my courses. I have time and again inquired into prerequisite English courses necessary to meeting expectations for writing at a post-secondary level. I have been assured that all students must take an English writing of some sort, though what that is, is not clear.
To the point, however, many of Nova’s undergraduates fail to meet secondary levels of competency, and when I do what must be done to assist these young people in improving their skills, which often opens up a fairness issue. That is; it is patently unfair to grade a student’s writing skills at the college level when I know that he/she doesn’t have the skills.
On the upside, the institution does provide writing centers where student’s can go to get help; students rarely take advantage of what is available to them.
Insofar as the Wilcox dissertation is concerned, it really is an embarrassment; as is typical of the quality and direction of education in
Oh, before I forget, did the president ever respond?
Mr. Bill
Mr.
Mr.
This paragon, however, falters, so he needs the grammar equivalent of that slave who stood behind the Roman conquering hero as he returned to the roar of the crowds who lined the streets to see the chariot pass in which stood the hero with a slave at his back whispering in his ear, “Remember, you are only a man.
I play slave in this grammar production.
Mr.
From Mr.
I have removed blog chapters 1 and 2 until I can figure out how to get the messed-up text fixed. Bear with me. lee
Bay Area Grammargrinch: Issue 3
I neglected local writers’ grammar to go after Pinellas school superintendent Dr. Clayton Wilcox’s marginal literacy. I ratted out his thesis errors to the new president of Nova to see how the guy will deal with Wilcox’s departure from the university's putative strict grammar requirements cited on Nova’s Web dissertation pages.
Nova has a reputation in the academic world of being something of a diploma mill; Dr. Wilcox’s error-ridden, marginally documented, slender thesis will test the validity of that reputation. If the president is mum, I move up the food chain to the accreditation Gestapo.
I learned how to migrate through bureaucracies in the Women's Movement. The trick is to understand that male lawmakers have put on the books equal-opportunity laws that they think nobody will bother to carry out. You call their bluff.
My patience won women's right to apply for officer jobs in the Tampa Police Department--heretofore closed to them. I tackled the EEOC on that outrage against women and leafleted the agency until it gave in and carried out Title VII.
My husband and I attended the graduation from the police academy of its first woman officer. Here name was Thelma. A single mother, she couldn't support her three children on the nurse's-aide salary of the job she held but could on a police officer's salary.
To open the
Anybody can do stuff like this if he or she is willing just to keep writing the bureaucrats until victory emerges to shut you up.
Dr. Wilcox picked up his Ed.D. from Nova about thirty minutes before the Pinellas board dingdongs hired him for close to $200,000 despite grammar and punctuation’s being a mystery to him. He also got a car in a system in which teachers start at $34,000 and have to take a literacy test to nail down their job while superintendents whistle by this roadblock with no literacy test to impede their employment, $200,000, and the car.
After this side excursion with Superintendent Wilcox's illiteracy, I am back on my regular Grammargrinch job and ready to look at Mr. Bill
Mr. Bill
Mr.
Mr.
This paragon, however, falters, so he needs the grammar equivalent of that slave who stood behind the Roman conquering hero as he returned to the roar of the crowds who lined the streets to see the chariot pass in which stood the hero with a slave at his back whispering in his ear, “Remember, you are only a man.
I play slave in this grammar production.
Mr.
From Mr.
Black critics of Imus are hypocrites
I have come to believe the reason newspapers affect go-to-hell capitalization of titles is to avoid learning the rules.
By BILL MAXWELL Published
Although I do not like Imus the man, I watched his show because it delivered infotainment with the rapier's edge of powerful satire.
“The man” is a nonrestrictive appositive and gets commas on both sides. Strunk & White would nix “powerful” as superfluous modifier. In addition to the advice of S&W, there's the matter of the music of language. Anybody attuned to it can read that subordinate clause and hear the bump in rhythm “powerful” causes.
The adjective “powerful” is inaccurate in addition. Aristophanes and Swift produced powerful satire. Imus side-mouthed asides for those addicted to smirky sneers. Mr.
I avoided the show for aesthetic reasons. I did not want to encounter the aesthetic poisoning of my mind’s flitting to the specter of those graceless love scenes enacted in the Imus boudoir after Imus married a young woman a third his age and produced a Viagra child--no doubt a feat that required besides IV Cialis several pulleys, lifts, and Archimedean levers as romantic props for coital positioning, given the arthritic conditions of such geezers’ joints, not to mention other age-blasted anatomical accoutrements.
I also wanted to sidestep thoughts of the unlovely phantasmorgia of Imus’s winter-of-discontent production of a child because I believe that a geezer’s begetting a child constitutes a form of child abuse that involves the youngster’s being drooled on by his ancient sire from birth and ends with the youngster’s having to take his pops big bales of Pampers to his assisted-living abode. The child abuse ends only after the pilgrimage of this teenage offspring to show his aged father the lad's high-school diploma. This valedictory visit marks the time and place from whence the abused Viagra child escapes Pampers duty by fleeing to college. Only time and the Stanford Binet will tell whether the offspring suffers dyscrasias from sprouting from a spermatazoan that gimped to the egg on a crutch.
Because I am a journalist, who is dedicated to freedom of speech, and because I am a former college professor, who is dedicated to academic freedom, I have no serious problem with Imus' epithet. Given his genre, his venue and his voice, he behaved true to form.
Here appear three errors of which Professor
“Imus’” should be “Imus’s.” With words of more than one syllable's ending in an “s” sound, one uses apostrophe "s" for possession if he or she can pronounce the extra syllable with a straight face. Try it. You can say “Imus’s allure.” Hence, you use apostrophe "s" for singular possession. So should Mr.
You see, Imus is white, while the overwhelming majority of gangsta rappers are black, tattooed, swaggering, thug wanna-bes pretending to portray authentic black life in their vile renderings.
No comma after “while”: it cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause.
The reason that this comma is redundant involves normal syntax, which is subject-verb-object (if there is one), adverbial modifier(s). The adverbial modifier at the end of an independent clause occupies its normal syntactical position; thus we should not put a redundant comma before it. Only if we disturb syntax and move adverbial modifiers to the beginning or middle of the sentence do we use commas with them: they remain restrictive in those positions but merit commas from the move that disturbs syntax.
People afflicted with a smattering of grammar savvy will natter about certain subordinating conjunctions’ signaling trailing non-restrictive adverbial clauses; they aver that such as “although,” “even though,” and “unless” signal a nonrestrictive adverbial clause at the end of a main clause. I have yet to see one that I count nonrestrictive in the end position no matter the subordinating conjunction that begins it. Syntax trumps is my conviction.
If Mr.
Mr.
I can’t understand why Professor
These are not the antics of amateurs, but the serious efforts of multimillionaires infecting black culture in ways from which it may never recover.
Strunk & White would nix “serious" as a redundant modifier. So would a person who hears the flaw it produces in the music of the sentence.
Not everybody hears the music of language; there are no rules for it. It comes from instinct.
I also imbibed the poetry of The Grand Ol’ Opry on Saturday nights because that was my father’s favorite program. And don’t sneer at the poetry of hillbilly music. The lyrics of its ballads have their own verbal magic as much as my beloved Wagner's do.
Moreover, I sent a record of our spat to the
Mr.
He can’t do that and remain among the punctuation adept. “But” is a mere coordinating conjunction joining two equal nouns as predicative nominatives. We use a comma when a coordinating conjunction joins two independent clauses, not when it joins compound predicate nominatives.
I shall have to ask Professor
Leaving Professor
Creative Loafing
Gordon Davis: "I can make it happen."
BY BRIAN RIES
Brian’s piece has a portrait of him. Ben Affleck’s reputation is safe.
Who? Gordon Davis, 55, is the force behind the rapidly expanding Ceviche restaurant group that originated in South Tampa, as well as former owner of
Never mind any introductory clues. Brian plunges us into the melee in medias res. We sink or swim as the tides of language dictates to Brian.
It doesn't help reader comprehension that the food-fight press has decided to make its mark on the literary world of journalism by abandoning quotation marks--even single ones--altogether. So the reader must rescue the direct quotes as best he or she can and to hell with writing civility.
Food-fight auteur Brian must not flatter himself that he can provoke Ms. Grammar Grinch into calling him a pretentious twit for this punctuation. No. That will never happen. I do not stoop to such low behavior. Brian can just do his worst. "Na, na, na" will never escape my lips.
The redundant comma after “
Davis expanded the Ceviche restaurant concept across the Bay last year and will soon open locations in Orlando and Sarasota, with the help of several longtime employees who have bought into the company over the past few years.
The comma after “
I [recently] taught a class called restaurant doctoring, and the first thing I told them is to get a good shrink and really think about what they're doing, because it can't be profit-motivated.
The quotation marks have disappeared. Intuition tells the reader that Le Davis speaks. The food-fight press gives away its quotation-marks game by clinging to brackets around an editorial interpolation in this quote as if it clutched a punctuation security blanket and is not yet brave enough to let go altogether. It's like leaving home to live on your own: one foot in the door, one out.
The Tribune has dropped back to single instead of double quotation marks around direct quotes. I may have to report these punctuation cut-ups to the Chicago
The brackets around “recently” betray this's being a direct quote. These punctuation renegades have to stop somewhere or reduce their communications to semaphore.
They came to me and said, "Gordon," (they knew I was going to retire) "we think this is the most exciting concept we've worked for, please don't leave, we want to see how far we can take it." You were in on the ground floor of "
Here there appears a chicken-out with quotes used around a direct quote. It's hell to stay pure. And the quotation marks around “
The parentheses above should be brackets in quoted material. The comma goes after the brackets. The comma after “for” marks a comma splice. It should be a period. The comma after “leave” marks another comma splice. It should be a period. A writer's committing repeated comma splices while messing around with quotation marks is like pondering another stationary style for template when a rattle snake lurks under your keyboard.
Comma splices, fragments, and misspelling are grammar felonies in the punctuating-abiding world outside the swashbuckling food-fight-Creative- Loafing press. These foodie press rebels fool nobody with their messing around with quotation marks to pose as linguistic sophisticates. Its faux swashbucklers don't know how to punctuate, and they are trying to cover up this deficiency with the quotation-marks diversion. If these big babies want to be real writers in the big time, they have to make friends with the little squiggle marks that go in between words known in the grown-up world as punctuation marks.
I started
We are back in the punctuation badlands of no quotation marks.
The comma after "
I hope the super-confident Mr. Davis is not here claiming to have coined the word “
There are horrible obstructionists here. I'd rather build a new business in any community other than
There is nothing that wrings one's heart like a misunderstood concepting restaurateur in midst of people who don't understand him. The quotation has no quotation marks around it naturellement. Ces grands bébés ont des mauvaises humeurs de ponctuation encore.
There should be another period after “be” for the end of the sentence preceding the ellipsis. The “it” in the quoted exit sentence points back to nothing. Mr. Davis probably means “cooperation doesn’t exist right now.” Brian should put “cooperation” in brackets after “it” and then depart at once to get a haircut.
Beach Beacon
Indecent exposure cases under investigation
By TOM GERMOND
Article published on
In both cases, a white male exposed himself to two adult females in a lewd manner, according to police.
The comma after “manner” is redundant. The “according to police” is a restrictive prepositional phrase. The police, not the guy who rakes the beaches in a tractor each morning at
The suspect was described as
This guys sounds like he could have gotten a date with either or both of the women instead of exposing himself. All he had to say was, “Let’s go down to
The police department used K-9s for each incident and contained the area while a thorough search was conducted.
Hauling out the k-9s twice for exposed behinds and pudenda is too much. That’s cruelty to animals. These dogs are used to tracking murderers; exposure addicts are too raunchy for their canine psyches and will produce emotional trauma. The ASPCA shall hear of this.
Anyone with information about this suspect is encouraged to contact the Treasure Island Police Department at 547-4595.
See those “was conducted” and “is encouraged” passive verbs? Such are signature of the lackadaisical writing the beach beat induces in reporters with no iron in their rhetorical spines.
Sociological aside: since the St. Petersburg Times bought out this wholesome family newspaper, all exposure stories go above the fold on page one especially if they involve glutei. A psycho-sociological-fiber-content analysis of this phenomenon would probably produce forensic evidence that someone on the city desk is a glutei fetishist. The Centers for Disease Control has conducted conclusive studies that show that this psychosexual affliction turns up with predictable frequency on city desks of cities such as
But this scientific insight offers no comfort to long-time beach residents, who lament, “ It’s no wonder our beaches have acquired the name Striptease Strip with all these above-the-fold St. Petersburg Times stories on exposure sickos." ”
Article published on
Bondi 'Loves Being Prosecutor'
By KEITH MORELLI, The
Published:
We have below in Mr. Morelli’s specimen displaying a recent trend that I have noted in some papers of throwing out double quotation marks and using instead single quotation marks, the ones that standard punctuation says signal a quote within a quote. Food-fight Creative Loafing has ditched quotation marks altogether. The Tribune engages in gradualism.
One infers that this trend represents an extension of newspaper quidnuncs’ incursions against Standard English that began with omitting the last comma in items in a series, moved on through throwing out the capital rules for titles, and now engaging in probing the corrupting of quotation marks. All the pukey blue-green type below marks evidence of this new outrage from the Fourth-Estate defilers of language.
It's pretty clear that all these food-fight Creative Loafing and Tribune press guys hated their English teachers, of which I was one. Sigmund Freud said that omitting quotation marks was diagnostic of the prodroma to this phobia.
Here follows Reporter Morelli’s hagiography of La Bondi:
'Once they see how articulate she is, how knowledgeable she is, the news stations compete for her presence,' said Bondi's boss, Hillsborough County State Attorney
Change wimpy passive verb to active: "The governor appointed
I saw Mr. Ober campaigning for office in
Candor requires that I report him to have knarled knees and knotted calves. To be fair, I noted no varicosities. These knarled knees and knotted calves make clear that Le Ober was not the model for Phidias’ Zeus in 5th-centruy B.
I aver it safe to follow the maxim that any man with legs as ugly as Mr. Ober’s forfeits the right for people to take his word on any subject whatsoever.
'She's walked the walk. She's somebody who's been in the courtroom, who knows the business.'
As a prosecutor for 16 years, Bondi provides a law enforcement perspective on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, through shows such as 'Hannity & Colmes,' '
TV shows don't get quotation marks, much less single quotation marks. The names of shows get italics; episodes get quotation marks. The refusal to use italics even though it's easy to set them on a computer is another of the press's peculiarities. The comma after "MSNBC" is redundant, cutting off a restrictive prepositional phrase.
I infer this abjuring italics finds its roots back in old typesetting when doing italics was hard. Those times are long gone. It's time to use the potential of computers to do italics. The only excuses for not observing italics protocol is press orneriness and laziness.
Bondi, Ober said, 'has never shied away from anything. She's not afraid of anything. ...
'People don't appreciate the great strain of a trial like this, the preparation, the national spotlight and the living away from home,' Ober said. His lawyers in the Panhandle are 'living out of a suitcase.'
'We were having a conversation. He knew Pam and what an asset she was to my office,' Ober said. 'He said, 'I'll trade you two very seasoned prosecutors for Pam Bondi.' I chuckled and I told him, 'Pam has a no-trade clause in her contract.''
Here there is a slip-up of the quotation marks-rebels: there are the regulation double quotation marks closing the last quotation instead of single ones. Some worthy 9th-grade English teacher pounded quotation-marks rules into this recalcitrant reporter's head, and his comma synapses snapped back in this end punctuation slip-up. Give us teachers the specimen when he or she is young, and we will drill down through the dura mater, pia mater, and arachnoid mater to seat those comma rules to last until hell freezes over. Those vile scientists may have wiped out everything else from Bourne's memory, but not the quotation marks. They are in there somewhere and will resurface anon when least expected. That's what the next movie will be about: the return of Bourne's quotation marks.
A comma goes after “chuckled” for a compound sentence joined by a coordinating conjunction.
Bondi also provides expert TV commentary on out-of-state issues, such as the false allegations of rape involving the
The comma after “issues” is redundant: it cuts off restrictive prepositional phrases.
Bondi ended up settling with the family, shipping the dog back but retaining 'visitation rights.'
'I think Pam is fiercely loyal to the people she works with,' Cohen said, 'and she's got an innate sense of fairness about her.'
From what he saw of her in the dog case, Cohen said, 'she's a very sensitive and loving lady. When she saw Noah on TV and he had just come back from Louisiana, she went out and sat on a cement floor and, when he was filthy dirty from that hurricane, hugged him and kissed him and let him drool all over her.'
There should be a comma after “floor” before the coordinating conjunction joining the compound sentence.
He has never faced off in court against Bondi, but if he did, Cohen said, 'I'd run away.'
By Thomas T. Huang
Mr. Huang is a good writer. He has a sure sense of the shape of a sentence; he makes few punctuation errors and no grammar errors. He writes better than does Dr. Roy Peter Clark, who occupies Poynter’s cushy job of head of faculty despite
For those who question the Web's reach within ethnic communities, consider this: The
Replacing the passive verb would produce a cleaner sentence: “The African-American Blogosphere spurred the discussion of the
The digital world can help the reader gain an understanding of people in other communities. It can help communities build bridges with one another. Again, we in the traditional media need to take advantage of that.
The writer refers to two things with the demonstrative pronoun "that": gaining understanding and building bridges. “That” should be “those things.”
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The comma before “as well” is redundant. Commas for marginally interruptive adverbs have almost disappeared in the trend toward minimal commas. So these redundant commas give off an out-of-date aura. See William Follett for the reduction in commas over the last four-hundred hears. “If you will” is padding. The author should dump it.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
“It turns out” is wordiness. The comma after "site" cuts off a restrictive participial phrase.
The program is based on a 1950s radio program hosted by
Active verb instead of passive produce a stronger sentence: “A 1950s
"We are not listening well, not understanding each other -- we are simply disagreeing, or worse.
The comma before “or worse” is redundant. It separates a compound verb with the second verb’s being elliptical: “simply disagreeing or [doing] worse.”
The Web site is a finalist for the 2007 Online Journalism Awards, as is another Web site I admire, washingtonpost.com's "onBeing" project.
No comma goes before the restrictive trailing adverbial clause "as is." Both "On Journalism" and "onBeing" get italics.
A mentor and mentee joke with each other, describing how they've become family.
The “describing” present participial phrase is restrictive: it modifies two general nouns preceded by "a." There are more than one mentor and mentee in the world.
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The trend in commas is minimalism, so "as well."equivalent to "too,' does not get commas.”If you will" is wordiness" that merits jettisoning.
The digital world gives journalists the tools to tell narrative stories in multi-layered ways, with the
"Narrative stories" is pleonasm. Stories are narratives by definition. The comma after “ways” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
I've always admired "This I Believe," which can be heard on National Public Radio.
Passive verb: “…which people can hear on National Public Radio” The TV program gets italics.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
Dump wordy "it turns out." The comma after "site" is redundant before a restrictive present participial phrase.
La Gaceta
“Silhouettes"
Paul Guzzo
She identified Pam Iorio as the remaining candidate she thought could best help the city, and joined her campaign.
A redundant comma splits a compound verb.
…if she believes a candidate truly wants to help better the community.
It’s the last phrase that truly defines Rifkin.
Guzzo should take the pledge on eschewing “truly”; Strunk & White forbids these redundant, hackneyed adverbs. "Truly" is the worst.
“I’m just a
The past participial phrase “born…” is restrictive: no comma before it.
She is Italian on her father’s,
Guzzo is in over his head in the above mangled sentence. If he wants to keep this syntax, he must make the appositive possessives line up with the nouns they rename: “She is Italian on her father’s,
It's never a disgrace to back up and recast if the syntax of your original sentence defeats you.
“It was like being a mom and pop hardware store….”
Hyphenate this three-word adjective before a noun.
“But no matter how good a grass-roots campaign you run if you don’t have money you’ll never win.”
Comma needed for long introductory prepositional phrase.
“…and to reach each voter four times, whether through commercials or mailers.”
No comma before "whether': it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
“When I’m in the middle of an election I’m working seven days a week, all day and all night.”
Comma after “election” is obligatory for an introductory adverbial clause. Comma after “week” is redundant: the “all day…” is restrictive appositive. She works not half the day and night seven days a week but all day and night.
New Feature: Truculent Letters to Journalists
Fittingly for a column on Dr. Wilcox’s reification at
I don’t know enough about how the press splits up jobs to say for sure, but I infer that
Mr. Tobin:
I wish you were within reach. I would box your ears—not because of your grammar-punctuation but because of your selectivity in reporting Dr. Wilcox’s appearance at
And don’t natter about objectivity: that’s an epistemological and psychological impossibility. The selection of details to include in your article and those to omit comes from your gauging of your bosses’ prejudices; that’s par in jobs everywhere: Kiss up to the boss.
You made only one comma error—“…we can educate Black kids and in very high numbers, and also in very high levels.”
The comma after “numbers” is redundant: it splits a pair of compound adverbial prepositional phrases modifying “can educate.”
Only one comma error is excellent.
But the style is oatmeal. Try getting past your unimaginative editors some occasional vivid diction or sentence with unorthodox syntax. Don't go hog wild. Be abstemious with these maneuvers but slip a few in for flavor.
Better, try the daring move of telling the truth for a change about the people on whom you report. You might have done so on the
What makes me want to puke is your selection of details to portray the superintendent as Cato the Elder. Misleading readers is worse than bad writing. It’s lousy ethics.
Why didn’t you mention the first man’s question about Dr. Wilcox’s failure to reduce the administrative bloat? The superintendent flimflammed the answer to a faretheewell. Press bias is always in favor of the official roster of rascals in positions of power. Power mesmerizes the press as it does citizen sheep that go along with whoever wears the crown. That’s how we got into war with
lee drury de cesare
board@pcsb.org ; wilcox@pcsb.org wilcox@pcsb.org
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 1:25 AM
Dr. Wilcox:
You evaded the first question at Tiger Bay today from the man who cited your promise to reduce administration bloat when you entered your job and asked how you had done so.
You hemmed and hawed, but one could infer that what you said behind the verbal smoke screen was that you had not reduced administrators but had moved them around.
Then, if I understood you correctly, you said that grant monies immured certain administrative jobs.
Why in the world is the administration writing grants to support yet more administrators when you already have too many?
Why don’t you sponsor writing grants to hire teachers to teach beginning Greek, beginning Arabic, and beginning Chinese?
I infer the schools already have Latin; they need Greek too for the smart kids to have the intellectual stimulation of a road that reaches back to the beginning of the 6th-century B.C. civilization starting democracy and laying down the basis for Western culture.
The schools engage in much discussion of bringing the scores of the underperforming students up. And that is a good goal to be sure.
But what about the smart children? Do they just fend for themselves? They need special attention too. Studies in classical languages would be one way to fulfill this need. In addition, tomorrow’s citizens must interact with the Arabic culture because we are now revving up for the long-simmering
The leaders of schools should have sufficient intelligence to discern such needs and to devise ways to deal with them. Smart students should not have to wait until they get to college to sample these subjects.
To repeat: the school system needs not only to see to the needs of the under performers but also to the needs of the gifted. These latter are the ones whose contributions move our world forward, but schools like those run by you in Pinellas County confine their obsession to raising scores of underperformers while neglecting smart students.
An intellectually superior superintendent familiar with the contours of Western civilization would see this need. That is one reason for which the board should hire an intelligent superintendent. I don’t believe that you are he, sir. I am sorry to be frank, but I must speak as I find.
I regret you avoided calling on me today. You evaded my hand because you thought I was going to nail you on another of your grammar errors. No, I did enough of that in the handout I gave to some fifty members of the club. I will be interested to see how the president of Nova responds to my email to him about the rigor of Nova's degree standards.
I planned to follow up on the fellow’s administrator-bloat question and add my recommendation for the cited language courses for superior students.
You called on your buddies in the audience and had no better sense than to name them as if the event were old home week for you and those guys.
That was bad manners, sir. Stop that offensive practice. It makes the other people think that you are shunning them and makes you look as if you were raised in a barn.
Lee Drury De Cesare
Confirming my suspicions of shoddy oversight of doctoral dissertations came this email from a part-time professor at Nova; he got one of my handouts at
Sent:
Subject: What's Wrong With Schools?
Mr. De Cesare;
Let me begin by thanking you for your spot-on critique of rigor absent on the part of those responsible for editing the doctoral theses of their candidates.
I clearly recall my draft chapters of my dissertation coming back with red markings where some error in writing protocol was evident (
Your commentary and critique are important to me because after retirement (23 years as a college-level instructor of political science) from the classroom,
I am currently on staff at Nova as an adjunct professor; I conduct undergraduate courses in Comparative and American Government.
That said, it should come as no surprise that I report that from the beginning of my tenure at Nova, I have been extremely critical of the writing skills of students enrolled in my courses. I have time and again inquired into prerequisite English courses necessary to meeting expectations for writing at a post-secondary level. I have been assured that all students must take an English writing of some sort, though what that is, is not clear.
To the point, however, many of Nova’s undergraduates fail to meet secondary levels of competency, and when I do what must be done to assist these young people in improving their skills, which often opens up a fairness issue. That is; it is patently unfair to grade a student’s writing skills at the college level when I know that he/she doesn’t have the skills.
On the upside, the institution does provide writing centers where student’s can go to get help; students rarely take advantage of what is available to them.
Insofar as the Wilcox dissertation is concerned, it really is an embarrassment; as is typical of the quality and direction of education in
Oh, before I forget, did the president ever respond?
Black critics of Imus are hypocrites
I have come to believe the reason newspapers affect go-to-hell capitalization of titles is to avoid learning the rules.
By BILL MAXWELL Published
Although I do not like Imus the man, I watched his show because it delivered infotainment with the rapier's edge of powerful satire.
“The man” is a nonrestrictive appositive and gets commas on both sides. Strunk & White would nix “powerful” as superfluous modifier. In addition to the advice of S&W, there's the matter of the music of language. Anybody attuned to it can read that subordinate clause and hear the bump in rhythm “powerful” causes.
The adjective “powerful” is inaccurate in addition. Aristophanes and Swift produced powerful satire. Imus side-mouthed asides for those addicted to smirky sneers. Mr.
I avoided the show for aesthetic reasons. I did not want to encounter the aesthetic poisoning of my mind’s flitting to the specter of those graceless love scenes enacted in the Imus boudoir after Imus married a young woman a third his age and produced a Viagra child--no doubt a feat that required besides IV Cialis several pulleys, lifts, and Archimedean levers as romantic props for coital positioning, given the arthritic conditions of such geezers’ joints, not to mention other age-blasted anatomical accoutrements.
I also wanted to sidestep thoughts of the unlovely phantasmorgia of Imus’s winter-of-discontent production of a child because I believe that a geezer’s begetting a child constitutes a form of child abuse that involves the youngster’s being drooled on by his ancient sire from birth and ends with the youngster’s having to take his pops big bales of Pampers to his assisted-living abode. The child abuse ends only after the pilgrimage of this teenage offspring to show his aged father the lad's high-school diploma. This valedictory visit marks the time and place from whence the abused Viagra child escapes Pampers duty by fleeing to college. Only time and the Stanford Binet will tell whether the offspring suffers dyscrasias from sprouting from a spermatazoan that gimped to the egg on a crutch.
Because I am a journalist, who is dedicated to freedom of speech, and because I am a former college professor, who is dedicated to academic freedom, I have no serious problem with Imus' epithet. Given his genre, his venue and his voice, he behaved true to form.
Here appear three errors of which Professor
“Imus’” should be “Imus’s.” With words of more than one syllable's ending in an “s” sound, one uses apostrophe "s" for possession if he or she can pronounce the extra syllable with a straight face. Try it. You can say “Imus’s allure.” Hence, you use apostrophe "s" for singular possession. So should Mr.
You see, Imus is white, while the overwhelming majority of gangsta rappers are black, tattooed, swaggering, thug wanna-bes pretending to portray authentic black life in their vile renderings.
No comma after “while”: it cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause.
The reason that this comma is redundant involves normal syntax, which is subject-verb-object (if there is one), adverbial modifier(s). The adverbial modifier at the end of an independent clause occupies its normal syntactical position; thus we should not put a redundant comma before it. Only if we disturb syntax and move adverbial modifiers to the beginning or middle of the sentence do we use commas with them: they remain restrictive in those positions but merit commas from the move that disturbs syntax.
People afflicted with a smattering of grammar savvy will natter about certain subordinating conjunctions’ signaling trailing non-restrictive adverbial clauses; they aver that such as “although,” “even though,” and “unless” signal a nonrestrictive adverbial clause at the end of a main clause. I have yet to see one that I count nonrestrictive in the end position no matter the subordinating conjunction that begins it. Syntax trumps is my conviction.
If Mr.
Mr.
I can’t understand why Professor
These are not the antics of amateurs, but the serious efforts of multimillionaires infecting black culture in ways from which it may never recover.
Strunk & White would nix “serious" as a redundant modifier. So would a person who hears the flaw it produces in the music of the sentence.
Not everybody hears the music of language; there are no rules for it. It comes from instinct.
I also imbibed the poetry of The Grand Ol’ Opry on Saturday nights because that was my father’s favorite program. And don’t sneer at the poetry of hillbilly music. The lyrics of its ballads have their own verbal magic as much as my beloved Wagner's do.
Moreover, I sent a record of our spat to the
Mr.
He can’t do that and remain among the punctuation adept. “But” is a mere coordinating conjunction joining two equal nouns as predicative nominatives. We use a comma when a coordinating conjunction joins two independent clauses, not when it joins compound predicate nominatives.
I shall have to ask Professor
Leaving Professor
Creative Loafing
Gordon Davis: "I can make it happen."
BY BRIAN RIES
Brian’s piece has a portrait of him. Ben Affleck’s reputation is safe.
Who? Gordon Davis, 55, is the force behind the rapidly expanding Ceviche restaurant group that originated in South Tampa, as well as former owner of
Never mind any introductory clues. Brian plunges us into the melee in medias res. We sink or swim as the tides of language dictates to Brian.
It doesn't help reader comprehension that the food-fight press has decided to make its mark on the literary world of journalism by abandoning quotation marks--even single ones--altogether. So the reader must rescue the direct quotes as best he or she can and to hell with writing civility.
Food-fight auteur Brian must not flatter himself that he can provoke Ms. Grammar Grinch into calling him a pretentious twit for this punctuation. No. That will never happen. I do not stoop to such low behavior. Brian can just do his worst. "Na, na, na" will never escape my lips.
The redundant comma after “
Davis expanded the Ceviche restaurant concept across the Bay last year and will soon open locations in Orlando and Sarasota, with the help of several longtime employees who have bought into the company over the past few years.
The comma after “
I [recently] taught a class called restaurant doctoring, and the first thing I told them is to get a good shrink and really think about what they're doing, because it can't be profit-motivated.
The quotation marks have disappeared. Intuition tells the reader that Le Davis speaks. The food-fight press gives away its quotation-marks game by clinging to brackets around an editorial interpolation in this quote as if it clutched a punctuation security blanket and is not yet brave enough to let go altogether. It's like leaving home to live on your own: one foot in the door, one out.
The Tribune has dropped back to single instead of double quotation marks around direct quotes. I may have to report these punctuation cut-ups to the Chicago
The brackets around “recently” betray this's being a direct quote. These punctuation renegades have to stop somewhere or reduce their communications to semaphore.
They came to me and said, "Gordon," (they knew I was going to retire) "we think this is the most exciting concept we've worked for, please don't leave, we want to see how far we can take it." You were in on the ground floor of "
Here there appears a chicken-out with quotes used around a direct quote. It's hell to stay pure. And the quotation marks around “
The parentheses above should be brackets in quoted material. The comma goes after the brackets. The comma after “for” marks a comma splice. It should be a period. The comma after “leave” marks another comma splice. It should be a period. A writer's committing repeated comma splices while messing around with quotation marks is like pondering another stationary style for template when a rattle snake lurks under your keyboard.
Comma splices, fragments, and misspelling are grammar felonies in the punctuating-abiding world outside the swashbuckling food-fight-Creative- Loafing press. These foodie press rebels fool nobody with their messing around with quotation marks to pose as linguistic sophisticates. Its faux swashbucklers don't know how to punctuate, and they are trying to cover up this deficiency with the quotation-marks diversion. If these big babies want to be real writers in the big time, they have to make friends with the little squiggle marks that go in between words known in the grown-up world as punctuation marks.
I started
We are back in the punctuation badlands of no quotation marks.
The comma after "
I hope the super-confident Mr. Davis is not here claiming to have coined the word “
There are horrible obstructionists here. I'd rather build a new business in any community other than
There is nothing that wrings one's heart like a misunderstood concepting restaurateur in midst of people who don't understand him. The quotation has no quotation marks around it naturellement. Ces grands bébés ont des mauvaises humeurs de ponctuation encore.
There should be another period after “be” for the end of the sentence preceding the ellipsis. The “it” in the quoted exit sentence points back to nothing. Mr. Davis probably means “cooperation doesn’t exist right now.” Brian should put “cooperation” in brackets after “it” and then depart at once to get a haircut.
Beach Beacon
Indecent exposure cases under investigation
By TOM GERMOND
Article published on
In both cases, a white male exposed himself to two adult females in a lewd manner, according to police.
The comma after “manner” is redundant. The “according to police” is a restrictive prepositional phrase. The police, not the guy who rakes the beaches in a tractor each morning at
The suspect was described as
This guys sounds like he could have gotten a date with either or both of the women instead of exposing himself. All he had to say was, “Let’s go down to
The police department used K-9s for each incident and contained the area while a thorough search was conducted.
Hauling out the k-9s twice for exposed behinds and pudenda is too much. That’s cruelty to animals. These dogs are used to tracking murderers; exposure addicts are too raunchy for their canine psyches and will produce emotional trauma. The ASPCA shall hear of this.
Anyone with information about this suspect is encouraged to contact the Treasure Island Police Department at 547-4595.
See those “was conducted” and “is encouraged” passive verbs? Such are signature of the lackadaisical writing the beach beat induces in reporters with no iron in their rhetorical spines.
Sociological aside: since the St. Petersburg Times bought out this wholesome family newspaper, all exposure stories go above the fold on page one especially if they involve glutei. A psycho-sociological-fiber-content analysis of this phenomenon would probably produce forensic evidence that someone on the city desk is a glutei fetishist. The Centers for Disease Control has conducted conclusive studies that show that this psychosexual affliction turns up with predictable frequency on city desks of cities such as
But this scientific insight offers no comfort to long-time beach residents, who lament, “ It’s no wonder our beaches have acquired the name Striptease Strip with all these above-the-fold St. Petersburg Times stories on exposure sickos." ”
Article published on
Bondi 'Loves Being Prosecutor'
By KEITH MORELLI, The
Published:
We have below in Mr. Morelli’s specimen displaying a recent trend that I have noted in some papers of throwing out double quotation marks and using instead single quotation marks, the ones that standard punctuation says signal a quote within a quote. Food-fight Creative Loafing has ditched quotation marks altogether. The Tribune engages in gradualism.
One infers that this trend represents an extension of newspaper quidnuncs’ incursions against Standard English that began with omitting the last comma in items in a series, moved on through throwing out the capital rules for titles, and now engaging in probing the corrupting of quotation marks. All the pukey blue-green type below marks evidence of this new outrage from the Fourth-Estate defilers of language.
It's pretty clear that all these food-fight Creative Loafing and Tribune press guys hated their English teachers, of which I was one. Sigmund Freud said that omitting quotation marks was diagnostic of the prodroma to this phobia.
Here follows Reporter Morelli’s hagiography of La Bondi:
'Once they see how articulate she is, how knowledgeable she is, the news stations compete for her presence,' said Bondi's boss, Hillsborough County State Attorney
Change wimpy passive verb to active: "The governor appointed
I saw Mr. Ober campaigning for office in
Candor requires that I report him to have knarled knees and knotted calves. To be fair, I noted no varicosities. These knarled knees and knotted calves make clear that Le Ober was not the model for Phidias’ Zeus in 5th-centruy B.
I aver it safe to follow the maxim that any man with legs as ugly as Mr. Ober’s forfeits the right for people to take his word on any subject whatsoever.
'She's walked the walk. She's somebody who's been in the courtroom, who knows the business.'
As a prosecutor for 16 years, Bondi provides a law enforcement perspective on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, through shows such as 'Hannity & Colmes,' '
TV shows don't get quotation marks, much less single quotation marks. The names of shows get italics; episodes get quotation marks. The refusal to use italics even though it's easy to set them on a computer is another of the press's peculiarities. The comma after "MSNBC" is redundant, cutting off a restrictive prepositional phrase.
I infer this abjuring italics finds its roots back in old typesetting when doing italics was hard. Those times are long gone. It's time to use the potential of computers to do italics. The only excuses for not observing italics protocol is press orneriness and laziness.
Bondi, Ober said, 'has never shied away from anything. She's not afraid of anything. ...
'People don't appreciate the great strain of a trial like this, the preparation, the national spotlight and the living away from home,' Ober said. His lawyers in the Panhandle are 'living out of a suitcase.'
'We were having a conversation. He knew Pam and what an asset she was to my office,' Ober said. 'He said, 'I'll trade you two very seasoned prosecutors for Pam Bondi.' I chuckled and I told him, 'Pam has a no-trade clause in her contract.''
Here there is a slip-up of the quotation marks-rebels: there are the regulation double quotation marks closing the last quotation instead of single ones. Some worthy 9th-grade English teacher pounded quotation-marks rules into this recalcitrant reporter's head, and his comma synapses snapped back in this end punctuation slip-up. Give us teachers the specimen when he or she is young, and we will drill down through the dura mater, pia mater, and arachnoid mater to seat those comma rules to last until hell freezes over. Those vile scientists may have wiped out everything else from Bourne's memory, but not the quotation marks. They are in there somewhere and will resurface anon when least expected. That's what the next movie will be about: the return of Bourne's quotation marks.
A comma goes after “chuckled” for a compound sentence joined by a coordinating conjunction.
Bondi also provides expert TV commentary on out-of-state issues, such as the false allegations of rape involving the
The comma after “issues” is redundant: it cuts off restrictive prepositional phrases.
Bondi ended up settling with the family, shipping the dog back but retaining 'visitation rights.'
'I think Pam is fiercely loyal to the people she works with,' Cohen said, 'and she's got an innate sense of fairness about her.'
From what he saw of her in the dog case, Cohen said, 'she's a very sensitive and loving lady. When she saw Noah on TV and he had just come back from Louisiana, she went out and sat on a cement floor and, when he was filthy dirty from that hurricane, hugged him and kissed him and let him drool all over her.'
There should be a comma after “floor” before the coordinating conjunction joining the compound sentence.
He has never faced off in court against Bondi, but if he did, Cohen said, 'I'd run away.'
Poynter Institute
By Thomas T. Huang
Mr. Huang is a good writer. He has a sure sense of the shape of a sentence; he makes few punctuation errors and no grammar errors. He writes better than does Dr. Roy Peter Clark, who occupies Poynter’s cushy job of head of faculty despite
For those who question the Web's reach within ethnic communities, consider this: The
Replacing the passive verb would produce a cleaner sentence: “The African-American Blogosphere spurred the discussion of the
The digital world can help the reader gain an understanding of people in other communities. It can help communities build bridges with one another. Again, we in the traditional media need to take advantage of that.
The writer refers to two things with the demonstrative pronoun "that": gaining understanding and building bridges. “That” should be “those things.”
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The comma before “as well” is redundant. Commas for marginally interruptive adverbs have almost disappeared in the trend toward minimal commas. So these redundant commas give off an out-of-date aura. See William Follett for the reduction in commas over the last four-hundred hears. “If you will” is padding. The author should dump it.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
“It turns out” is wordiness. The comma after "site" cuts off a restrictive participial phrase.
The program is based on a 1950s radio program hosted by
Active verb instead of passive produce a stronger sentence: “A 1950s
"We are not listening well, not understanding each other -- we are simply disagreeing, or worse.
The comma before “or worse” is redundant. It separates a compound verb with the second verb’s being elliptical: “simply disagreeing or [doing] worse.”
The Web site is a finalist for the 2007 Online Journalism Awards, as is another Web site I admire, washingtonpost.com's "onBeing" project.
No comma goes before the restrictive trailing adverbial clause "as is." Both "On Journalism" and "onBeing" get italics.
A mentor and mentee joke with each other, describing how they've become family.
The “describing” present participial phrase is restrictive: it modifies two general nouns preceded by "a." There are more than one mentor and mentee in the world.
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The trend in commas is minimalism, so "as well."equivalent to "too,' does not get commas.”If you will" is wordiness" that merits jettisoning.
The digital world gives journalists the tools to tell narrative stories in multi-layered ways, with the
"Narrative stories" is pleonasm. Stories are narratives by definition. The comma after “ways” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
I've always admired "This I Believe," which can be heard on National Public Radio.
Passive verb: “…which people can hear on National Public Radio” The TV program gets italics.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
Dump wordy "it turns out." The comma after "site" is redundant before a restrictive present participial phrase.
La Gaceta
“Silhouettes"
Paul Guzzo
She identified Pam Iorio as the remaining candidate she thought could best help the city, and joined her campaign.
A redundant comma splits a compound verb.
…if she believes a candidate truly wants to help better the community.
It’s the last phrase that truly defines Rifkin.
Guzzo should take the pledge on eschewing “truly”; Strunk & White forbids these redundant, hackneyed adverbs. "Truly" is the worst.
“I’m just a
The past participial phrase “born…” is restrictive: no comma before it.
She is Italian on her father’s,
Guzzo is in over his head in the above mangled sentence. If he wants to keep this syntax, he must make the appositive possessives line up with the nouns they rename: “She is Italian on her father’s,
It's never a disgrace to back up and recast if the syntax of your original sentence defeats you.
“It was like being a mom and pop hardware store….”
Hyphenate this three-word adjective before a noun.
“But no matter how good a grass-roots campaign you run if you don’t have money you’ll never win.”
Comma needed for long introductory prepositional phrase.
“…and to reach each voter four times, whether through commercials or mailers.”
No comma before "whether': it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
“When I’m in the middle of an election I’m working seven days a week, all day and all night.”
Comma after “election” is obligatory for an introductory adverbial clause. Comma after “week” is redundant: the “all day…” is restrictive appositive. She works not half the day and night seven days a week but all day and night.
New Feature: Truculent Letters to Journalists
Fittingly for a column on Dr. Wilcox’s reification at
I don’t know enough about how the press splits up jobs to say for sure, but I infer that
Mr. Tobin:
I wish you were within reach. I would box your ears—not because of your grammar-punctuation but because of your selectivity in reporting Dr. Wilcox’s appearance at
And don’t natter about objectivity: that’s an epistemological and psychological impossibility. The selection of details to include in your article and those to omit comes from your gauging of your bosses’ prejudices; that’s par in jobs everywhere: Kiss up to the boss.
You made only one comma error—“…we can educate Black kids and in very high numbers, and also in very high levels.”
The comma after “numbers” is redundant: it splits a pair of compound adverbial prepositional phrases modifying “can educate.”
Only one comma error is excellent.
But the style is oatmeal. Try getting past your unimaginative editors some occasional vivid diction or sentence with unorthodox syntax. Don't go hog wild. Be abstemious with these maneuvers but slip a few in for flavor.
Better, try the daring move of telling the truth for a change about the people on whom you report. You might have done so on the
What makes me want to puke is your selection of details to portray the superintendent as Cato the Elder. Misleading readers is worse than bad writing. It’s lousy ethics.
Why didn’t you mention the first man’s question about Dr. Wilcox’s failure to reduce the administrative bloat? The superintendent flimflammed the answer to a faretheewell. Press bias is always in favor of the official roster of rascals in positions of power. Power mesmerizes the press as it does citizen sheep that go along with whoever wears the crown. That’s how we got into war with
lee drury de cesare
board@pcsb.org ; wilcox@pcsb.org wilcox@pcsb.org
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 1:25 AM
Dr. Wilcox:
You evaded the first question at Tiger Bay today from the man who cited your promise to reduce administration bloat when you entered your job and asked how you had done so.
You hemmed and hawed, but one could infer that what you said behind the verbal smoke screen was that you had not reduced administrators but had moved them around.
Then, if I understood you correctly, you said that grant monies immured certain administrative jobs.
Why in the world is the administration writing grants to support yet more administrators when you already have too many?
Why don’t you sponsor writing grants to hire teachers to teach beginning Greek, beginning Arabic, and beginning Chinese?
I infer the schools already have Latin; they need Greek too for the smart kids to have the intellectual stimulation of a road that reaches back to the beginning of the 6th-century B.C. civilization starting democracy and laying down the basis for Western culture.
The schools engage in much discussion of bringing the scores of the underperforming students up. And that is a good goal to be sure.
But what about the smart children? Do they just fend for themselves? They need special attention too. Studies in classical languages would be one way to fulfill this need. In addition, tomorrow’s citizens must interact with the Arabic culture because we are now revving up for the long-simmering
The leaders of schools should have sufficient intelligence to discern such needs and to devise ways to deal with them. Smart students should not have to wait until they get to college to sample these subjects.
To repeat: the school system needs not only to see to the needs of the under performers but also to the needs of the gifted. These latter are the ones whose contributions move our world forward, but schools like those run by you in Pinellas County confine their obsession to raising scores of underperformers while neglecting smart students.
An intellectually superior superintendent familiar with the contours of Western civilization would see this need. That is one reason for which the board should hire an intelligent superintendent. I don’t believe that you are he, sir. I am sorry to be frank, but I must speak as I find.
I regret you avoided calling on me today. You evaded my hand because you thought I was going to nail you on another of your grammar errors. No, I did enough of that in the handout I gave to some fifty members of the club. I will be interested to see how the president of Nova responds to my email to him about the rigor of Nova's degree standards.
I planned to follow up on the fellow’s administrator-bloat question and add my recommendation for the cited language courses for superior students.
You called on your buddies in the audience and had no better sense than to name them as if the event were old home week for you and those guys.
That was bad manners, sir. Stop that offensive practice. It makes the other people think that you are shunning them and makes you look as if you were raised in a barn.
Lee Drury De Cesare
Confirming my suspicions of shoddy oversight of doctoral dissertations came this email from a part-time professor at Nova; he got one of my handouts at
Sent:
Subject: What's Wrong With Schools?
Mr. De Cesare;
Let me begin by thanking you for your spot-on critique of rigor absent on the part of those responsible for editing the doctoral theses of their candidates.
I clearly recall my draft chapters of my dissertation coming back with red markings where some error in writing protocol was evident (
Your commentary and critique are important to me because after retirement (23 years as a college-level instructor of political science) from the classroom,
I am currently on staff at Nova as an adjunct professor; I conduct undergraduate courses in Comparative and American Government.
That said, it should come as no surprise that I report that from the beginning of my tenure at Nova, I have been extremely critical of the writing skills of students enrolled in my courses. I have time and again inquired into prerequisite English courses necessary to meeting expectations for writing at a post-secondary level. I have been assured that all students must take an English writing of some sort, though what that is, is not clear.
To the point, however, many of Nova’s undergraduates fail to meet secondary levels of competency, and when I do what must be done to assist these young people in improving their skills, which often opens up a fairness issue. That is; it is patently unfair to grade a student’s writing skills at the college level when I know that he/she doesn’t have the skills.
On the upside, the institution does provide writing centers where student’s can go to get help; students rarely take advantage of what is available to them.
Insofar as the Wilcox dissertation is concerned, it really is an embarrassment; as is typical of the quality and direction of education in
Oh, before I forget, did the president ever respond?
the president is mum, I move up the food chain to the accreditation Gestapo.
I learned how to migrate through bureaucracies in the Women's Movement. The trick is to understand that male lawmakers have put on the books equal-opportunity laws that they think nobody will bother to carry out. You call their bluff.
My patience won women's right to apply for officer jobs in the Tampa Police Department--heretofore closed to them. I tackled the EEOC on that outrage against women and leafleted the agency until it gave in and carried out Title VII.
My husband and I attended the graduation from the police academy of its first woman officer. Here name was Thelma. A single mother, she couldn't support her three children on the nurse's-aide salary of the job she held but could on a police officer's salary.
To open the
Anybody can do stuff like this if he or she is willing just to keep writing the bureaucrats until victory emerges to shut you up.
Dr. Wilcox picked up his Ed.D. from Nova about thirty minutes before the Pinellas board dingdongs hired him for close to $200,000 despite grammar and punctuation’s being a mystery to him. He also got a car in a system in which teachers start at $34,000 and have to take a literacy test to nail down their job while superintendents whistle by this roadblock with no literacy test to impede their employment, $200,000, and the car.
After this side excursion with Superintendent Wilcox's illiteracy, I am back on my regular Grammargrinch job and ready to look at Mr. Bill
Mr. Bill
Mr.
Mr.
This paragon, however, falters, so he needs the grammar equivalent of that slave who stood behind the Roman conquering hero as he returned to the roar of the crowds who lined the streets to see the chariot pass in which stood the hero with a slave at his back whispering in his ear, “Remember, you are only a man.
I play slave in this grammar production.
Mr.
From Mr.
Black critics of Imus are hypocrites
I have come to believe the reason newspapers affect go-to-hell capitalization of titles is to avoid learning the rules.
By BILL MAXWELL Published
Although I do not like Imus the man, I watched his show because it delivered infotainment with the rapier's edge of powerful satire.
“The man” is a nonrestrictive appositive and gets commas on both sides. Strunk & White would nix “powerful” as superfluous modifier. In addition to the advice of S&W, there's the matter of the music of language. Anybody attuned to it can read that subordinate clause and hear the bump in rhythm “powerful” causes.
The adjective “powerful” is inaccurate in addition. Aristophanes and Swift produced powerful satire. Imus side-mouthed asides for those addicted to smirky sneers. Mr.
I avoided the show for aesthetic reasons. I did not want to encounter the aesthetic poisoning of my mind’s flitting to the specter of those graceless love scenes enacted in the Imus boudoir after Imus married a young woman a third his age and produced a Viagra child--no doubt a feat that required besides IV Cialis several pulleys, lifts, and Archimedean levers as romantic props for coital positioning, given the arthritic conditions of such geezers’ joints, not to mention other age-blasted anatomical accoutrements.
I also wanted to sidestep thoughts of the unlovely phantasmorgia of Imus’s winter-of-discontent production of a child because I believe that a geezer’s begetting a child constitutes a form of child abuse that involves the youngster’s being drooled on by his ancient sire from birth and ends with the youngster’s having to take his pops big bales of Pampers to his assisted-living abode. The child abuse ends only after the pilgrimage of this teenage offspring to show his aged father the lad's high-school diploma. This valedictory visit marks the time and place from whence the abused Viagra child escapes Pampers duty by fleeing to college. Only time and the Stanford Binet will tell whether the offspring suffers dyscrasias from sprouting from a spermatazoan that gimped to the egg on a crutch.
Because I am a journalist, who is dedicated to freedom of speech, and because I am a former college professor, who is dedicated to academic freedom, I have no serious problem with Imus' epithet. Given his genre, his venue and his voice, he behaved true to form.
Here appear three errors of which Professor
“Imus’” should be “Imus’s.” With words of more than one syllable's ending in an “s” sound, one uses apostrophe "s" for possession if he or she can pronounce the extra syllable with a straight face. Try it. You can say “Imus’s allure.” Hence, you use apostrophe "s" for singular possession. So should Mr.
You see, Imus is white, while the overwhelming majority of gangsta rappers are black, tattooed, swaggering, thug wanna-bes pretending to portray authentic black life in their vile renderings.
No comma after “while”: it cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause.
The reason that this comma is redundant involves normal syntax, which is subject-verb-object (if there is one), adverbial modifier(s). The adverbial modifier at the end of an independent clause occupies its normal syntactical position; thus we should not put a redundant comma before it. Only if we disturb syntax and move adverbial modifiers to the beginning or middle of the sentence do we use commas with them: they remain restrictive in those positions but merit commas from the move that disturbs syntax.
People afflicted with a smattering of grammar savvy will natter about certain subordinating conjunctions’ signaling trailing non-restrictive adverbial clauses; they aver that such as “although,” “even though,” and “unless” signal a nonrestrictive adverbial clause at the end of a main clause. I have yet to see one that I count nonrestrictive in the end position no matter the subordinating conjunction that begins it. Syntax trumps is my conviction.
If Mr.
Mr.
I can’t understand why Professor
These are not the antics of amateurs, but the serious efforts of multimillionaires infecting black culture in ways from which it may never recover.
Strunk & White would nix “serious" as a redundant modifier. So would a person who hears the flaw it produces in the music of the sentence.
Not everybody hears the music of language; there are no rules for it. It comes from instinct.
I also imbibed the poetry of The Grand Ol’ Opry on Saturday nights because that was my father’s favorite program. And don’t sneer at the poetry of hillbilly music. The lyrics of its ballads have their own verbal magic as much as my beloved Wagner's do.
Moreover, I sent a record of our spat to the
Mr.
He can’t do that and remain among the punctuation adept. “But” is a mere coordinating conjunction joining two equal nouns as predicative nominatives. We use a comma when a coordinating conjunction joins two independent clauses, not when it joins compound predicate nominatives.
I shall have to ask Professor
Leaving Professor
Creative Loafing
Gordon Davis: "I can make it happen."
BY BRIAN RIES
Brian’s piece has a portrait of him. Ben Affleck’s reputation is safe.
Who? Gordon Davis, 55, is the force behind the rapidly expanding Ceviche restaurant group that originated in South Tampa, as well as former owner of
Never mind any introductory clues. Brian plunges us into the melee in medias res. We sink or swim as the tides of language dictates to Brian.
It doesn't help reader comprehension that the food-fight press has decided to make its mark on the literary world of journalism by abandoning quotation marks--even single ones--altogether. So the reader must rescue the direct quotes as best he or she can and to hell with writing civility.
Food-fight auteur Brian must not flatter himself that he can provoke Ms. Grammar Grinch into calling him a pretentious twit for this punctuation. No. That will never happen. I do not stoop to such low behavior. Brian can just do his worst. "Na, na, na" will never escape my lips.
The redundant comma after “
Davis expanded the Ceviche restaurant concept across the Bay last year and will soon open locations in Orlando and Sarasota, with the help of several longtime employees who have bought into the company over the past few years.
The comma after “
I [recently] taught a class called restaurant doctoring, and the first thing I told them is to get a good shrink and really think about what they're doing, because it can't be profit-motivated.
The quotation marks have disappeared. Intuition tells the reader that Le Davis speaks. The food-fight press gives away its quotation-marks game by clinging to brackets around an editorial interpolation in this quote as if it clutched a punctuation security blanket and is not yet brave enough to let go altogether. It's like leaving home to live on your own: one foot in the door, one out.
The Tribune has dropped back to single instead of double quotation marks around direct quotes. I may have to report these punctuation cut-ups to the Chicago
The brackets around “recently” betray this's being a direct quote. These punctuation renegades have to stop somewhere or reduce their communications to semaphore.
They came to me and said, "Gordon," (they knew I was going to retire) "we think this is the most exciting concept we've worked for, please don't leave, we want to see how far we can take it." You were in on the ground floor of "
Here there appears a chicken-out with quotes used around a direct quote. It's hell to stay pure. And the quotation marks around “
The parentheses above should be brackets in quoted material. The comma goes after the brackets. The comma after “for” marks a comma splice. It should be a period. The comma after “leave” marks another comma splice. It should be a period. A writer's committing repeated comma splices while messing around with quotation marks is like pondering another stationary style for template when a rattle snake lurks under your keyboard.
Comma splices, fragments, and misspelling are grammar felonies in the punctuating-abiding world outside the swashbuckling food-fight-Creative- Loafing press. These foodie press rebels fool nobody with their messing around with quotation marks to pose as linguistic sophisticates. Its faux swashbucklers don't know how to punctuate, and they are trying to cover up this deficiency with the quotation-marks diversion. If these big babies want to be real writers in the big time, they have to make friends with the little squiggle marks that go in between words known in the grown-up world as punctuation marks.
I started
We are back in the punctuation badlands of no quotation marks.
The comma after "
I hope the super-confident Mr. Davis is not here claiming to have coined the word “
There are horrible obstructionists here. I'd rather build a new business in any community other than
There is nothing that wrings one's heart like a misunderstood concepting restaurateur in midst of people who don't understand him. The quotation has no quotation marks around it naturellement. Ces grands bébés ont des mauvaises humeurs de ponctuation encore.
There should be another period after “be” for the end of the sentence preceding the ellipsis. The “it” in the quoted exit sentence points back to nothing. Mr. Davis probably means “cooperation doesn’t exist right now.” Brian should put “cooperation” in brackets after “it” and then depart at once to get a haircut.
Beach Beacon
Indecent exposure cases under investigation
By TOM GERMOND
Article published on
In both cases, a white male exposed himself to two adult females in a lewd manner, according to police.
The comma after “manner” is redundant. The “according to police” is a restrictive prepositional phrase. The police, not the guy who rakes the beaches in a tractor each morning at
The suspect was described as
This guys sounds like he could have gotten a date with either or both of the women instead of exposing himself. All he had to say was, “Let’s go down to
The police department used K-9s for each incident and contained the area while a thorough search was conducted.
Hauling out the k-9s twice for exposed behinds and pudenda is too much. That’s cruelty to animals. These dogs are used to tracking murderers; exposure addicts are too raunchy for their canine psyches and will produce emotional trauma. The ASPCA shall hear of this.
Anyone with information about this suspect is encouraged to contact the Treasure Island Police Department at 547-4595.
See those “was conducted” and “is encouraged” passive verbs? Such are signature of the lackadaisical writing the beach beat induces in reporters with no iron in their rhetorical spines.
Sociological aside: since the St. Petersburg Times bought out this wholesome family newspaper, all exposure stories go above the fold on page one especially if they involve glutei. A psycho-sociological-fiber-content analysis of this phenomenon would probably produce forensic evidence that someone on the city desk is a glutei fetishist. The Centers for Disease Control has conducted conclusive studies that show that this psychosexual affliction turns up with predictable frequency on city desks of cities such as
But this scientific insight offers no comfort to long-time beach residents, who lament, “ It’s no wonder our beaches have acquired the name Striptease Strip with all these above-the-fold St. Petersburg Times stories on exposure sickos." ”
Article published on
Bondi 'Loves Being Prosecutor'
By KEITH MORELLI, The
Published:
We have below in Mr. Morelli’s specimen displaying a recent trend that I have noted in some papers of throwing out double quotation marks and using instead single quotation marks, the ones that standard punctuation says signal a quote within a quote. Food-fight Creative Loafing has ditched quotation marks altogether. The Tribune engages in gradualism.
One infers that this trend represents an extension of newspaper quidnuncs’ incursions against Standard English that began with omitting the last comma in items in a series, moved on through throwing out the capital rules for titles, and now engaging in probing the corrupting of quotation marks. All the pukey blue-green type below marks evidence of this new outrage from the Fourth-Estate defilers of language.
It's pretty clear that all these food-fight Creative Loafing and Tribune press guys hated their English teachers, of which I was one. Sigmund Freud said that omitting quotation marks was diagnostic of the prodroma to this phobia.
Here follows Reporter Morelli’s hagiography of La Bondi:
'Once they see how articulate she is, how knowledgeable she is, the news stations compete for her presence,' said Bondi's boss, Hillsborough County State Attorney
Change wimpy passive verb to active: "The governor appointed
I saw Mr. Ober campaigning for office in
Candor requires that I report him to have knarled knees and knotted calves. To be fair, I noted no varicosities. These knarled knees and knotted calves make clear that Le Ober was not the model for Phidias’ Zeus in 5th-centruy B.
I aver it safe to follow the maxim that any man with legs as ugly as Mr. Ober’s forfeits the right for people to take his word on any subject whatsoever.
'She's walked the walk. She's somebody who's been in the courtroom, who knows the business.'
As a prosecutor for 16 years, Bondi provides a law enforcement perspective on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, through shows such as 'Hannity & Colmes,' '
TV shows don't get quotation marks, much less single quotation marks. The names of shows get italics; episodes get quotation marks. The refusal to use italics even though it's easy to set them on a computer is another of the press's peculiarities. The comma after "MSNBC" is redundant, cutting off a restrictive prepositional phrase.
I infer this abjuring italics finds its roots back in old typesetting when doing italics was hard. Those times are long gone. It's time to use the potential of computers to do italics. The only excuses for not observing italics protocol is press orneriness and laziness.
Bondi, Ober said, 'has never shied away from anything. She's not afraid of anything. ...
'People don't appreciate the great strain of a trial like this, the preparation, the national spotlight and the living away from home,' Ober said. His lawyers in the Panhandle are 'living out of a suitcase.'
'We were having a conversation. He knew Pam and what an asset she was to my office,' Ober said. 'He said, 'I'll trade you two very seasoned prosecutors for Pam Bondi.' I chuckled and I told him, 'Pam has a no-trade clause in her contract.''
Here there is a slip-up of the quotation marks-rebels: there are the regulation double quotation marks closing the last quotation instead of single ones.
Some worthy 9th-grade English teacher pounded quotation-marks rules into this recalcitrant's head, and his comma synapses snapped back in this end punctuation slip-up. Give us teachers the specimen when he or she is young, and we will drill down through the dura mater, pia mater, and arachnoid mater to seat those quotation-marks rules to last until hell freezes over. Those vile scientists may have wiped out everything else from Bourne's memory, but not the quotation marks. They are in there somewhere and will resurface anon when least expected. That's what the next movie will be about: the return of Bourne's quotation marks.
A comma goes after “chuckled” for a compound sentence joined by a coordinating conjunction.
Bondi also provides expert TV commentary on out-of-state issues, such as the false allegations of rape involving the
The comma after “issues” is redundant: it cuts off restrictive prepositional phrases.
Bondi ended up settling with the family, shipping the dog back but retaining 'visitation rights.'
'I think Pam is fiercely loyal to the people she works with,' Cohen said, 'and she's got an innate sense of fairness about her.'
From what he saw of her in the dog case, Cohen said, 'she's a very sensitive and loving lady. When she saw Noah on TV and he had just come back from Louisiana, she went out and sat on a cement floor and, when he was filthy dirty from that hurricane, hugged him and kissed him and let him drool all over her.'
There should be a comma after “floor” before the coordinating conjunction joining the compound sentence.
He has never faced off in court against Bondi, but if he did, Cohen said, 'I'd run away.'
By Thomas T. Huang
Mr. Huang is a good writer. He has a sure sense of the shape of a sentence; he makes few punctuation errors and no grammar errors. He writes better than does Dr. Roy Peter Clark, who occupies Poynter’s cushy job of head of faculty despite
For those who question the Web's reach within ethnic communities, consider this: The
Replacing the passive verb would produce a cleaner sentence: “The African-American Blogosphere spurred the discussion of the
The digital world can help the reader gain an understanding of people in other communities. It can help communities build bridges with one another. Again, we in the traditional media need to take advantage of that.
The writer refers to two things with the demonstrative pronoun "that": gaining understanding and building bridges. “That” should be “those things.”
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The comma before “as well” is redundant. Commas for marginally interruptive adverbs have almost disappeared in the trend toward minimal commas. So these redundant commas give off an out-of-date aura. See William Follett for the reduction in commas over the last four-hundred hears. “If you will” is padding. The author should dump it.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
“It turns out” is wordiness. The comma after "site" cuts off a restrictive participial phrase.
The program is based on a 1950s radio program hosted by
Active verb instead of passive produce a stronger sentence: “A 1950s
"We are not listening well, not understanding each other -- we are simply disagreeing, or worse.
The comma before “or worse” is redundant. It separates a compound verb with the second verb’s being elliptical: “simply disagreeing or [doing] worse.”
The Web site is a finalist for the 2007 Online Journalism Awards, as is another Web site I admire, washingtonpost.com's "onBeing" project.
No comma goes before the restrictive trailing adverbial clause "as is." Both "On Journalism" and "onBeing" get italics.
A mentor and mentee joke with each other, describing how they've become family.
The “describing” present participial phrase is restrictive: it modifies two general nouns preceded by "a." There are more than one mentor and mentee in the world.
Online journalism can venture there, as well. But it also has the potential to set up something that's more like a happy hour, if you will, or a dinner party.
The trend in commas is minimalism, so "as well."equivalent to "too,' does not get commas.”If you will" is wordiness" that merits jettisoning.
The digital world gives journalists the tools to tell narrative stories in multi-layered ways, with the
"Narrative stories" is pleonasm. Stories are narratives by definition. The comma after “ways” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
I've always admired "This I Believe," which can be heard on National Public Radio.
Passive verb: “…which people can hear on National Public Radio” The TV program gets italics.
It turns out the program has a Web site, allowing the visitor to read and listen to the essays.
Dump wordy "it turns out." The comma after "site" is redundant before a restrictive present participial phrase.
La Gaceta
“Silhouettes"
Paul Guzzo
She identified Pam Iorio as the remaining candidate she thought could best help the city, and joined her campaign.
A redundant comma splits a compound verb.
…if she believes a candidate truly wants to help better the community.
It’s the last phrase that truly defines Rifkin.
Guzzo should take the pledge on eschewing “truly”; Strunk & White forbids these redundant, hackneyed adverbs. "Truly" is the worst.
“I’m just a
The past participial phrase “born…” is restrictive: no comma before it.
She is Italian on her father’s,
Guzzo is in over his head in the above mangled sentence. If he wants to keep this syntax, he must make the appositive possessives line up with the nouns they rename: “She is Italian on her father’s,
It's never a disgrace to back up and recast if the syntax of your original sentence defeats you.
“It was like being a mom and pop hardware store….”
Hyphenate this three-word adjective before a noun.
“But no matter how good a grass-roots campaign you run if you don’t have money you’ll never win.”
Comma needed for long introductory prepositional phrase.
“…and to reach each voter four times, whether through commercials or mailers.”
No comma before "whether': it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.
“When I’m in the middle of an election I’m working seven days a week, all day and all night.”
Comma after “election” is obligatory for an introductory adverbial clause. Comma after “week” is redundant: the “all day…” is restrictive appositive. She works not half the day and night seven days a week but all day and night.
New Feature: Truculent Letters to Journalists
Fittingly for a column on Dr. Wilcox’s reification at
I don’t know enough about how the press splits up jobs to say for sure, but I infer that
Mr. Tobin:
I wish you were within reach. I would box your ears—not because of your grammar-punctuation but because of your selectivity in reporting Dr. Wilcox’s appearance at
And don’t natter about objectivity: that’s an epistemological and psychological impossibility. The selection of details to include in your article and those to omit comes from your gauging of your bosses’ prejudices; that’s par in jobs everywhere: Kiss up to the boss.
You made only one comma error—“…we can educate Black kids and in very high numbers, and also in very high levels.”
The comma after “numbers” is redundant: it splits a pair of compound adverbial prepositional phrases modifying “can educate.”
Only one comma error is excellent.
But the style is oatmeal. Try getting past your unimaginative editors some occasional vivid diction or sentence with unorthodox syntax. Don't go hog wild. Be abstemious with these maneuvers but slip a few in for flavor.
Better, try the daring move of telling the truth for a change about the people on whom you report. You might have done so on the
What makes me want to puke is your selection of details to portray the superintendent as Cato the Elder. Misleading readers is worse than bad writing. It’s lousy ethics.
Why didn’t you mention the first man’s question about Dr. Wilcox’s failure to reduce the administrative bloat? The superintendent flimflammed the answer to a faretheewell. Press bias is always in favor of the official roster of rascals in positions of power. Power mesmerizes the press as it does citizen sheep that go along with whoever wears the crown. That’s how we got into war with
lee drury de cesare
board@pcsb.org ; wilcox@pcsb.org wilcox@pcsb.org
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 1:25 AM
Dr. Wilcox:
You evaded the first question at Tiger Bay today from the man who cited your promise to reduce administration bloat when you entered your job and asked how you had done so.
You hemmed and hawed, but one could infer that what you said behind the verbal smoke screen was that you had not reduced administrators but had moved them around.
Then, if I understood you correctly, you said that grant monies immured certain administrative jobs.
Why in the world is the administration writing grants to support yet more administrators when you already have too many?
Why don’t you sponsor writing grants to hire teachers to teach beginning Greek, beginning Arabic, and beginning Chinese?
I infer the schools already have Latin; they need Greek too for the smart kids to have the intellectual stimulation of a road that reaches back to the beginning of the 6th-century B.C. civilization starting democracy and laying down the basis for Western culture.
The schools engage in much discussion of bringing the scores of the underperforming students up. And that is a good goal to be sure.
But what about the smart children? Do they just fend for themselves? They need special attention too. Studies in classical languages would be one way to fulfill this need. In addition, tomorrow’s citizens must interact with the Arabic culture because we are now revving up for the long-simmering
The leaders of schools should have sufficient intelligence to discern such needs and to devise ways to deal with them. Smart students should not have to wait until they get to college to sample these subjects.
To repeat: the school system needs not only to see to the needs of the under performers but also to the needs of the gifted. These latter are the ones whose contributions move our world forward, but schools like those run by you in Pinellas County confine their obsession to raising scores of underperformers while neglecting smart students.
An intellectually superior superintendent familiar with the contours of Western civilization would see this need. That is one reason for which the board should hire an intelligent superintendent. I don’t believe that you are he, sir. I am sorry to be frank, but I must speak as I find.
I regret you avoided calling on me today. You evaded my hand because you thought I was going to nail you on another of your grammar errors. No, I did enough of that in the handout I gave to some fifty members of the club. I will be interested to see how the president of Nova responds to my email to him about the rigor of Nova's degree standards.
I planned to follow up on the fellow’s administrator-bloat question and add my recommendation for the cited language courses for superior students.
You called on your buddies in the audience and had no better sense than to name them as if the event were old home week for you and those guys.
That was bad manners, sir. Stop that offensive practice. It makes the other people think that you are shunning them and makes you look as if you were raised in a barn.
Lee Drury De Cesare
Confirming my suspicions of shoddy oversight of doctoral dissertations came this email from a part-time professor at Nova; he got one of my handouts at
Sent:
Subject: What's Wrong With Schools?
Mr. De Cesare;
Let me begin by thanking you for your spot-on critique of rigor absent on the part of those responsible for editing the doctoral theses of their candidates.
I clearly recall my draft chapters of my dissertation coming back with red markings where some error in writing protocol was evident (
Your commentary and critique are important to me because after retirement (23 years as a college-level instructor of political science) from the classroom,
I am currently on staff at Nova as an adjunct professor; I conduct undergraduate courses in Comparative and American Government.
That said, it should come as no surprise that I report that from the beginning of my tenure at Nova, I have been extremely critical of the writing skills of students enrolled in my courses. I have time and again inquired into prerequisite English courses necessary to meeting expectations for writing at a post-secondary level. I have been assured that all students must take an English writing of some sort, though what that is, is not clear.
To the point, however, many of Nova’s undergraduates fail to meet secondary levels of competency, and when I do what must be done to assist these young people in improving their skills, which often opens up a fairness issue. That is; it is patently unfair to grade a student’s writing skills at the college level when I know that he/she doesn’t have the skills.
On the upside, the institution does provide writing centers where student’s can go to get help; students rarely take advantage of what is available to them.
Insofar as the Wilcox dissertation is concerned, it really is an embarrassment; as is typical of the quality and direction of education in
Oh, before I forget, did the president ever respond?
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