GrammarGrinch2

2008-05-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay area publications

Patrick, for heaven’s sakes, why did you let that vain ninny Dick Greco get away with clipping ten years off his age in his ”Silhouettes” interview? He and I graduated from HHS in ’51. If he is a mere 66 now, he was eight when we graduated.

Paul has outdone himself in bloviating journalistic sycophancy on this one. He has written a hagiography of the local bore that is almost as long as Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. I wonder the presses didn’t run out of ink.

Paul spells “descent” as “decent.” I won’t even go where commas appear where they shouldn’t and don’t appear where they should.

Le Guzzo kneels at the feet of Dick—who is getting so fat he won’t be able to see his feet over his belt soon—and writes ad infinitum about this great baby as if he were the El Cid of the bay area.

That Le Dick’s fans have coerced the city into putting up a statue of him in downtown Tampa doesn’t say much for the town’s standards of éclat or aesthetics.

Not one negative thing is mentioned about this highly flawed local character.

Why not a retrospective of his varied marital exploits and nonstop skirtchasing? And didn’t he leave the city in debt?

He discriminated against women in employment so that Tampa Now had to file an EEOC charge against him for patterns and practices of sex discrimination to get him to open the police department to women. He and that rascal Marshall Jessee kept “losing” a young black woman’s application for the police department.

Then he ran around the state bragging that his was the first major city with an affirmative action plan. He didn’t mention that NOW and the EEOC made him do it.

Paul should be ashamed of himself for writing this twaddle and you for publishing it.

Lee

Posted on BayAreaGrammarGrinch in honor of the offenses against writing

Sir Flossy George Will Flunks Commas and Research

2008-04-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

Education Lessons We Left Behind

George Will Washington Post April 24, 2008

Mr. Will:

Your column displays obtuse customary kick at teachers’ unions as major cause of what’s wrong with education.

It’s clear that you nor other pundits who deliver this same old argument about teacher unions’ demanding higher teacher salaries as major cause of failing education have done no recent research.

What about administration salaries and administration greed and mediocrity?

In Hillsborough County, the superintendent got her job through politics as the inside candidate who would continue the gravy train for administration insiders and board incumbents. She bamboozled a somnolent, complicit board, but its members cooperated in hiring her not because they thought that she demonstrated concern for education or that she was an exemplar of it but that she was an advocate of administrative greed and power hunger.

The board lowered the Ph.D. requirement to Ms. Elia’s master’s from an undistinguished institution so that she could take the job away from Ph.D.s who applied from first-rate universities with distinguished careers of varied experience and publishing.

Besides not being able to punctuate and write beyond junior-high level, Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia is greedy and power mad.

She makes $300,000 a year despite her deficiencies, the highest superintendent salary I can find on the Internet. She augments her salary by taking a “performance bonus” for the work teachers do to raise student scores to bloat her salary even more.

The teacher’s union that you cite as the major problem to excellence in education eked out only $34,000 starting salary for teachers while the part-time school board voted itself over $40,000.

When I objected to this circumstance at a political meeting, Board Member Dr. Jack Lamb screamed at me that he didn’t want to hear from me ever again. This outburst came after he had taken an oath to defend a citizen’s Constitutional right to approach public officials for redress of grievances.

With board collusion, Ms. Elia hires sycophantic, highly plaid administrators with early childhood degrees to fill slots that should have professionals in them. She does not advertise these crony bloated-pay jobs with the board’s acquiescence, equal opportunity and academic excellence bedamned.

When these crony administrators can’t do their jobs, the board rushes in pricey tax-paid consultants to teach them what they don’t know, which is mostly everything.

None of the administrators are interested in education. They are interested in their pocket books and how to raise their salaries even higher. They use their boss as role model for this yen.

The bullying superintendent imposes decrees onto teachers without consulting them while the board pares its cuticles. She forced teachers to accept a grade-inflation scheme so that her performance would look better; she has most recently bought a gim-crack education do-dad for over three million dollars a year that abandons text books for the faux learning of an industrially-produced Skinner-box thing-a-ma-jig that makes money for producers, leaves students bereft, and gives Ms. Elia another bonus for student recruitment.

This Spring fraud on education has proven in other places to be a bust. The board, of course, sat by and didn’t ask if Ms. Elia had consulted teachers on this Spring gimcrack revolution teachers must carry out in the classroom. Only after the local Tampa Tribune editorialized against the state of affairs did one board member make the tardy suggestion for a workshop, which was closing the barn door after the critter had escaped. Ms. Elia has already signed the deal while the board snoozed.

This too-late “workshop” will be a fraud for show to propitiate the press with hope it looks elsewhere so that the board, Ms. Elia, and her early-childhood-degreed myrmidons can get back to managing the schools so the students get the worst education possible and so that Ms. Elia and her administrator crew get as much money as possible leeched from the taxpayers.

Ms. Elia and her myrmidons never consult teachers. They treat them with contempt if they dare come to the board to let the board and administration know their views. Ms. Elia considers teachers not professional educators but her class-room field hands whose existence makes possible her control over a lot of state money to bloat her salary and to buy the intoxication of abuse of power which her psyche requires.

To solve her problems at the beginning of this school year, Ms. Elia sprang an extra class on high-school teachers that takes away their planning time and latitude to sponsor student clubs among other things.

This extra class has produced a lot of tired-out teachers who can’t do their best by students because of fatigue and low morale. These teachers are the heart of the school system that never get an invitation from the board to come and share their insights and never get a say in how Ms. Elia runs the schools because Ms. Elia is Captain Queeg.

If a teacher gets out of line to the point of criticizing Ms. Elia’s tyranny, the Professional Standards office steps forward with a manufactured case against the teacher to terrorize him or her with the threat of job loss.

The school board, supposed to be Ms. Elia’s boss, is her puppet. Its members pose as ceremonial potted plants on the board dais when not lollygagging around Tampa attending community functions so that they can preen as benefactors of education. They don’t visit schools. They don’t even deign to respond to parent pleas for meetings.

One board member, Dr. Lamb, refused to meet with parents in his district to discuss a boundary change but never misses Chamber- of-Commerce breakfasts to chat up how powerful he is with the other piney-woods mandarins of the town. Dr. Lamb’s conduct shows that board members have little interest in education but a lot of interest in amour propre.

The elected board signs off on every one of Ms. Elia’s outrages and salary boosts while the graduation rate and the minority students’ performance plummet. Yet the board Web site touts its allegiance to “excellence in education.”

The single black board member, one Ms. Edgecomb, is an Aunt Tom who never mentions black children’s dilemma in the schools. As Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in An American Dilemma, Ms. Edgecomb is just glad to have made it out of the Black ghetto into whitey’s world. She participates with enthusiasm in the state’s double dipping of pension- and-salary largesse, making over $90,000 a year of tax money in a system in which children come to school ill fed, ill clothed, and too poor to buy supplies they need to participate in class projects.

The next time you do an education column, Mr. Will, don’t report stale research. Expand your research into how the hordes of featherbedding, concupiscent, minimally-educated, greedy administrative parasites injure education.

Come down to the Bay Area to do your research on the Hillsborough County board and administration.

Travel to some of the Florida school administrative bureaucracy’s back-to-back conferences staged at posh hotels and paid for by unsuspecting taxpayers. You will find there throngs of C-student minds with “PhDs” from diploma mills like NOVA, which allows its matriculants to escape with advanced degrees after letting slide theses packed with grammar-punctuation errors, not to mention risible writing and logic.

Concentrate on the supine, complicit elected boards such as those in Hillsborough County, which lie to the taxpayers about candidates’ devotion to education to get elected but in office continue this evil system that betrays students. It is one that rots from the top and prevents children from getting a good education so that they can compete in the world they will face when they exit the auditorium with their often worthless diplomas.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com;

Grammargrinch.blogspot.com

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Sentence from your essay today:

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada.

Those commas, a retired teacher and once president of the faculty union explains, are redundant. The “measured” past participial phrase is restrictive. It modifies “determinant,” which is the cited standardized-tests measure, not that of some other metric.

You need some new research, Mr. Will. Your analysis is dated. Come on down!

SPTimes Writers' Punctuation Gaffes

2008-03-23T09:23:00.001-07:00

Times staff writers Steve Bousquet, Mary Jane Park and Alex Leary and researcher John Martin contributed. Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at svansickler@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

And lately a much talked-about potential running mate for Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

John Mc Cain is the sole Republican presidential nominee now; so “John Mc Cain” is a restrictive appositive and needs a comma before it.

Florida's payroll sees some triple-dip

By Lucy Morgan, Times Senior Correspondent
Published Saturday, March 22, 2008 12:24 AM

The state has made it far too easy to "game the system,'' according to a national expert on state pension funds.

The comma after “system” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. The statement is not from a group of actuarial experts; its from “a national expert….”

Offseason shopping: Bucs meet needs, so far

By Rick Stroud, Times Staff Writer
Published Saturday, March 22, 2008 9:40 PM

TAMPA — If the Bucs had to play a regular-season game today, what kind of team would they put on the field?

Pronoun-antecedent disagreement problem: “Bucs” is one team: singular; so “they” should be “it.”

Garcia Knee Deep in Redundant Commas and Adverbs

2008-03-22T13:19:00.001-07:00

Re-vote, re-disenfranchise

Florida Democrats struggle with the best way to get screwed over — again.

Published 03.19.08

By Wayne Garcia

You really have to wonder about the Florida Democratic Party with Karen Thurman at the helm.

“Really” is the redundant adverb that Strunk & White inveighs against. It makes the writer sound like a California Valley Girl.

As I watched her being flailed by her own politicians last week when she floated a vote-by-mail scheme, I actually started to feel sorry for the former congresswoman that (gasp!) Florida broke the rules seems an impossible task.

Passive pussyfooting verb: “As I watched her own politicians' flailing her last week…”

“Actually” is another redundant adverb, confirming the California Valley Girl status of Le Garcia.

• The Miami Herald: It's an "absurd idea...a last-ditch, Hail Mary pass that has failure written all over it."

Garcia demonstrates wrong use of ellipsis; what he needs is a comma or a dash. Use an ellipsis for omitted material or to indicate a trailing off of the speaker’s words.

If a re-vote happens, he said, Democrats will take part. But he acknowledges "nobody's really dying for it, either, it seems."

The commas surrounding “either” are redundant. It is a restrictive adverb.

I guess what strikes me most is the apathy I hear about the whole voting mess, as if we are so beaten down in Florida, so used to being the butt of cable news and late-night jokes, that we've lost the will to argue.

The “as if” adverbial clause is restrictive: no comma after “miss” or “jokes.”

We just shrug our shoulders like Jake Gittes' private-eye colleagues in the last scene of Chinatown and say, with resignation, "Forget it, voters. It's Floridatown."

“Just” is a redundant adverb. Dump it. The comma after “say” is superfluous: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. “Gittes’” should be “Gittes’s.”

Graham Greene, who would have gotten a Nobel if one of the Nobel Committee members had not had it in for him, eschewed adverbs altogether. Read a page or two of him to see what punch this abstention gives his style.

ldd

Trough or Knives and Forks?

2008-03-19T23:10:00.001-07:00

Does punctuation count? Punctuation matters little to people who eat out of a rhetorical trough. But for those who want to pick up forks and knives, punctuation is the next level of writing civility. ldd

By RAY REYES of The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 19, 2008

Charles Beck never missed a day of work and he would call if he was going to be late, employers told deputies.

A comma goes after “work” for a coordinating conjunction’s dividing two independent clauses.

By Daniel Ruth

The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 20, 2008

By now it has probably dawned upon you as a resident of Florida, and therefore an eyewitness to hysteria, that the ham-handed galoots running the Democratic Party hereabouts make "The Honeymooners" Raccoon Lodge seem like a Marine Corps precision drill team.

The commas after “Florida” and “hysteria” are redundant. The phrase is restrictive. “Precision drill” is a hyphenated adjective before a noun: “precision-drill team.”

By MARTIN FENNELLY of The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 20, 2008

There weren't official greeters for Siena coach Fran McCaffery and his lads, unless you count] freshman forward Ryan Rossiter's dad. Steve Rossiter, a retired New York City firefighter, is here for Friday's game against Vanderbilt.

The comma after “lads” is superfluous: it cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause.

Ethics and Commas Don't Mix

2008-03-14T19:33:00.000-07:00

The Tampa Tribune Newsroom Ethics Policy

__________________________________________________

The writer's clarity in this ethics piece comes from crisp sentences and punchy diction. He also has a quirky sense of humor.

His weaknesses: Raging comma overuse; passive verbs; redundant modifiers

Overuse of commas ranks the most frequent error of punctuation.

Commas for the last four hundred years have been on the decline. Fowler is the best authority on this trend.

Writers used to sprinkle commas with a hey nonny nonny to suit rhetorical pauses or any other urges they had to insert a comma. Read some Elizabethan prose to see what I mean. Basing comma use on rhetorical pauses ranks unreliable since a person can pause anywhere in a sentence.

I sense that linguistics studies influence the trend toward minimal commas. Chomsky and his followers of generative grammar emphasize the structure of a sentence. Commas have waned because this mark of punctuation now follows sentence structure and not the whim of the writer.

I used to tell students, "When in doubt, leave it out." You shouldn't be in doubt. But you are safer leaving out a comma than putting one in that you can't justify with a rule. There are a mere six comma rules. The hard one is non-restrictive element. To use this last comma rule right, you must know the guts of a sentence.

One would think that newspaper writers should welcome diminution of commas since in a time long, long ago lost in newspaper legend, news writers defied comma convention, snapped their suspenders, adjusted their green eyeshades, spat into their newsroom spittoons, and vowed never to use a comma before the last item in a series. They vowed also never to allow women on the premises of the newsroom sweat lodge lest they put up Pricilla curtains and insist on the civility of not too many references to the female pudendum from the spittoon brigade.

This latter ban of late has lifted at the Tribune, which has seen Pricilla curtains hung in the management offices upstairs.

News crews, however, cleave to superfluous commas with irrational tenacity as this Tribune ethics essay shows. They continue to bestrew commas with vague ideas of why they put them in a sentence. They appear to cling to a stubborn resistance to learn comma lore. The best newspaper writers suffer this affliction as my grammar blog on the NYT and the Washington Post shows (Grammargrinch.blogspot.com). Hunkering down in defiant ignorance is easier than mastering the structure of a sentence so as to know for sure where a comma goes and where it does not.

Passive verbs are wimps that weaken the thrust of a sentence and sound sneaky by leaving out who did things. They are longer than active verbs. They make the reader distrust the author, who appears to hide secrets behind passive verbs.

Grammar checkers give the percentage of passive verbs, but they don't tell you how to spot or fix them. Spotting them is easy: A passive verb is a verb phrase; its main verb is the past participle; one of its helping verbs is a form of the verb "to be"; and you find in the sentence or can add yourself "by somebody or something." The "by" phrase is where you find your subject to convert passive to active voice.

The cat was chased [by the dog].

The dog chased the cat.

News writers are professionals whose only tools are words and the little squiggle marks between words to convey meaning. The squiggle marks--punctuation--form an integral part of these writers' craft. So there's no excuse for newspaper writers' not using punctuation well if they mean to write well. There is also no excuse for their not dumping boggy passive verbs and redundant modifiers to produce more readable prose. The reason they continue these negative habits is resistance to change, laziness, and the belief that people won’t notice their marginal literacy—which, among other delusions, they beguile themselves into believing is a banner of the romance of their profession.

Newspaper writers, most of whom dropped out of college in the second year, also relish the idea of thumbing their noses at the prissy academics they left behind who know the rules but who can't hit a spittoon for beans.

Some newsroom philosopher produced this press-virtues doxology below fifteen years ago. It needs updating with clean-up of its shoddy grammar and punctuation. The person who does this job must also consider making the virtue guidelines more realistic and less coincident with the practices of Himalayan monks, who submit to abstinence, undergo food deprivation, walk barefoot in the snow for miles, and chant hours on end out of tune to the discomfort of anyone in hearing range including themselves.

The new guidelines don’t have to convey “It’s party time” but should outline a more human behavior model for the Tribune Knights and Pricella Ladies of the Yellow pad and the CRT Screen.

ldd

Published: May 16, 2002
Last Updated: May 16, 2002

Tampa Tribune Newsroom Ethics Policy

People ought to trust us. It irks us when they don't.

All we have are our principles.

The indefinite pronoun "all" is plural when it refers to people or things you can count; it is singular when it refers to things that you can't count. "All" here means "the only thing that we have"; so the verb should be singular: "is."

The magisterial Fowler in Modern English Usage says this: "When 'all' is the subject of the verb `to be' followed by a plural complement, the linking verb is expressed in the singular." The usual linking verb is some form of the verb "to be" as is the case in the Tribune sentence. The plural complement is "principles."

We have forgone lucrative careers in medicine, business and law in order to defend democracy, free speech and the American way. Without us, Ann Landers would be just another know-it-all.

Prominent correction: Some of us failed science and math.

Diction: "Disclosure" should replace "Prominent correction."

Readers don't know our sacrifices.

We suffer through elections without benefit of bumper stickers. We know which politicians are idiots but can't scream it in a crowded room.

We lunch with millionaires but can't let them pick up the check.

Meanwhile, our siblings, who drive better cars, expect us to shower them with Bucs tickets and Disney passes. Our neighbors, who boast of knowing us, want publicity. We fail, unable to profile their tire stores on Page 1.

We feel quietly superior at high school reunions. But that's pretty much the end to the fun.

"Quietly" and “pretty much” are redundant adverbs. I hazared that “pretty much” is too informal even for a newspaper. It makes the writer sound like a guy named Luke attired in overalls, hanging out in front of the drugstore in some tiny Southern town with a sparse population of farmers and seasonal bean pickers.

Credibility is a platform for words and ideas.

Without it, no one can hear us.

It's not a stomping ground for our personal viewpoints.

And it can't take the weight of our personal gain.

Anonymous sources

It's sometimes necessary, but seldom a good idea, to quote an unnamed source. Likewise for using fictitious names.

The commas following "but" and "idea" are redundant: they cut off a linking verb from the predicate nominative "idea." The "Likewise” locution begins a fragment. We allow Proust, James, and Faulkner artful fragments. Tribune auteurs do not enjoy this largess. As soon as these write an A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, The Ambassadors, or Go Down, Moses," s/he enters into this hallowed demesne of fragments and endless sentences. Faulkner’s “The Jail” is only two.

When we do so, we in effect tell readers: "Trust us."

A colon does not split a verb and its complement.

Edits: "We tell our readers to trust us." "We tell our readers, `Trust us.'"

The more we ask for trust, the less we seem to deserve it.

By not revealing a source, we vouch for the veracity of what's said. That puts our own credibility on the line.

So we ought to be judicious in bestowing anonymity.

A few thoughts:

1. Exhaust other options. Don't stop interviewing. Will someone else go on the record, now that you know, or seem to know, the story?

The three commas are superfluous. The one after "record" cuts off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause; the ones around "or seems to know" split a compound verb: "know or know."

Example: A Tampa surgeon cuts the wrong foot off a patient. We learn of it from an insider who does not wish to be identified. The hospital spokesman won't comment. The surgeon won't comment. We don't know the patient's name. An editor suggests calling hospital board members. One goes on the record, confirming our report.

2. Talk it over with an editor. Is the interview even worth using, given the ground rules? If a reporter and team leader can't agree, get a senior editor involved.

"Even" is a redundant adverb.

Be careful what you promise sources. Assure anonymity in print, when necessary. But editors may need the source's identity to make an informed decision. The source may have burned us before.

The superfluous comma after "print" cuts off a restrictive elided ("when [it is] necessary") adverbial clause.

3. Grant anonymity only if someone's professional, financial or physical well-being are at stake - or if the subject matter suggests a need for privacy. For instance, stories about AIDS, impotence, personal debt, divorce, incontinence, rape and child abuse may require anonymity for candor.

Subject-verb agreement: The subject is "well-being." The verb should be "is."

4. Be skeptical of a source's motives and be fair: Don't permit anonymous character attacks.

5. When quoting unnamed sources, describe their credentials as thoroughly as possible without jeopardizing identity. Make sure the source is comfortable with the description.

Fictitious or composite characters aren't allowed, except in cases of obvious exaggeration.

The comma after "allowed" cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

These guidelines do not preclude confidential conversations between reporters and sources, sometimes necessary in the news-gathering process. It's OK to go off the record, and reporters should guard the integrity of their relationships with sources.

But published material, in general, ought to be clearly attributed.

Commas should not encircle this restrictive prepositional phrase. It's superfluous. I would dump it.

Civic activity

Few other ethical issues cause more head scratching.

We're supposed to be plugged into the community, able to recognize the heart and soul of our neighbors. Yet we're also supposed to be neutral about the issues that concern them.

The compromise: Be independent but not detached.

And if a conflict emerges, declare it.

Don't give up your right to be a citizen. Just be cautious when choosing civic bedfellows, particularly if you cover a beat.

Sacrifice "particularly": it's a redundant adverb.

Normal syntax is subject-verb-adverbial modifier. In the normal end position, the adverbial modifier is restrictive and gets no comma before it. If you move it to the beginning or the middle of the sentence, an adverbial modifier remains restrictive but gets commas because you have disturbed syntax.

There are only a few hard-and-fast rules: Don't join fund-raising arms of political parties. Avoid organizations with hot agendas, such as abortion rights or gun control. Don't take a stand on something you cover.

Jettison "only": it's a superfluous adverb. The comma after "agendas" cuts off a restrictive adjectival phrase.

Join a church, but stay away from religious lobbying groups.

The comma splits a compound verb: "join but stay."

Don't sign petitions. Research before you sign a check.

Join the Sierra Club, hoping for a few good canoe trips, and your dollars may pay for local opposition to a road. It's not so embarrassing if you're the food writer, but what if you cover roads?

The environmental reporter shouldn't belong to Greenpeace. The education reporter shouldn't run for PTA office. Otherwise, professional, humanitarian, cultural, environmental, support, alumni, hobbyist, athletic and neighborhood associations pose few risks.

Use common sense.

The AARP is one of America's largest lobbying groups, but membership likely won't cause a conflict.

Generally, it's fine to volunteer with groups such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Habitat for Humanity, the Spring or local theater companies - but don't let your Tribune connection be exploited for publicity.

Passive: "Don't let these enterprises exploit..."

I wonder whether the press's failing to italicize a newspaper is laziness or another affectation of the green-shade buccaners.

Civic activity may demand a case-by-case consideration. Don't hesitate to get others' opinions.

See also "Political activity."

Connections

However tempting, it's unethical to mine professional contacts for personal gain.

That means no personal letters on Tribune stationery. No threats, overt or implicit, of retaliation or pressure. No using your position to get better seats at a concert or a table in an already booked restaurant. No attempts to speed up personal business with public agencies.

After "stationery" is a good place for a colon; then you avoid a series of fragments.

Hyphenated adjective before a noun: "already-booked restaurant."

No benefiting from unpublished information.

Financial reporters and editors shouldn't own stock in Tampa area companies, excluding mutual funds. Nor should they own stock in companies they might reasonably anticipate covering. If a conflict emerges, someone else should do the story.

Hyphenated adjective before a noun: "Tampa-area companies"

Dump "reasonably”: it’s the style-killer superfluous adverb that Strunk & White eschews.

We shouldn't use our beats to look for better jobs. If a source - a political candidate, for instance - offers a job, the offer should be disclosed to an editor, so as not to jeopardize the newspaper's appearance of impartiality.

Passive: “The reporter should disclose..." The comma after "editor" is dead wrong. It cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause.

See also "Paying our way."

Corrections

There's no hiding from a correction. It's like a blemish. Coworkers who didn't even read your story will manage to see the correction.

Superfluous adverb

Nobody likes the embarrassment.

But in correcting mistakes, we reaffirm to readers our intent to get things right.

Corrections and clarifications appear on the section front in which the error occurred. They shouldn't repeat a mistake but should contain enough detail for clarity.

If incorrect information was provided to the Tribune, we should say so, but we shouldn't engage in internal finger-pointing in print.

I wish you would for the fun of the readers. Passive: "If someone provided incorrect information to the Tribune... “I suppose it’s sentimental to yearn for the continuation of the civility of the subjunctive mood: “If incorrect information were given…”

A team leader should be made immediately aware of factual errors and misleading statements, and should sign off on the correction.

passive verb-redundant adverb

Passive: "A reporter should make a team leader aware of factual errors and sign off on the correction."

The comma before "and' splits a compound verb.

Diversity

We flinch at one-source stories. They seem incomplete.

But how about one-race stories?

It's false and misleading to put African-Americans on the sports page and in the crime log, if general reporting automatically defaults to a backdrop of white voters, white Girl Scouts and white commuters.

Dump wordy "false and." The comma after "log" cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause. Jettison the redundant adverb.

It's our job to reflect the community. Each day's newspaper creates a snapshot of the Tampa Bay area. The snapshot shouldn't overlook minority members. Nor, in an attempt to feature aspects of race, ethnicity or religion should we overstate the differences among us, while ignoring our common ground.

Omit the comma after "nor" and put it after "religion" for the long introductory prepositional phrase.

The comma after "us" is redundant: It cuts off a trailing adverbial prepositional phrase.

We must not lose the nuances of individuality by casting a community through a high-contrast filter.

Diverse voices should be woven into the everyday fabric of the newspaper.

Passive: "Writers should weave diverse voices...."

Do Muslims tell us about Ramadan but offer no opinions on education, zoning or Monica Lewinsky? Must a disability be a news peg? Aren't people in wheelchairs also parents and taxpayers?

While we seek diverse voices, we avoid labeling individuals. Unless relevant, we don't identify someone's race or ethnicity in a story.

Nor do we imply that any one person speaks for others by virtue of a common denominator such as race or gender.

Crime suspects should be identified by race only if it is part of a complex description. Unacceptable: "a black male in his 40s." Acceptable: "a light-skinned black man with freckles and short, graying hair, wearing khaki slacks and driving a blue Escort." One description merely perpetuates a stereotype. The other may solve a crime.

Passive: "Don't identify crime suspects by race." Get rid of superfluous adverb.

A guy wrote this piece. Were it a woman, she would include a woman-diversity paragraph to remind that ritual citing of a woman’s attire and looks is sexist.

Lastly, we don't repeat slurs without good reason, such as when a public figure speaks inappropriately.

Diction: Use "last" unless you want to sound like an ancient pontificator on a walker. Omit comma after "reason": it cuts off the restrictive trailing adverbial clause.

Fairness

It's good to get both sides but even better to get all sides.

Insight is our constant goal, even in the shortest of stories.

The redundant comma cuts off an adverbial restrictive prepositional phrase.

If we quote the advocates and the naysayers, we should also consider the undecided, the compromised and the confused. We must seek out the silent.

Before sullying a person's reputation, we should make every effort to elicit a response, even at the expense of delayed publication, when possible.

If we've reported criminal charges, we should report verdicts in corresponding court cases, especially when the accused is acquitted. If an arrest drew prominent play, the acquittal demands equally prominent play.

Passive: "When the court acquits..." The two adverbs are redundant.

Freelancing

It's permissible to take on freelance assignments, as long as they don't interfere with regular duties or compete directly with The Tribune. Competing publications usually are considered to be those within the circulation area.

The comma after "as" cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause. Passive: "We consider..." “Usually" is a redundant adverb.

Supervisors should be told.

Passive: “You should tell supervisors.”

Work done for The Tribune becomes the newspaper's property. Stories and photographs can't be resold. That doesn't preclude staff members from rewriting or photographing familiar subjects for new markets after publication in The Tribune.

Passive: "Tribune employees can't sell..."

Company equipment, including camera gear and computers, should not be used for freelance ventures.

Both commas rank redundant: they cut off a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase. Passive: "Employees should not use..."

The employee manual also addresses outside employment.

Gifts

Nobody bribes us with bundles of cash.

But if tins of cheddar popcorn were gold, we'd be rich.

On any given day, free stuff loads the newsroom mailboxes.

"Given" is a redundant adjective.

The general rule: Accept no gifts.

"General" is a redundant adjective.

That includes food, alcohol, clothing, tickets, travel offers, sample products and offers of free services.

For the sake of sanity, items of token value (under $10) are exempt. Other stuff should be returned or donated to charity. The readers' desk will maintain a charity bin and preprinted gift return cards. (No raiding the bin!)

Passive: "People should return..."

The logistics:

1. If you receive a gift of value from a source, subject or reader, return it by mail or in person. Write a note or use a preprinted gift return card.

Example: "The crystal toad is adorable, but I must return it. We can't accept gifts. Maybe I did, as you say, overlook a few warts, but the chocolate mousse was ribeting."

2. Mass mailings from marketing companies require less delicate treatment. Put the gift in the charity bin and send a gift return card to the giver.

3. Review copies of books, music CDs, software and videos - in effect, press releases - may be kept by the reviewer. It's OK for writers to keep reference copies: a food writer might keep a cookbook for future use.

Passive: "The reviewer may keep..."

Otherwise, review materials should be donated to charity. They should never be sold or traded at commercial outlets.

Passive: "Donate review materials to charity; don't sell or trade them at commercial outlets."

4. Perishables, by nature, are handled differently.

"By nature" is a wordy redundancy. Passive: "We handle..."

Food may be offered up for newsroom consumption, within reason. Return all sides of beef and cases of caviar. All alcohol should be returned.

Passive: "One may offer up..." "Return all alcohol."

Fresh flowers may be kept, but consider intent: A $100 arrangement from a developer grateful for publicity should be returned. Not so for a daisy basket from a reader, delighted we noticed his 100th birthday.

The comma after "kept" spits a compound verb. Passive: "Keep fresh flowers but consider the intent." Passive: “Return a $100-dollar arrangement…”

If in doubt about what's appropriate, talk to an editor.

Misrepresentation

People have a right to know they're talking to a reporter before an interview begins.

We don't sneak around trying to trick people into talking.

In rare instances, a reporter may require candid, first-hand knowledge of how an agency, company or individual behaves. Senior news management should first approve of any such activity.

Newsroom independence

Increasingly, reporters and editors hear of relations forged between The Tribune's advertising and promotions departments and the business community - unique arrangements with a stadium, a shopping mall, a housing development.

The redundant adverb and adjective should go.

It's important to remember that the newsroom's impartial voice exists independently of all other departments.

"Exists" is a linking verb (They aren't always some form of "to be."). So the adverb "independently" should be the predicate adjective "independent."

News is news. Advertising is advertising. News content is not dictated by advertising sales. Advertisers attempting to influence coverage deserve only a polite refusal.

Passive: "Advertising sales do not dictate..." "Only" is a redundant adverb.

Similarly, the editorial staff expresses the newspaper's opinion as a business. The editorial board, by nature, attempts to persuade, commenting on community issues.

The adverb and adjectival prepositional phrase are redundant.

Columnists enjoy similar latitude, although columnists should not use news pages to promote candidates, legislation or referendum issues.

Likewise, news pages are not an appropriate venue for a reporter or editor's crusade or cause.

For separate possession, each owner gets an apostrophe "s."

Online journalism

The Internet's unique characteristics do not lower the standards by which we evaluate, gather and disseminate information.

Material gathered online should be verified.

Material disseminated online should be solidly confirmed.

The two previous sentences say the same thing: drop one.

The ability to change information around the clock does not lessen the need for accuracy.

Paying for news

We barely pay reporters, let alone sources.

Be wary of anyone offering information for money. We never pay for news, and the very attempt to solicit payment raises questions about truthfulness and motives.

Possessive before the gerund: "anyone's offering." "Very": superfluous adverb

We do, of course, pay material costs such as copying expenses for documents.

Wordy superfluous phrase

Paying our way

Food: Restaurant critics dine anonymously, so there's seldom a scramble for the bill. However, critics, columnists and other journalists are sometimes recognized, and owners may try to sweeten the experience by dismissing the check or adding a complimentary bottle of wine. While sometimes awkward, we must pay our way.

Example: You're on a restaurant review. Dick Greco stops by the table to say hello. Minutes later, the owner is at Greco's table. Not long after, the owner brings you a bottle of wine ""on the house." Geez: Does he know you're from The Tribune? Does he just think you're Greco's friend? Either way, if you drink the wine, you pay.

"Geez"? The writer must have a more sophisticated expletive than "geez" in his vocabulary kit.

When dining with sources, pick up the check … or take turns. Our standards differ from those of the regular business world, and it's incumbent upon us to explain the rules.

The ellipsis here confirms to no recognized use of the mark. Use nothing and have a compound verb.

Do so in a way that doesn't make people feel like crooks. Sometimes it helps to explain that the newspaper will reimburse you.

None of this precludes common sense.

Reporters aren't expected to go hungry just because there's no way to pay for the buffet at a conference or sporting event. Sometimes there's nowhere else to go without missing what you're there to cover. But news-savvy organizers may know of your concern and already have a plan in place to allow you to pay.

Both adverbs are superfluous.

Tickets: We don't take free tickets, unless they're free to anyone.

The comma after "tickets" cuts off a restrictive adverbial trailing clause.

We can't ask for them, and we can't use them, whether delivered in person or unsolicited by mail. We can't give them away to family, friends or coworkers. We should send them back with an explanation or a gift return card. Otherwise, donors may assume we used them.

The comma after "them" cuts off a restrictive past participial phrase.

If we want tickets, we stand in line like the rest of the world. It builds character. It reminds us how much average people pay for mediocre performances. Likewise for admission to sporting events. Ethics would not spare us the joy of a foul ball to the upper, upper, upper tier.

Attach the “likewise” fragment to the previous sentence with a comma or an "and" with no comma.

We shouldn't accept special treatment, either on or off the job.

The redundant comma cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

Exceptions exist.

Concert and theater promoters may set aside press seating for critics. We accept the convenience but pay for the tickets. Critics should sample acoustics throughout the arena. We pay when possible.

We can't buy seats at movie preview screenings or in the press box during athletic events, but competitively, we can't afford not to be there.

The adverb is redundant.

We don't pay for stage or field access when photographing musicians or athletes. But we don't sell, lend or give away credentials.

Credentials are tools. If we aren't taking notes or shooting pictures, we should question their use.

Regularly, the Tribune promotions department gets tickets to dinners and events in exchange for sponsorship. Those tickets, obtained through the business arm of the newspaper, may be enjoyed without restraint when distributed to the staff.

The adverb is redundant. Passive: "The staff may enjoy..."

Travel: During any business trips, we cover our own travel costs.

Modifier wordiness

That includes travel with political candidates and sports teams.

"That" should be "those," referring to "costs."

In charter situations, we pay our share of total costs.

Redundant modifier

Under special circumstances, senior newsroom management may approve of different arrangements, such as when military transport is the only way to reach a disaster scene or war zone.

Comma cuts off trailing restrictive adverbial clause.

Media days at theme parks and other attractions are off limits, unless we're covering the event, as in the debut of a ride. Such previews shouldn't be parlayed into family outings.

The commas are both redundant: the one after "unless" cuts off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause; the one after "event" cuts off a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase.

Commercially sponsored media parties … including those staged during political conventions and Super Bowl festivities … create conflicts and should be avoided. In some cases, they may offer newsgathering opportunities. If you go, attempt to pay. If in doubt, talk with an editor before going.

The writer does not know how to use ellipses. The "including" phrase is a restrictive prepositional phrase modifying "parties."

We don't accept free or reduced-price travel to research travel stories. If freelancers take free or reduced-price accommodations, we should say so in print.

Photography

Photographs should remain truthful in spirit, manipulated only through quality enhancements such as burning, dodging, contrast control, color balancing, spotting and cropping.

The comma after "spirit" cuts off a restrictive past participial phrase.

We don't stage, re-enact or recreate news events for photos. Personality portraits and studio illustrations shouldn't create an artificial sense of spontaneity. Photo illustrations, computer enhancements, colorized and composite photographs should be labeled as such, out of regard for the public's trust.

Passive verb: "We should label..." No comma after "such": it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

Removing or adding an object in an editorial photograph is not permitted.

Nor is flopping a photograph.

Readers deserve accuracy and honesty, whether viewing an image or reading words. Their eyes may deceive them, but the newspaper should not.

Plagiarism

Please, only original work.

If you borrow a clever idea, joke, turn of phrase or unique observation, give the author credit, and maybe one day, someone will grant you the same courtesy.

Political activity

No running for public office. No working for a candidate, government agency or special interest group.

No placards, buttons or bumper stickers, on your person, desk, car or yard.*

No campaign contributions.

No political demonstrations marches or rallies.

No giving advice to candidates.

Yes, by all means, you should vote.

Political affiliation is a matter of public record. It's an individual choice, but some reporters find it prudent to declare ""no party" when registering to vote.

* In the interest of marital harmony, the newspaper does not attempt to control the activities of spouses. But if a spouse becomes active in a political campaign or public cause, please tell an editor.

Radio, TV, personal appearances

If you're going to be a star, clear it first with your supervisor.

Newsroom staff may appear as unpaid panelists and guests on radio and television shows, with prior approval.

"With prior approval" is a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase: no comma cuts it off.

Professional standards don't change with the migration to airwaves. A news reporter should remain impartial, while a columnist or editorial writer will be free to express opinions.

No comma: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial clause.

Don't say anything you wouldn't be willing to write, and don't scoop The Tribune on significant news.

Relationships

Steve Otto gets to humiliate family members in print.

Others should stick to covering strangers.

Exceptions may be made for first-person accounts, but generally, we don't write, photograph or make news judgments regarding relatives, close friends, business partners or romantic interests.

Redundant adverb

Friendships and relationships, while a matter of personal choice, may limit the sorts of stories we may write or edit.

The prepositional phrase is restrictive: no commas.

It's a conflict, for instance, to write a feature on a friend's business, to date a police officer while covering police, or to edit a child abuse story if married to a caseworker.

Hyphenated adjective before a noun: child-abuse story

Ethics: Winging it

The ethical decisions we face can't all be covered here.

Passive: "We can't cover..."

Even if they were, there's little to keep a crafty journalist from finding ways to benefit between the lines.

Consider this code to be a yardstick. See how your own situations measure up to the spirit of these words.

If it's not on the list, talk it over among people whose values you trust.

Think critically.

All we have are our principles.

This remains a subject-verb agreement error as it was when the writer started the piece with it.

_

_________________________________________________

Maxwell Jealous of Obama, Takes It Out on Commas

2008-03-09T19:12:00.001-07:00

Mr. Maxwell:

Your column today again demonstrates your dislike for Obama. You
aver the press beats up on Hillary and treats Obama like the “Second Coming.”

You cite the Center for Media Affairs as confirming that the press mistreats Hillary and yada, yada, yada.

You started on this anti-Obama tack when he announced for office. You said that he should wait his turn. Wiser political heads told him, "Jump when the opening is there. It may never come again."

That after Bush anybody can advise a person to wait to run for president for any reason at all is absurd. Bush makes possible an orangutan’s running for president with nobody’s having a right to demur.

I wrote you then and rebuked you. I confirm that rebuke today when your cover your dislike for the beauteous Obama with the old press bias kitsch.

Let’s straighten out your thinking on this bias charge. The press maintains the forlorn fallacy that it is unbiased to make itself sound extraordinary. Whether the press is too dumb to know it’s blowing smoke or whether it aims to rev up its purity spin to impress the masses one does not know.

But the press or anybody can’t be unbiased.

Study after study shows that being nonbiased is not possible. The fancy term is that the claim is an epistemological fallacy.

Data enter a person’s ear and comes out the other ear shaped by the back roads, cul-de-sacs, and curlicues of the alembic of that person’s
particular psyche. In other words, it comes out biased.

In the second place reporters’ output is biased to conform to biases of their bosses so as to keep their jobs. Anybody who hasn't figured this out better never try for a reporter job. The whole paper's reflecting the boss's bias explains how a paper gets the reputation of being either liberal or conservative. That reputation comes from the boss’s bias reflected throughout the paper’s echo of this boss bias.

A second consideration in your accusation of press bias against Hillary is that a whole lot of people hate her. She never can get above the 50th percentile in approval ratings. The press is not a separate entity. It’s a piece of the continent, a part of the main. So its treatment of Hillary is coincident with the national psyche.

Your caterwauling about press bias against Hillary is cover for your jealousy of Obama. You are pea green with envy because Obama is pretty, and you’re not. You were not fortunate enough to come from a gene pool with a father as black as night and a mother as white as milk. Is it any wonder that magical gene pool produced a movie star? .

Get over it, Mr. Maxwell, and deal with things about which you have control—or should have. A former college teacher and long-time columnist should have control over the correct use of punctuation for example.

You don’t. Here are examples from your Obama-hating column:

If Clinton had not raised the issue and if Saturday Night Live had not spoofed journalists for fawning over Sen. Barack Obama, like puppies licking their owners' mouths, the charge of bias probably would have remained a mere wink-and-nod charade.

The prepositional phrase “like puppies…mouths” is restrictive. It does not describe a situation in which journalists fawned over Clinton like cats licking their owners’ mouths but like “puppies…mouths.” Leave the comma off after “Obama.” Keep the one after “mouths" for the end of an introductory adverbial clause.

The gap in good press widened since the New Hampshire primary, with Clinton dropping to 47 percent positive comments and Obama holding steady at 83 percent positive.

The comma after “primary” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase with its occupying the usual syntactical position at the end of the clause. “Clinton” should be “Clinton’s”: possessive before the gerund. “Obama’s,” not “Obama”: possessive before the gerund.

I had a tussle argument with the editor of the North American Oxford English Dictionary on this point and bested him. I sent this colloquy to the linguistics department at Oxford so that the supercilious members of that body in their rump-sprung tweeds and noses in the air will rag the American editor when they have their next transatlantic conference (Grammargrinch.blogspot.com).

The most surprising finding, at least to me, was the pervasive bias in coverage of the two candidates' foreign policy.

“At least for me” is a restrictive adverbial phrase. You do not speak of "at least for anybody" but "at least for me." So you need that particular restrictive prepositional phrase to identify whom you are talking about.

Rarely have I seen a story about Obama's influence-peddling pal from Chicago, Tony Rezko, on the front page.

Since you hate Obama as much as you do, you should treat “Tony Rezko” as a restrictive appositive with no commas, implying that Obama has more than one influence-peddling pal from Chicago. Then you can go on to call him “Barack Hussein Obama” and mention that he takes his oath of elected office on the Koran and eats cous cous for breakfast.

Promiscuous use of the comma has been waning for four hundred years. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is good on this phenomenon. One would think that since the press is eager to get rid of the comma in items in a series, it would be eager to abandon overusing other commas. But that is not the case. The press continues to overuse commas as do you in the above examples.

When you feel an urge to stick pins in the darling Obama, haul out Fowler as your breviary to distance the green-eyed monster. Your soul and your punctuation will be the better for this chaste use of time.

lee drury de cesare
Grammargrinch.blogspot.com
TampaBayGrammargrinch.blogspot.com

St. Pete Times Women's Grammar and Punctuation

2008-02-25T19:05:00.001-08:00

Les filles de grammaire des Temps de Saint-Pétersbourg: Bennett, Bancroft, Moore, Ryan

My husband says that I pick on newspaper guys’ grammar and let the women off because the sisterhood covers for each other.

I pointed out that I sometimes correct Maureen Dowd’s superfluous commas and tell her she won’t learn possessive-before-gerund to annoy me. I also correct Gail Collins. In fact I correct her mess-up on “whom,” among other errors in my current Grammargrinch.blogspot post.

But my old man has a point. So I shall scrutinize writing samples of Les Girls at the St. Petersburg Times. Appropriate is that I pick the special comment that four Times women made on Hillary. Mr. Maxwell also wrote an irate column on women’s cussing him out on the Hillary-sticking-to-Bill puzzle. That subject gets women to screaming even under the dryer at the beauty parlor.

Le Maxwell said with old-fart sexism that women used some cuss words in harassing him about the puzzling Hillary-Bill equation. You can tell by his tone that Maxwell doesn’t approve of women’s using strong language. Maxwell’s father was a preacher; thus, Maxwell listened to his father’s sermons until the ton of Bible misogyny sank into his reptilian brain from whence he transports it to his columns.

Everybody outside the lower quartile of the Stanford Binet knows that all religions are patriarchal misogynist. Their male honchos hunkered down in cathedral sweat lodges to continue long-running exegesis on areas into which women mustn’t trespass lest men get confused about their prenatal affirmative-action-plan that keeps women second bananas until the roll is called up yonder.

Cosseted in the comfy belief of the superiority of y-chromosome to x-chromosome phylum since the delivery nurse tossed a blue blanket over them at parturition, guys have an endocrine melt down that requires Viagra booster shots to keep their nerves steady when women demand equality.

All those from-birth privileges have over the other half the human race have made fellows fragile. Women have to be careful, or men’s vaunted egos—women still do not merit egos, of course-- will undergo melt-downs at the notion that women should get half of the world’s goodies.

Nobody mentioned my answer for why Hillary sticks with Bill despite his serial infidelities. She loves him. Why? God knows. I can’t see his allure. I infer that Hillary’s sticking to Bill is a crazy-salad situation. “It’s certain that fine women eat a crazy salad with their meat,” a spurned Yeats wrote when Maud Gonne married Major Mc Bride.

Besides, my guess is that Hillary’s sticking to Bill represents the behavior of most of the married women in the United States. Pious glosses of this fact are sociological piffle pumped out by women’s magazines that want to keep women stuck as Angels of the House crocheting doilies.

Women are mad at Hillary because she didn’t do what they didn’t do: kick out the tomcatting skunk. They wanted Hillary to perform vicarious expiation for them. That’s why they scream under the dryer at the beauty parlor and cuss Mr. Maxwell in his male fastness.

_Times women__________________________________________________________.

Lennie Bennett, Times art critic, was born and grew up in St. Petersburg, attended a small women's college, Agnes Scott, registered

“Agnes Scott” is restrictive appositive: no comma before it. There are more than one small women's colleges.

very Republican to placate her family (though often voting Democrat -- don't tell anyone), joined the Junior League to placate her family (though actually enjoying the volunteer experience and becoming its president), has been divorced for a number of years and has two very independent young adult children.

Redundant adverbs: "Actually" makes you sound like a California Valley Girl. Strunk & White warned us against superfluous modifiers--especially adverbs-- in freshman English.

Overuse of adverbs ranks style problem. A writer must fight the impulse to stick in one. Doing so makes her sound as if she were not sure about what she says and needs an adverbial prop to punch up impact. Graham Greene hated adverbs and foreswore them. Read a page or two of Greene and see the result. Part of his style's lean quality comes from his banishing all but occasional adverb.

I am ambivalent on Greene even though he should have won the Nobel and would have had there not been a guy who hated him on the committee. My ambivalence against him comes from his treating women like dog pookie. He resented his mother’s favoring his father over him and lived his life trying to repair this oedipal injury by seducing as many men’s wives he could. The End of the Affair is paradigm.

But using male writers’ misogyny as impediment to reading them would cut out just about all writing guys. I just had a spell of reading Faulkner. Yoknapatpha County is mostly male world. Faulkner hated women and said so often but couldn’t live without them. This was a guy whose extreme need for women made him both fear and despise them. I think that sentiment is key to the pornography industry.

I now read some Dickens that I missed when I was young. He ran off and left his wife to live with a young woman, of course. I diagnose that he was taking his hatred of his mother out on his wife. His mother had made him keep working instead of going to school as he wanted after his family got out of debtors’ prison (portraits of debtors’ prison life appear in both David Copperfield and also Little Dorrit).

I have been rereading as well a new version of the Divine Comedy with young poets—none of whom I know—translating a canto each. Quite a few women poets participate in the project I’m pleased to note.

If Beatrice had not died young but had married Dante, one is sure that he would not have put her in hell as his guide but would have asked her to be sure to have oxtail stew for dinner.

And if she forgot, he would have flown into a rage and uttered a whole string of male-only profanity, a malignant tradition which we feminists today can end if we gird up our loins and start emitting curse words heretofore the purview of sailors.

Resume with La Bennett __________________________________________________________

About Hillary Clinton: I am neutral. Which is not to say, in political parlance, I'm undecided. I'm definitely decided. I have decided that she

The “in political parlance” is a wordy restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase better omitted. The writer speaks not of aesthetic parlance but of political parlance.

is outstandingly ordinary and predictable in her choices. They're the same ones I and most women I know in our 50s and 60s have been making for more than 30 years.

The progressive tenses sound handwringing. Unless you mean to emphasize that something happens over time, simple tenses sound crisper.

It's the same journey, only in her case writ larger and known to the world.

Omit the comma before “only”: it begins the first half of compound participial phases modifying “journey”: “writ larger in her case”; “known to the world.” Better would be to omit wordy "only in her case."

For the last four hundred years, commas have waned. Unless you can cite a rule or syntactical reason, you omit commas. One would think that newspapers would have jumped on this circumstance; but they haven’t. They omit the last comma in items-in a series but cram in redundant ones with a hey nonny nonny elsewhere.

Style suffers from superfluous commas. They impede the thrust of a sentence.

My opinion is based on what she has looked like over the decades: hair, clothes, makeup (or lack thereof). Scroll through photos. Her appearance places her exactly at a particular point of discovery or self-realization, and it always conforms to cultural and social shifts we of that generation have experienced.

Avoid passive verbs: “My opinion comes from…” Dump “thereof” unless you lust to sound like pedantic geezer. Jettison the redundant adverb. Wordiness: choose either “discovery” or self-realization. “Always” is a ratty redundant adverb.

And they have been many and dramatic. Some would call this a superficial zeitgeist. But using her sartorial arc to parallel her personal and professional self-discovery is, I believe, valid.

“This” requires an antecedent that the reader does not need infer. I don’t know what you refer to, and I am a reader of average intelligence

“Sartorial” is not exact diction. That word comes from the Latin word meaning “tailor.” That origin accounts for its reference to men’s attire. Hillary has just begun to wear pricey bespoke tailored pant suits that disguise her too generous bottom. Before she could afford these, she wore women’s off-the-rack fashion or couture if she had some extra egg money.

Some examples, beginning with her college years.

Using artful fragments needs control of verbal pattern. A writer must work the pattern out so that it coheres. This writer misses the mark. Parallel fragments would help coherence I suggest workmanlike sentences are better choice. The comma after "examples" is redundant: it cuts off a restrictive present participial phrase.

The earnest student look: A-line skirts, ironed cotton blouses with Peter Pan collars. Hair set with rollers and a hooded hairdryer. Serious and respectful, in spite of world events that invited deep cynicism. That she didn't use highlights indicates a latent iconoclasm. Reference the Wellesley commencement speech.

The comma after "respectful" ranks redundant. The prepositional phrase following it is restrictive.

The postgrad radical look: We were there, too, our clothes and hair affecting a studied nonchalance approaching hippiness. (The hair only looked dirty.) But for God's sake, we were inventing a new world order. Or thought we could.

“Hair” should be “hair’s” in the first line: joint possessive of "clothes and hair" before the gerund.

I got into a fracas with the editor if the North American Oxford English Dictionary on this issue. See my Grammargrinch.blogspot on NYT-Washington Post errors . He is a sexist twit far gone in preciosity, always a lure for me to put up my grammar dukes.

Safire had consulted the Oxford-dictionary guy as supposed grammar heavyweight to answer Safire’s question on something the twit didn’t understand—and who didn’t have the grace to admit his ignorance-- that came from my email rebuking Safire.

I believe I quelled the twit after doing some research in the grammar god Curme. Read my account on Grammargrinch.blogspot.com and judge.

I wrote to Slate and asked why in the hell it let this grammar poseur write prescriptive columns when he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. I also ratted this junior sexist out to the Oxford linguistic swells in their rump-sprung tweeds. It soothed my anger at twit misogyny to think what a trying time Dictionary Misogynist Man would have at the next trans-Atlantic Oxford linguistics wingding.

The I'm-in-the-system-but-not-its-toady look: Payback time for the years of sacrificial idealism.

“Payback” gets lower case because it does not begin a sentence after the colon.

We were the vanguard of women aspiring to executive suites.

“Women” should be “women’s”: another possessive before the gerund. The NYT Style Manual cites this rule, but nobody there seems to follow it. I don’t think flouting possessive-before-gerund is newspaper iconoclasm as omitted last comma is in items in a series; I judge it to signal ignorance. I have not been able to teach it to Maureen Dowd, who’s respectful of any grammar-and-punctuation advice. She went to Catholic school, and the nuns beat respect into her. I saw her once at Eckerd. She’s beautiful as well as witty and charming. She's also shy.

Translated into suits of polyestered armor we all endured before Donna Karan showed us that professional women could be individuals. I recall big shoulder pads and big hair. (We were learning to use blow-dryers.) And separate checking accounts if we were married. Reference Hillary's role as the family breadwinner during the Arkansas years.

Here's a sample of the difficulty of sustaining artful fragments. You get a crick in your neck reading the paragraph. It’s a delicate balance to get complete sentences and fragments into pleasing balance.

The TASTEFUL FASHIONISTA LOOK: We no longer needed to prove we could have careers outside the home and did not feel the need to look different from our nonprofessional friends. Some of us chose to "retire" and feather our nests. We had Martha Stewart. Hillary was first lady, the biggest stay-at-home-mom gig anywhere. St. John suits. As soon as we could afford one, we bought it. Blond highlights, as soon as we could afford standing appointments. A uniform, to be sure, but we needed it. Reference the First Wives Club and Monica Lewinsky. Hillary had her share of expensive missteps in cultivating the look as we all did. Sort of like the health care thing.

"Gig" makes me cringe as I recall students' laughing at us adults who try to sound au courant by swiping kids' slang. The young invent a language to separate themselves from us. We shouldn't infringe on it in our eagerness to sound young.

“Health-care thing”: “health care is a hyphenated adjective before a noun.

Currently, the female CEO look: We're about as good as we'll ever be at this point, professionally, and if we don't have a personal style by now, well. ... Like the rest of us, Hillary has come to terms with the limitations and characteristics of her hair and body type. (I personally think she wears pants a lot to conceal thick ankles.) She's polished, tasteful and self-assured. Doesn't need designer logos plastered all over her person. An accumulation of experience and aspiration, her anonymously expensive clothes and flawless hair and makeup reflect her choice to fit in, to be conspicuous only by virtue of her accomplishments. Most of the high-level corporate women I know have made that same choice.

Comma after “point” cuts off a restrictive adverb, which is redundant and merits dumping.

“Personally” is also redundant adverb. “I think” and “personally” say the same thing. Cut adverb “anonymously”; consider “custom-made” or “bespoke.” Most of the corporate women I know don’t look as good as Hillary does. They don’t have her money for pricey bespoke tailoring.

I sometimes wish for more fashion swagger and swag; she's earned the right to cool shoes.

But I get her. We are of the same tribe. She has chosen to be neutral so, about Hillary, I am neutral.

The comma goes before the coordinating conjunction “so,” not after it.

I enjoyed these comments on clothes. I believe clothes make a personal, political, and social statement. So much does the subject interest me that I will get on a plane to see a new show in the Metropolitan Fashion Institute. The author is right. Hillary’s ankles are fire hydrants. She should wear pants all the time to disguise them. Lena Horne, a great black beauty of a previous era, wore pants because she had tooth-pick legs. Hillary’s current look suits her to a T. The bright, expensive jewelry is great for those stark tailored suits. I agree that she needs spiffier shoes with a little more heel.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at lennie@sptimes.com.

Colette Bancroft, Times book editor, was born in Ohio and grew up in South Tampa. Her mother worked in banking and her father owned an auto repair business. She participated in her first antiwar and civil rights marches as a high school student, graduated from USF and the University of Florida and taught English at several universities before switching to journalism.

A comma follows "banking" for a compound sentence joined by a coordinating conjunction.

“Civil rights” is a hyphenated adjective before a noun.

Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency keeps reminding me of Ginger Rogers.

As in, Hillary had to do everything Fred Astaire did, except backward and in high heels.

The sentence would improve by omitting “as in.” The comma after “did” is redundant. It cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase (in fact, an elliptical clause: “except [that she had to do it] backwards.”)

Much as I wish that 1970s feminist wisecrack was outdated, it chimes in my head every time I hear some bloviator blathering about Hillary's toughness or tears, hair or hormones. What century do those geezers and I'm talking about their wheezy old attitudes, not their chronological ages live in?

“Bloviator” should be “bloviator’s”: possessive before the gerund.

I regret to report that Ms. Bancroft has fallen into a grammar felony: subject-verb disagreement. “Do” should be “does”: “What century does.” The grammar checker is good on spotting such subject-verb agreement errors.

Regard “was” in the first line: Do we live in the twilight of the subjunctive mood? Will we all have soon retreated to Space Odyssey 2001, sitting around picking fleas off each other at the mouth of the cave, gnawing bones, and picking natural buffalo-jerky shreds out of our broken teeth stubs? Today, one sees the subjunctive in Henry James and The New York Review of Books, and that’s about it.

I'm still not sure how I'll cast my imaginary vote on Tuesday. I certainly don't agree with Hillary on everything, now or in the past.

The redundant adverb should go. The comma after “everything” is redundant. It cuts off a restrictive adverb and adverbial prepositional phrase.

But I'm a baby boomer, a feminist, a working woman, and I can't help identifying with her when she has to put up with being judged too mean if she's not sensitive, too sensitive if she's not mean. Or when she has to listen to a lunkhead like Chris Matthews braying that she only got to be a senator because her husband played around and folks felt sorry for her. Hey, if that's how it works, time to pay up, boys -- I expect to see the Senate filled with 100 politicians' wives next term, with a special subcommittee of Rudy Giuliani's exes.

The “or” construction is a fragment. We allow artful fragments to Proust and Faulkner and others who inhabit the writing empyrean; but we earth-bound toilers use sentences. "Matthews" gets apostrophe "s" for possessive before the gerund.

Count on “only” to be misplaced about 90 percent of the time. This “only” goes before “because.” The comma after “term” is redundant. It cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase in its normal syntactical position at the end of the clause.

In the first presidential primary I ever voted in, back in 1972, I punched a chad for Democrat Shirley Chisholm, an accomplished and admirable member of Congress from New York who was black as well as female. (She garnered 152 delegates.)

The comma after “in” is redundant: “back in 1972” is a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

I myself wore Chisholm’s president button until it rusted out and did my husband’s professional career much injury at corporate functions inhabited by Republican sexists and their Aunt Tom spouses.

Back then, I voted for Chisholm because she was black and female (and not Richard Nixon). Thirty-six years later, all of us ought to be past judging any candidate by race or gender. But Hillary's still dancing backward.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at bancroft@sptimes.com.

Waveney Ann Moore, a Times staff writer based in St. Petersburg, was born in Guyana, South America. After becoming a naturalized citizen, she voted for the first time in the 1988 general elections.

I get neither rabid nor excessively fervent about the woman who doesn't need a surname. In fact, I'd like to believe that when the former first lady, current New York senator, persevering spouse of Bill and aspiring leader of the United States comes to mind, that I can be at once thoughtful and objective. It's worth a try, anyway.

Wordiness: “Rabid” or “excessively fervent”: mean the same thing. Pick one. “Excessively” is the hated redundant adverb. The comma after “try” should go. “Anyway” is a restrictive adverb. I counsel dumping it.

Because I'm of an age to remember feeling proud of the pioneering ascendancy of Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi in India and Golda Meir in Israel, the idea of Hillary or any woman becoming president of these United States -- where people in every corner of the world believe the streets are paved with possibility -- fails to catapult me into raw panic.

“Woman” should be “woman’s”: possessive before the gerund. I suggest “raw” before “panic” is redundant adjective. “Raw panic” is also a cliché.

I bring to my view of Hillary a few things we share in common: oldest child, of a certain age, mother of a beloved only child, wife and professional.

There's plenty that separates us, as well. I'm black, with an accent that betrays my immigrant roots, and a naturalized American with no chance of becoming president, even if I wanted to.

This sentence requires no commas. The commas after “black” and roots” cut off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. The comma after roots” is redundant: it lops off a restrictive adverbial trailing clause.

I grew up in a poor former British colony, know what it's like to live in a house without running water, how to use an outdoor latrine and never saw a television until I was 20. My parents instilled in their six children a love for reading and education and are old- fashioned. Daddy makes the decisions and my mother quietly lets him think that he does.

There should be a comma after “decisions”: compound sentence joined by a coordinating conjunction.

My background, in part, informs the way I feel about Hillary.

“In part” is a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase: no commas. Your background doesn’t inform as a whole but in part.

Words like ambitious, articulate, strong, courageous and intelligent come to mind.

Words used as words get quotation marks around each word: “ambitious,” “ articulate,” “ strong,” "courageous” and “intelligent.”

Add to that compromising and perhaps, exceedingly forgiving.

“compromising”; “exceedingly forgiving”

Yes, I'm familiar with where she stands on issues from schools to health care to the war in Iraq to global warming. And yes, she doesn't strike me as a Jane Austen heroine, gentle and coy, but then neither did Mother Teresa, who, by all accounts, got the job done nonetheless.

Elizabeth Bennet was not “gentle and coy.” Neither was Emily, who gave Mr. Knightly such grief.

But, I digress. Knowing how Hillary will respond to key issues does affect how I think of her, but I suspect that like many others, my opinion about this complex woman was formed long before she decided to run for the nation's top office.

Who didn't have an opinion when word of Bill's dalliances made news even before he became leader of the world's superpower? I was particularly sympathetic when the Bill-Monica affair brought further public humiliation. Publicly, she responded to the revelations with dignity. In private, who knows, she might have attacked him with the talons of a virago. To voluntarily throw herself back into the spotlight is either foolish or courageous. I think of it as the latter and can't help but wonder how many of her detractors, feminists and perennial Hillary haters alike, who make sport of deriding her marriage, themselves remain in quietly desperate unions of convenience.

"Publicly" is a superflous adverb. The “who knows” is a sudden interrupter and question that means you owe your reader a question mark. Dashes would work better to set it off: “In private—who knows?—she…” I hope she did scratch Bill as long as her energy held out.

Hillary supported her husband through triumph and scandal, so it might now be his turn to plan state dinners and decorate the White House Christmas tree.

There's another thing. I commiserate with the not-so-veiled references to Hillary's age and comparisons to the more youthful Barack Obama.

A colon goes after “with.” You must use either a colon or a comma because “references’’ is a nonrestrictive appositive.

How the years speed by. I remember how amused my husband and I were when our first-year Harvard daughter came home at Christmas scolding us for not recycling our newspapers and soda cans and proudly wearing a "Vote for Hillary's husband" button.

A comma follows “Christmas”: the present participial phrase is nonrestrictive.

Years later, now that Hillary is actually running for president, my American-born daughter is more thoughtful. She says she identifies with this Wellesley- and Yale-educated former first lady as a woman of strength, but at the same time can't help but appreciate the historic potential of an Obama victory.

Dump redundant adverb “actually.” It's shibbolith of the California Valley Girl. Omit comma after “strength”’ it separates the compound verb “says” but “can’t help.”

If ever there was a conundrum for those who admire Hillary but are drawn to Obama, this is it.

The "was" should be "were" for subjunctive mood. But I'm about to give up this fight.

Waveney Ann Moore can be reached at wmoore@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2283.

Patty Ryan cast her first presidential vote for Jimmy Carter. Her two yellow dogs offer a hint of her leanings. She grew up in Pinellas Park and is now an editor for the St. Petersburg Times in Tampa.

I have decided that laziness accounts for newspapers’ not italicizing a newspaper’s title.

It is tempting to seek hope outside of ourselves. It is tempting to want a hero, to believe that the future rests not in the hands of ordinary people but in hidden destiny. Barack Obama stirs that in us. He touches an imago, and so we sense there is more to him than meets the eye.

Hillary Clinton is no less inspiring, simply less fresh. She endured the worst of Washington but apparently cared enough to return. She infiltrated the herd that trampled her, to redirect its course. As reward, she gets to be the butt of snotty jokes and to be judged by an invisible yardstick. People assume there is less to her than meets the eye.

Jettison the redundant adverb "apparently."

The comma after “her” is redundant: the infinitive phrase “to redirect…” is restrictive. If the writer means “and” where the comma is, then she should put it there for clarity.

We forget that before she married, she had political ambitions. She earned a law degree at Yale. She also advised the House committee that forced Richard Nixon's resignation. I don't believe that her run for the presidency is a copycat crime.

Perhaps women view her as ordinary because we view ourselves as such. We are unaccustomed to surrendering power to one who may be vulnerable to our own self-doubts. I am not sure why Clinton draws enmity so disproportionate to her deeds. But we should ask ourselves whether she polarizes because she's inadequate or if the very suggestion of a woman president will always be polarizing to some.

Parallelism: Use either “whether” whether” or “if” “if.” “Very” is a redundant adverb.

It would be foolish to vote solely on race or gender but equally foolish to disregard the opportunity to widen the view from the top.

My vote goes for this rare indispensable adverb.

Women form a majority in the United States, which has had 43 white male presidents.

As a white woman, the gulf of gender feels somehow deeper to me than the gulf of race. I identify more with other women than with men of any skin color. And I wonder how unbroken paternalism can possibly cultivate change.

The “as a white woman” should go after “me” to avoid your readers’ doing a double take to see if you have committed the dreaded dangling modifier. The modifier “as a white woman” is misplaced. Adverbs can travel; but the only adjectives that travel are participles. Ordinary adjectives come right before or right after the word they modify.

The office makes the leader, given a supply of intelligence and energy and passion. Clearly, it has already begun to shape Clinton.

Dump “clearly.”

Patty Ryan can be reached at pryan@sptimes.com.

[Last modified January 27, 2008, 01:56:04]

All four have punctuation errors. All write with competence. I choose Ryan’s as best style in these samples. Her sentences possess a thrust that throttles them forward with power. She is clear, writing's number one goal.

I do not speak of the great imaginative writers. They set rules; they don't follow them. Sometimes I have read a Faulkner sentence a dozen times to get it. Cormac McCarthy, overpraised in my opinion because of the dearth of good writers around now, feeds off Faulkner but can’t touch the bottom rung of his ladder to greatness. Faulkner is our best writer. His preeminence has everything to do with complexity and little to do with easy clarity. Faulkner can be work. “The Jail” is two sentences total.

The beginning of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is replica of the start of “Barn Burner.” Nobody will ever make a movie that is better than the words of "Barn Burner." The movie “Country for Old Men” is better than the book.

McCarthy’s shtick in Blood Meridian is abstruse vocabulary. He overdoes the device.

Mc Carthy now lives in New Mexico in one of those multimillion-dollar faux adobe structures with over half of the state’s mostly Hispanic people’s living under the poverty line.

I did like the wolf in the McCarthy’s border trilogy.

To propitiate my old man, I also reviewed Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd in Grammargrinch.com. The NYT has 150 copy editors. I don't know what they do.

I have critiqued the writing of six women in all. Now I can get back to guys--especially the ones who would not have their jobs were they not male. That category includes Le Tash. See my critique of this undeserving pooh-bah's writing on the TampaBayGrammarGrinch.blogspot.com.

No one will be surprised that I pick Dowd from the six women writers as best. She makes clumsy grammar errors and overuses commas. But her writing features imagination, verve, wit, and grace notes such as easy references to classical literature. Somewhere along the line she got a solid liberal-arts education.

There’s a new guy writing op eds there: Cohen. He nips at Dowd's heels in excellence of a different kind. He’s more sophisticated, more European, more worldly than she. He is also more erudite. Dowd reads a lot of pulp trash you can tell from her easy allusion to pop culture. You get no popular allusions in Cohen. But Cohen can work in a “shudder in the loins” from “Leda and the Swan” while talking about the French sexual situation with as much deft indirection as a faculty-lounge habitué who teaches Yeats for a living. Cohen does not have Dowd’s prescience, however, about character, her ability pull off a leaping arc from the petty politician she dissects to put the character in his or her place in the wider firmament of the political meaning of the country.

But Dowd is not for sustained read. She would wear on one because she is a vignette person. Cohen you would stick with to the end of a book-long piece of writing because he writes with more self-aware craft and more secure grasp of the height and breadth of his larger meaning in a more capacious world than does Dowd. That’s my read of the two anyway.

I met Sulzberger when he came to Poynter: he's not one of the great intellects of the Western world. I got his attention as a shareholder and begged him to hire another woman to join Dowd in op ed. He smirked that he had already hired a man.

I sold my stock.

lee

2008-01-20T21:32:00.000-08:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay area publications

Editors:

My husband and I disagreed on your editorial since he favors Hillary and I Obama. That you made no comma errors quite beguiled me in addition to your recommending my choice for president.

You, however, made one error that is rather more sophisticated than your usual comma errors. Here it is: “What separates these two candidates are not the issues.”

Your subject is the single noun clause “What separates these two candidates.” Your verb should be “is,” not “are.” One makes the verb agree with the subject, not with the predicate nominative “issues.”

I will post this on TampaBayGrammargrinch.blogspot.com for the edification of those who care about language.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Le Matus Wrestles with Commas

2008-01-09T23:00:00.000-08:00

By RON MATUS, Times Staff Writer
Published November 2, 2007

My guess is that some biggy assignment person at the SPTimes told Mr. Matus to write this article on fake degrees because the editor considers Ron smart.

Making dopey mistakes when the subject is such would look ill.

Mr. Matus seems one of the smart kids in the back of the class who does well on his essay, but he has trouble with what plagues most writers: commas.

Yet experts say there are still hundreds of institutions cranking them out, and hundreds of thousands of them listed on resumes.

Matus here makes the most common comma error: superfluous comma. The comma after “out” splits a compound predicate nominative. “hundreds” and “hundreds.”

"Many state governments still allow use of fake or substandard credentials by their own employees" and many local governments are "stuffed" with them, said Alan Contreras, who heads Oregon's Office of Degree Authorization and testified on the issue before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 2004.

The easiest comma rule is the two-independent-clauses rule. Here Matus misses it: a comma follows “employees” inside the quotation marks at the end of the first independent clause.

In an initial interview, McNeil said he couldn't remember the names of any classes or instructors, or whether he wrote a master's thesis.

The comma after “instructors” is redundant. It splits compound direct-object noun clauses of “said”: “said [that] he couldn’t remember…” or “whether he wrote…”

Since the department requires academic degrees for some promotions and pay raises, "we better make sure it's a legitimate degree," Slapp said.

The beginning of a quoted sentence gets a capital.

I can't keep the text from blowing up this way below. Commas I know. Graphics are a mystery.

CHEA thinks states can do more. In a letter to all 50 governors earlier this year, the organization offered its help in crafting state laws, and cited a federal bill filed by Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minnesota, as a model. Substandard degrees everywhere

The comma after “laws” is redundant: it splits a compound verb: “offered” and “cited.”

Verification is lax, particularly in public sector jobs.

The comma after “lax” is redundant: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase modifying the predicate adjective “lax.”

That his boss makes worse errors below may assuage Mr. Matus's ego. From the looks of Mr. Tash's essay, one would infer that inferior writing skills lead to the top in the newspaper racket. ldd

Pulitzer Misfires: Inducts Tash

2007-12-17T07:51:00.000-08:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa- Bay-area publications

Mr. Graham, Pulitzer Prize Committee Chair:

Had I known in 2006 that Paul Tash got the nod to join the Pulitzer Committee, I would have protested the appointment on two grounds: sexism and grammar.

Sexism: The committee’s female membership is 5 out of 17: 30 percent. Women are more than fifty percent of the population. They should have nine members on the committee and the guys eight. Fair is fair.

Mr. Tash’s addition increased the disparity and not only that: his newspaper masthead is a male locker room. I ran a study a few years ago, and most of the front-page bylines were male. And this misogyny comes from a man with two daughters.

Besides, Mr. Tash’s essay below shows he has not mastered the basic tool of his trade: writing. He messes up commas, stumbles into subject-verb-agreement felonies, and writes in a rhetorical style that sounds as if he just stepped off the bus from his natal state of Indiana. I don’t know if Le Paul aims to mimic faux Noble Savage or whether he thinks his is a beguiling untutored style.

Mr. Tash graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University. I think that fact does Indiana University no credit. I understand that all you have to do to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Indiana is to pick the hayseed out of your teeth by your junior year.

Indiana University has a Phi Beta Kappa chapter despite its being the site of that movie about the Cutters and the university soi-disant football aristocratic knights of the Indiana Round Table—God knows how it got a chapter with the PBK snoots that infest the national office.

I don’t see Mr. Tash at any PBK hoedowns in the Tampa Bay area with the forlorn souls that stand as the local intellectuals that leaveneth the whole lump in these know-nothing badlands, the denizens of which inhabit Mr. Tash’s readership lists.

I haven’t heard that Le Tash has put in a good word for USF to get a PBK chapter even though one is sure that it deserves one as much as Indiana University does--probably more.

I infer that the PBK leaders went to Indiana in an antic mood and awarded the University of Indiana a chapter as a lark because they were liquored up on a Lost Weekend. PBK refuses pleas from USF for a chapter, the snotty utter toads.

So the area’s university stands bereft of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter because carpetbagger Tash refuses to throw his weight around and lobby for one. What good is it to be the Times publisher and now member of the flossy Pulitzer sexist board if you can’t help the home team get a PBK chapter for Pete’s sake?

Don’t let the LA Times’s Scott Timberg’s pretensions (below) of drama expertise rattle you. Never kowtow to an intellectual-manqué who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow in grammar and punctuation when he lectures you on drama aesthetics. Le Scott is the old miles gloriosus of Greek dramaturgy, the blowhard stock character.

Make a pledge to run any future Pulitzer committee- member appointments by me because I can see from the lopsidedness of the male-female count that you can’t handle this issue.

I infer this sexist statistic is a dimension of male Pulitzer male performance anxiety. I shall forward the dilemma to the CDC for official investigation of Pulitzer sexual malaise and also for a review of the Cialis-Viagra conglomerates, which have an interest in outcomes. These investigations are bound to reveal that if PBK headquarters committee men imbibe Cialis or Viagra p.o, IV, or subq, they will make decisions on the sex of members to induct with more tranquil psyches and thus right the sexual disparity before the ice in the North Pole melts from green gases.

Meanwhile, you must send Le Paul Tash to remedial grammar-punctuation training as a condition of his remaining on the committee, and you must not trust Mr. William Safire to instruct him on commas. I did my best to teach Mr. Safire comma lore when he was the token-conservative columnist at the NYT, where he reigned as in-house intellectual and saboteur of commas. He suffers invincible ignorance in the area, and y’all should kick him off the committee to make room for another woman.

Mr. Tash's wife is an English teacher whom he could have consulted to correct his literacy problems. But men of Tash's ilk think we wimmenfolk are for childbearing, slopping the hogs, and holding up a mirror to them to reflect them twice their size.

I ask that you give a copy of this missive to all members of the Pulitzer committee to fast and pray over.

I expect the five women on the committee to be Aunt Toms as were the legions who joined the male misogynists in calling the suffragists “hyenas in petticoats, ” John Knox's putdown, during the struggle for suffrage. By some miracle, be there one who protests the lopsided sexist count on the Pulitzer committee, she is my girlfriend. If not, she is Phyllis Schafley’s girlfriend and must use Phyllis’s cement-based hairspray for life.

(Ms.) Lee Drury De Cesare (middle Valkyrie in pink at the Women’s March for Choice in Washington, DC, at which she had the thrill of being called a Jezebel by a curbside born-again bigot even though she is a granny of ten.)

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Lee_decesare@yahoo.com

Grammargrinch.blogspot.com

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Pulitzer Puttering

LA Times' Scott Timberg has more dope on the backstage drama of Drama at the Pulitzers, 2007:

The 17-member Pulitzer board couldn't reach a required majority vote on the nominees and faced a second consecutive year without awarding a prize in drama, Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said Monday. "Rabbit Hole” had been "mentioned favorably" in the jury's report, Gissler said, and the board, by a required three-quarters majority, Redundant commas: the adverbial prepositional phrase is restrictive. sidestepped the nominees and gave it the prize.

So, to recap, here's what happened. The "jurors" There is no reason to put quotation marks around this word. selected to nominate plays (Ben Brantley, Paula Vogel, two regional theatre critics, and a Haverford English professor) submitted three titles they deemed the best of the year. Surprisingly, and to their credit, the redundant adverb and cliché phrase are wordy: dump both. all three were relatively Wordy redundant adverb. little known, aesthetically and/or politically Jettison clunky redundant adverbs. challenging pieces nowhere near Broadway. They were:

"Orpheus X" by Rinde Eckert
"Bulrusher" by Eisa Davis
"Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue" by Quiara Alegría Hudes

Now some are already chiming in with ho-hum reactions to having seen these. I didn't see them. But I'm still impressed that the jury (a jury that included the New York Times lead drama critic!) went ahead and The exclamation point is excessive; “went ahead and” sounds like a hillbilly verb. Dump. submitted such refreshing and unorthodox Forego one of these adjectives. titles without even making a gesture not only to Broadway, but the comma splits compound adverbial prepositional phrases. even to sanctioned nonprofit "safe houses" for new plays like Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Rep, etc.

So then those three titles had to be voted on Passive verbs vitiate: edit to “So the gang of seventeen had to vote on…” by the gang of seventeen. TimThere is no known mechanics rule that justifies this use of italics. Who are these Pulitzer Board members, you may ask?

In alphabetical order:
Lee C. Bollinger, President, Columbia University

Danielle Allen, Professor, Departments of Classics and Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Jim Amoss, Editor, Times-Picayune, New Orleans, La.

Amanda Bennett, Executive Editor/Enterprise, Bloomberg News

Joann Byrd, Former Editor of the Editorial Page, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President, Associated Press

Thomas L. Friedman., Columnist, The New York Times

Donald E. Graham, Chairman, (Chair, goddamit!) The Washington Post

Anders Gyllenhaal, Executive Editor, The Miami Herald

Jay T. Harris, Wallis Annenberg Chair, Director, Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California

David M. Kennedy, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University

Nicholas Lemann, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University

Ann Marie Lipinski, Senior Vice President and Editor, Chicago Tribune

Gregory L. Moore, Editor, The Denver Post

Richard Oppel, Editor, Austin American-Statesman

Mike Pride, Editor, Concord (N.H.) Monitor

Paul Tash, Editor, CEO, and Chairman, St. Petersburg Times

I'll tell you something I notice about this list. None of them, not one, could remotely be considered an artist or even an arts specialist. Given the Pulitzers are a Journalism/Media entity--famous for giving certain highly prestigious awards to the arts, the fact not one critic is on the ultimately decisive board is pretty shocking. And insulting to the arts. This insult to the Pulitzer committee is a fragment and comes from an LATimes reporter who probably had two years of sociology and then started his Grub Street career.

Can you really Jettison superflous adverb "Really" makes writer sound like a California Valley girl. imagine any of these people--let's just say even the New York-based ones--seeing any of the plays nominated? Or is the theatre Hold on: you cannot slip the British spelling in to suggest that your are super refined. going experience of journalist cognoscenti Try "adepts." It's only two syllables, Lord Tim. like Nicholas Lemann and Tom Friedman limited to a token Manhattan Theatre Club subscription?

Ok, I don't know if either of them subscribes to MTC. But it shouldn't surprise us that not even 9 out of this group (that "majority") could get behind any of the three choices of the eminent juror panel. And that a "three-quarters majority" (so, 12?) had no problem completely Redundant adverb overruling them in favor of probably "Perhaps" is two syllables. the only play they had seen all year that fit the qualifications (i.e. it wasn't British, it wasn't Shakespeare, and it wasn't a revival).

Here's another theory: are the scripts of the plays provided for the jurors, and the board, These commas are dead wrong: they cut out the compound object of the preposition "for." to read? Since very Pliestoscene redundant adverb few people saw the nominated plays, one would hope "One would hope': now there's a forlorn cliche used by pantywaists who can't discover a muscular substitute. everyone at least read them. However--while I didn't see them, I know enough about the work of Rinde Eckert and Eisa Davis (basically performance artists Is this the same as actors?) and know from the reviews of "Elliot"--that these are profoundly One day you will choke on these redundant adverbs. visual and performative works. This guy knows no more about What's-his-name's pretentious theory of the performative arts than he knows about Elliot's objective correlative. Nobody would read his book: it was too show-off arcane. In nominating these titles, the jurors were also taking the bold step of saying the most exciting new plays out there are not necessarily primarily O.K. You can have one of these adverbs. You can't have two. literary.

(I can't help wondering if the same problem is what hurt the two-woman AIDS documentary piece In The Continuum--the play rumored to be the juror's favorite last year.)

I can only Knock it off. imagine these three scripts might have been baffling reads for the board. (Imagine reading an avant-garde theatre text for the first time, Superflous comma cuts off a restrictive prepositional phrase. without the visual aid/supplement of performance.) At least, a lot more grueling a read than... Rabbit Hole? This is a fragment. Only Proust and Faulkner get the privilege of fragments, not LATimes reporters with delusions of grandeur.

Yes, Rabbit Hole is easy to like, if The superflous comma cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause. what you ask from theatre is just good story, poignant emotion, and a glamorous lead performance. And, yes, it also hails from both Manhattan Theatre Club and South Coast Rep. (Ok, I dropped those names earlier as a setup. You also pretend to be British and a deep student of modern drama.) So no matter the merits of the play, what a safe, safe Romper Room device of repeating a word for emphasis pick.

Which is probably exactly Superflous adverb what the board considers its charge to do.

All Pulitzer info from the official site. (No direct links to specific pages possible. So, happy hunting!)

Paul Tash speaks:

Thanks very much for the chance to be with you today at the Inland Press Association, and for Redundant comma dividing compound adverbial prepositional phrases the chance to come home for a short while to the Midwest. I grew up down the road a ways in a place called South Bend, Indiana, and went to journalism school at Indiana University. Indiana produces lots of journalists, many of whom migrate to other places -- like Florida. I tell folks that Hoosiers make good journalists, Comma cuts off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause.partly because after Indiana, everything else is interesting. (But only folks from Indiana can say that.)

It was that connection between I.U. and Nelson Poynter that brought me to the St. Petersburg Times, where I started working as a reporter in 1978. If you'd told me then that I would still be at the St. Pete Times 24 years later, I would have been pretty skeptical, because Comma cuts off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause. that wasn't the pattern of the business or the reputation of our newspaper. At that time, the St. Pete Times was sort of "Nelson Poynter's Finishing School for Journalists." But the grown-ups there kept giving me new things to do that always seemed more interesting than what anybody else was offering. Shift in point of view. Lo and behold, the skinny kid who was a cub reporter now finds himself responsible not only for the news report, Comma separates a correlative. but also for the business operations of Florida's largest daily newspaper.

So, I've One can begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction but can't put a comma after it. seen first-hand how the news and business operations of the newspaper relate to each other. Fragment: We allow Faulkner and Proust these but not Tash until he learns where to put commas and where not to put them. How they can get in each other's way, but mostly how they rely on each other.

Okay, I'm a newsie who was steeped in the hard-charging journalism values of Gene Patterson and Andy Barnes, but let me be the first to acknowledge what some of my colleagues in the profession occasionally overlook: for a news organization to be strong, its business operations must be strong.

Last week, for example, the St. Petersburg Times took an unprecedented step for a North American newspaper by buying the naming rights to a major sports and entertainment center. This is persiflage. Everybody knows this move was to twit the Tampa Tribune because the building is in Tampa. That building had been known as: Passive and wordy edit: Use “was.” the Ice Palace, the home to the Tampa Bay Lightning NHL hockey team and a very Strunk & White’s redundant adverb successful concert venue. Now it's the "St. Pete Times Forum." Starting this year, the Times will pay $2.1-million a year, plus provide some free advertising, to have our name on one of the most busy Clunky modifier: “busiest” is idiomatic. and visible places in the Tampa Bay area. Next spring, the St. Pete Times Forum will host the opening rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, dear to the heart of any true Hoosier, and Redundant comma splits a compound verb. is in the running for the Republican National Convention in 2004.

That would be a delicious irony, since Redundant comma cuts off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause. the newspaper for which it is named passive: Use “from which its name comes” has never supported a Republican candidate for president. My favorite quote in the coverage about the name change last week came from a GOP bigwig who noted that most Republicans in Florida had started out as Democrats but had been Dump: change to active voice. converted. "Maybe," he said, "we can even convert the St. Pete Times."

But best of all, Comma severs a restrictive prepositional phrase. from our standpoint, the Ice Palace (oops, make that the St. Pete Times Forum), sits smack dab The Hoosier leitmotif that dominates the diction of this lucubration ranks relentless, but “smack dab” goes too far with the Eiron pose and exposes Tash’s hand. Le Tash thinks his forced folksiness fools us that we are his intellectual superiors when he is the brains in the room. in downtown Tampa, at the heart of the metropolitan region. We think this deal both validates and also advances an image of the newspaper we have been building for the last 15 years: the St. Pete Times is the dominant newspaper throughout the Tampa Bay region. As I mentioned earlier, the St. Petersburg Times is already the largest daily newspaper in Florida, and we sell roughly 110,000 copies a day more than any other newspaper in the Tampa Bay region.

But some folks still have trouble seeing the St. Pete Times as the newspaper for Tampa Bay. Mr. Tash is greedy. The bigots are entitled to their newspaper; The Tribune has served that purpose for many a moon. We think this deal will help us make stronger connections with some key customer groups: national advertisers, especially those 20-something media buyers who move restlessly Redundant modifier through the ad agencies. Young readers, who are not connecting with newspapers the way earlier generations, did. Fragment And readers outside St. Petersburg, especially Redundant adverb readers in Tampa, where our circulation is already showing strong gains -- but where we obviously Redundant adverb want more. Fragment

So, Redundant comma this naming rights deal is designed Passive: use “will bolster.” to bolster our long-term business interests, and Wrong conjunction: “but” makes sense. it will cause some complications for our newsroom. Initially, there was some controversy because the financial terms were not disclosed Passive: "The parties did not disclose..." when the deal was announced. Inept sentence Edit: The parties’ not disclosing the financial terms caused controversy at first. were not open. Even though it was a financial deal between two private companies, some people thought it Two “it’s” in a sentence cause confusion. was hypocritical for a newspaper that presses for public disclosure to keep these numbers private. Edit “Despite the deal’s being between private companies, some people called hypocritical a newspaper’s keeping the numbers private with its history of pressing for public disclosure.”So, No comma three days after the deal was announced, Passive. Edit: “So three days after the agreement, the building owners released the financial terms: This colon gets the support of no known use of the colon. Jettison it. with our support and encouragement.

Longer term, my news colleagues will have to demonstrate show that our coverage of the Lightning, of the St. Pete Times Forum and the concerts that play there Dump. remains clear-eyed and Wordy unaffected by the fact that because our name is on the building. Some media critics and our competitors immediately Redundant adverbs subtract from credibility. They say, “Aw, c’mon. You’ve got to believe me.” criticized our decision, saying it would inevitably blemish our reputation for strong ethics and impartial coverage.

Personally, Redundant adverb I've got more faith in our newsroom to base coverage on the readers' interests and not on our business interests. Twice in my decade as editor, our news coverage has cost the advertising department $1-million in lost business -- without a peep of complaint from the ad folks. And even though we have a substantial marketing sponsorship of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, our lead baseball writer irritated the team owner so much once that he pulled all our newspaper racks from the stadium.

I've also got more confidence in our readers than the media critics may have. The readers will be keeping an eye on us, and they'll quickly Redundant adverb know if we're pulling punches or playing favorites.
Some of our critics have noted that until now, no newspaper has Dump put its name on a stadium or an arena, with the suggestion that journalism ethics have held others back. Our critics are right that the St. Petersburg Times broke new ground last week, but I think Wordy throatclearing the reasons have more to do with business than with journalism.

For one thing, there aren't many competitive newspaper towns left in America. As I said earlier, Jettison stocking stuffer. one of the key factors in our

thinking was the chance to help establish the St. Petersburg Times as the premier newspaper for the entire Redundant adjective Tampa bay area. Only one-third of the circulation of the St. Pete Times is in St. Petersburg itself.

But an even bigger factor is that most newspapers would have a hard time taking on a new expense -- especially during tough economic times. Like all of you, we've noticed that business isn't exactly great these days, and if we were trying only Handwringing present-progressive verb and redundant adverb to boost our profits in the short term, we wouldn't be committing Progressive verbs sound dithering. Simple verbs “tried” and “commit” are crisper and more convincing. to this new level of expense -- about $1.5-million a year above and beyond what we were already spending. spent

On the other hand, Dump; "also" is sufficient transition. we also wouldn't have expanded steadily Redundant adverb into new territories outside St. Petersburg over the last three decades, because Comma cuts off a restrictive adverbial clause. getting each of those new editions established cost money that would have dropped to the bottom line. And consequently, Tiresome redundant adverb we'd have been a nicely Another one profitable little Too coy by far newspaper, hemmed Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive past participial phrase. in on three sides by water and by competitors on the fourth, Stop this metastasis here. Start a new sentence. our own fortunes tied to those of a mid-sized city with limited room for growth and a steadily Redundant adverb younger population base. Instead, our circulation area stretches for nearly 100 miles along the west coast of Florida, and we are increasingly Redundant adverb making good on our business goal: to be the newspaper for all of Tampa Bay.

It has taken a long time and a lot of money and effort to establish ourselves as the hometown newspaper in lots of places beyond our original hometown. It has taken a big circulation force, Redundant comma cutting off a restrictive adjectival infinitive phrase. both to sell and deliver the newspaper. It's taken a big advertising staff, with reps selling into part- and full-run sections. It's taken one of the most complex patterns of production and distribution in the business, as Redundant comma severing a restrictive trailing adverbial clause we try to adapt the various editions to the tastes and interests Dump one. of readers in specific areas.

And most of all, it Pronoun reference: a new paragraph should not start with a pronoun with no antecedent so that the reader must plod back through the previous paragraph to discover it or, worse, to provide the reference him- or herself. has taken a huge commitment to journalism. We have devoted dozens of reporters, editors and photographers -- plus the copy editors and designers to pull their work together -- to local coverage. Those local sections may reach as few as 20,000 subscribers, but a story or photo costs the same to create as if we sent it to the full audience. Andy Barnes, my boss and patron, observed wistfully I shall allow this adverb because of its piquant improbability. One cannot imagine Andrew Barnes’s being wistful. The first time I saw him was when he first came to the area and turned up at a community luncheon carrying a tome by Spinoza or Foucault or some such deep thinker under his arm to remind us rubes what a whiz had reified into our midst. He would flag down people in the street to tell them that he came from The Washington Post. once that we probably spend a greater proportion of our budget on local news than any other newspaper our size. Yes, I agreed, and if we didn't spend so much on local news, we wouldn't be a newspaper our size.

At the outset of my remarks, People want to kill you for this locution. It's fusty, pretentious, and evokes the image of a never-ending lucubration of killing ennui. I acknowledged a point that some journalists need to remember: that the news report can be strong only if the business that supports it is vigorous.

But there's an important corollary that often gets overlooked, especially No comma: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. Cut redundant adverb. in newspaper publishing circles: that a newspaper ultimately can be strong as a business only if its news report and editorial comment is Subject-verb agreement error: report and comment are. worth reading. Sure, profits can be higher this year if we drop a reporter or two, or Redundant comma: the coordinating conjunction between the items in a series replaces any commas. if we can trim some newshole out of the newspaper, or if Redundant comma splits compound dependent clauses.we can cut back on travel and drop some syndicates. Don't get me wrong: if done carefully, all those things can be accomplished Passive verb Edit: we can accomplish… without any real damage to the news report or reader satisfaction. We've taken our share of austerity measures at the St. Petersburg Times to help get us through one of the coldest and longest winters in newspaper advertising that anybody can remember.

But let's not kid ourselves: readers can tell when we're stretching the soup, This is the first fresh metaphor Le Tash has managed to muster. I like it. and if they stop ordering from our menu, we're not left with much of a business.

Al Neuharth, the former chairman of Gannett, spoke to the Florida state newspaper convention last summer -- and scolded this generation of editors and publishers for letting circulation fall during the last decade. Even during a period of great growth in the state population, the combined daily circulation of Florida newspapers had dropped from 3.1-million daily copies to 2.9-million, Neuharth said, and he called those figures "disgraceful."

Part of the problem, Neuharth said, is that too many publishers are focused too much on the bottom line rather than growing their circulation and their business. I thought some of those in the audience would choke on their chicken dinner, given Neuharth's own role in driving up the profits that most owners and investors have come to expect from newspapers. Al Neuharth complaining Possessive before the gerund that we're too focused on profits? What's next? Hugh Hefner suggesting Possessive before the gerund we're too obsessed with sex?

But I was reminded of another speech I heard this year. At the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Jack Fuller of Tribune Company said Commas to set of a nonrestrictive prepositional phrase that the profit magin Make friends with the spell checker to catch goofy errors such as this. of the Chicago Tribune had gone from roughly 8 percent in 1980 to 30 percent by 2000, 20 years later.

Okay, okay. This isn't supposed to be a speech about the right profit level for newspapers. My assignment is to determine whether newspapers can meet their business and journalistic obligations at the same time. For the record: Dump this shop-worn phrase. I don't see how you can publish a great newspaper without having a strong business, and unless you publish an interesting, entertaining, compelling and provocative news report, you won't have much of a business for very long. So from my standpoint, the question about news vs. business values isn't a very productive question because it often leads to some false choices and dead ends.

Here's the problem, from my perspective. Wordy: Dump it. The editors say they need more reporters and newshole. The publishers dismiss them as fuzzy-thinking romantics who don't have a clue about the demands of the business. The editors dismiss the publishers as mouth-breathing, money-grubbing neanderthals. Capitalize. End of discussion. Only Proust and Faulkner have earned the right to fragments.

Think about how the conversation might change if we framed the issue as long-term business values versus short-term business values. In that context, good journalism is a long-term business value. So is Subject-verb agreement: Are circulation development and growth. So is advertising market share. Profit margins, on the other hand, are more a short-term business value. I'm not knocking profits; I'm very much in favor of them. But they are by no means the only measure -- or even the most important measure -- of the health of our businesses.

As a journalist, and I still think of myself as a journalist, With your frail grasp of grammar and punctuation, you do less harm where you are. Keep away from the news room. I'd welcome some fresh terms and new ways of thinking about this debate within our business. It shouldn't just be editors and reporters who are making a ruckus or stirring the pot Cite one or the other: not both. about cutbacks and the potential damage they cause. I get tired of hearing the familiar laments, and some of them are self-interested, arising at the journalism conventions -- and only at the journalism conventions.

Some good folks at the Poynter Institute and other organizations are trying now to develop the business case for good journalism. At the University of North Carolina, Professor Phil Meyer is exploring the statistical connection between a newspaper's circulation and the size of its news staff. But these issues are much too important to the business of journalism to be left only to the journalists.

Imagine how much more healthy and interesting the conversation could be if we had business-side executives -- circulation and advertising directors -- asking pointed questions about a declining audience, what it means to the business, and No comma between a compound noun restrictive appositive what we can do to shore up our claim on the time and attention of readers.

As an editor, I'd welcome the company. We might even have Al Neuharth standing with us. And if nothing else, that would make many of the editors I know stop cold in their tracks and take a fresh look at their positions.

Thanks very much for your kind invitation and attention today. I'd be pleased to hear your reactions and observations.

Paul Tash is editor and president of the St. Petersburg Times. He delivered these remarks to the Inland Press Association on Sept. 12, 2002.

Le Gailey Gets Scrutiny

2007-11-17T17:00:00.000-08:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay publications

La Gaceta is on Grammargrinch's schedule to suffer examination this time; but I have misplaced my last copy and must wait until the next one makes it to the beach by Conestoga. La Gaceta doesn't have an online edition. Le Patrick is too parsimonious to mount one.

Clinton can duck but she can't hide

Mr. Gailey's title shows standard newspaper neglect of capital protocol for titles not to mention punctuation. My theory says people who check the literacy of these essays have decided that it's too taxing to learn capital and punctuation rules.

Here's the standard for the civilized world:

Clinton Can Duck, but She Can't Hide

By PHILIP GAILEY, Editor of Editorials
Published November 4, 2007

And Slick Hilly remember Slick Willie? got away with it until Wednesday night's debate in Philadelphia, where she stumbled badly two months before the primary voting begins in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Le Gailey has mispunctuated his dig at Hillary. Here’s how he should have done the deed: “And Slick Hilly—remember slick Willie?—got away with it…."

Her aides portrayed Clinton, the runaway front-runner coming into the debate, as the victim of a gang mugging - poor, defenseless Hillary is slapped around by a bunch of mean male bullies.

Passive verbs rank escutcheon of mean male bullies. That breed is as dumb as turnips. Mr. Gailey can put himself in gallantry’s sharp-witted minions by recasting his passive verb to an active one: “A mean bunch of male bullies slap poor, defenseless Hillary around.”

If she was the victim of anything, it was of her own doubletalk.

I don’t know whether newspaper readers’ putative 6^th-grade reading level prevents Mr. Gailey’s using the subjunctive mood in the verb—“If she were…”--or whether he doesn’t know this refinement of grammar. That he doesn’t is possible because I believe he went to the University of Georgia, which the English faculty all came straight off Georgia farms as did Mr. Gailey, so its members are still learning to pronounce trompe d’oil without a cornpone accent before they move on to the mysteries of the subjunctive mood.

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage hews to subjunctive protocols of uptown grammar. But NYT flossy writers went to Harvard and Yale and had the subjunctive mood drilled into them in required course Preciosity 101. Outback types such as journalists hereabouts may not have heard of the rule or sneer at it as too effeminate for ruff `n tough-BayArea journalists. If the St. Petersburg Times has a style book, it should put that document on line for us readers to check such details of literacy. Don't tell me that the SPT does not have a style book. Such gaucherie does not get its staff invited to sit on the Pulizer Committee.

The Philadelphia event was exactly what a presidential debate should be. Candidates should face tough questions and be held accountable for their answers. Contrary to the postdebate spin of the Clinton campaign, it is not a personal attack or piling on when candidates aggressively grill and challenge each other on important issues facing the next president.

Here are some details of style for Le Phil to ponder: The “exactly” redundant adverb is the kind that Strunk & White eschews. “Aggressively” is another.” Be held” is passive and weakens his sentence. Crisper is “…and the voters should hold them accountable for their answers.” Dump the adverbs.

“Postdebate” should be “post-debate.” “It” constructions are wordy: a writer concerned with style makes spare use of them. Edit: “Candidates’ grilling and challenging each other is not personal attacks.”

How dare anyone try to interfere with her cakewalk to the nomination.

This question is rhetorical, but it deserves a question mark.

On another matter, the former first lady was asked if she would release her correspondence with the president, papers that are locked away at Bill Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock.

Passive verbs rank flaccid. Rhett Butler never used them. He knew that he couldn’t win Scarlett if he did because such he-men as Rhett intuit that Georgia belles hold a deep antipathy for men who use passive verbs on the ubiquitous powder-room theory that men who use passive verbs harbor etiolated spermatozoa. “Russert asked the former First Lady (gets capitals) if she would release her locked-away correspondence from the Clinton Little Rock library.

Does any of it really matter? Only to voters who believe it is not too much to expect presidential candidates to level with them.

Mr. Gailey’s level of writing does not entitle him to indulge in artful fragments. We allow those in Faulkner, Proust, or even Dowd—but not Gailey. The redundant adverb “really” makes Mr. Gailey sound like a California Valley Girl.

Stuffing in two redundant adverbs is bad enough. But worse is resorting to two “it’s” in the exit paragraph and leaving readers to scratch their heads about vague pronoun reference. Perhaps this editorial-page-editor quidnunc means this: “Does Ms. Clinton’s evasive style matter? It does to voters who believe she should level with them."

In the comment section below this Gailey essay on Hillary, one woman says that Mr. Gailey never mentions a woman politician without knocking her. Just as I suspected, given the male-locker-room status of the St. Petersburg Times masthead.

This churlishness comes from Mr. Gailey’s Georgia upbringing. I was born in Georgia and can affirm that we have some of the most sexist louts in the country holed up in Georgia filling-station culture, hell holes of misogyny in the small towns that festoon the state. I bet that’s where Le Gailey spent every waking minute of his youth.

The filling-station matriculants never change. Their early lives amongst the tires (“tars”), wrenches (“ranches), and oil (“aw-yul”) fumes rearrange their neurons for good. Their synapses grow to be set in stone on the question of womankind’s unsuitability for the rigors of filling-station status or male news locker room. I have heard my male cousins call women “slatterns” at family gatherings. I think that’s worse than hip-hop hos. Mr. Gailey is hip deep in this malignant attitude toward women in journalism. His baleful influence explains the paucity of women on the masthead.

May cow dung be rained on this editorial-page pooh-bah’s sexist head and may his crops lie fallow in the fields. May he also suffer anaphylactic shock from both Viagra and Cialis.

Other than that, may he have a nice day.

Now We Know the Mystery of the Root of "Political Whore"

2007-10-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay are publications

A Mystery Solved at Last:

Why Wayne Garcia of Creative Loafing Calls Himself a Whore

Why Le Wayne Garcia calls his Creative Loafing column “Political Whore” poses no puzzle for parlor psychology whizzes such as I. Reading Uncle Freud’s self-help books filled in gaps in my intuition about why people act as they do.

I spent a whole summer on my grandma’s Georgia farm when I was in high school during which I did nothing but pick cotton and read the entire Freud oeuvre from soup to nuts. At summer’s end, I had not only my cotton-picking money from grandma but also a morganatic marriage from lore gained from my reading Uncle Freud. I had read my way to a toehold in the psychobabble craft that entitled me to hang up my shingle. So I never hesitate to weigh in on what makes people tick. Who would demur with my bona fides?

Remember when Samuel Beckett says in Waiting for Godot that men are born astride the grave?

Bingo. That’s the key to Wayne’s “whore” fetish. Uncle Sigmund offers insight into Le Garcia’s revealing column title in “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Sexual Life.”

We have in Wayne’s “Political Whore” instant diagnosis of his problem: Wayne’s afraid of women. Male terror of women was the roadblock in the 60’s to us women’s passing the ERA. The guys got spooked because they thought women already had enough astride-the-grave power as it was and shuddered to think of the consequences for the patriarchy of men’s consenting to ladies’ having more.

If you want more telling detail about Beckett’s metaphor, faites attention: The grave of which the fellows stand astride is the female vagina—scary phenomenon that explains all the Dempsey Dumpsters of pornography churned out to denigrate women’s sexuality so as to vitiate male pornography scaredy cats’ fear of being astride the grave in Beckettsian metaphoric terror.

Pornography allows men to regard women’s sexuality with contempt and to fool themselves that they are not scared of it. Then they go and give themselves away by naming their columns “Political Whore.” It’s analogous to the “Baby- baby-don’t- get-hooked-on-me” stance of over-the-hill bikers with Viagra commercials in the background’s blowing their cover.

So Wayne blazons his psychological affliction in his column title out in front of God and everybody. It didn’t take me but about the time required to pick a sack of cotton and put a few rocks in it to cheat grandma to figure out Wayne’s problem.

Were Wayne’s male-security quotient as robust as his gym-scale reading, he would call his column “Political Warlock.”

Blatant allusion to women’s degraded whore status in which men can buy sex and hence control it as Wayne’s “Political Whore” security blanket trumpets is one thing: a man’s fear of the danger of women’s bloodsucking sexual power over him is another, closer to the bone of male psychological angst. Wayne might as well wear a placard saying, “I’m scared of girls.”

That “whore” invocation is Wayne’s whistling-past-the-graveyard’s talisman against his fear of women. He could have revealed even more defensive fright had he used “Political Ho” instead of the more formal “Political Whore.” That restraint means Wayne, poor devil, has not reached bottom yet of his female terror pathology.

I recommend group therapy and Halcyon to Wayne. He should also up his intake of Vitamin E and, budget permitting, take the waters at Baden-Baden.

Wayne would do well to sign up for grammar-punctuation therapy for its psychological therapeutic value (see below for proof of Wayne’s runaway grammar-punctuation malaise), not to mention his professional advancement. The New York Times has advertised for a recovering astride-the-grave writer from an outback alternative publication in which astride-the-grave males occupy all the jobs except that of gofer, which is x-chromosome in Wayne’s Creative Loafing bailiwick , where Beckett’s Syndrome runs rampant. A girl gofer makes the astride-the-grave boys feel superior and able to forget for a time their being astride the grave.

These observations are not fantastic; they come from solid science. Check with the CDC.

Neither Uncle Freud nor even Jung--late-blooming smart aleck who came up with the “collective-unconscious” racket and then stuck his tongue out at his master, Freud--ever discovered the grammar aspect of the astride-the-grave malady. That’s my contribution. I added my bit to the NFL starting line-up of Vienna psychiatrists’ advice to the lovelorn on the subject of comma pathology—a sneaky aspect of the astride-the-grave disease that nobody but one from the Other Side—me-- could spot and delineate.

I expect to win a Nobel laureate for this contribution since the Nobel guys think I am y-chromosome from my first name. George Elliot knows what I am talking about. Only seven of the 350 Nobels in science have gone to women thus far, and those women worked their way thorough school as gofers at Creative Loafing including Madame Curie. So I will be the eighth for my comma contribution to the double helix of astride-the-grave psychological mystery, my exceptional status’s being that I served no internship as gofer for Creative Loafing.

Mine thus will be the breakthrough award. Feminists who attend the ceremony in Stockholm will wear Valkyrie breast plates and Manolo Blanick stilettos in the tradition of astride-the-grave couture.

POLITICAL WHORE

BY WAYNE GARCIA

Published 10.24.07

Wayne Garcia Creative Loafing

That young lad, however, has no idea of how bad that three-quarter-page advertisement looked to a handful of businesspeople that have made a quiet crusade out of attracting more overseas flights for an airport closer to home: Tampa International.

Redundant adjective: lads are young by definition.

The Orlando airport ad was made possible, in part, through the financial support of Pinellas County's tax-supported tourism agency, Visit St. Petersburg-Clearwater. That same agency is represented on an airport advisory committee with those same upset Tampa Bay businesspeople. Tampa's airport has long struggled to achieve internationality.

These wimpy passive verbs are sequelae to Wayne’s fragile condition. When he recovers somewhat from his astride-the-grave syndrome, he will signal this advance by adopting active verbs: “The support of Pinellas County’s tax-supported tourism agency made the Orlando airport ad possible.” “The Pinellas tourism agency also serves with these upset Tampa Bay businesspeople on the same advisory committee.”

"I get all lathered up about it because I feel like we should have something more," said Bill Krusen, whose been involved in the aviation business since he was in college and was chairman of the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority in the mid-1960s.

Astride-the-grave vagina terror has damaged Le Garcia's synapses, Hence, Wayne stumbles on homophones: he means “who’s,” not “whose.” The “chairman” for generic male power betrays the defensive macho linguistic dimensions of Wayne’s astride-the-grave malady. The lad is far gone, far gone.

Tampa International currently has just five nonstop to foreign destinations, the most prominent being London. A few years back it had 10.

“Currently” and “just’ are redundant adverbs that Strunk & White condemns. The “prominent” should be “prominent’s” for possessive before the gerund.

What's especially sad about how far behind Tampa International has fallen is that commercial aviation was born in Tampa Bay. Tony Jannus famously took care of that with his Benoist Flying Boat hop from St. Pete to Tampa. And 100 years ago, Tampa was a hub of commerce, with its Latin American connections, cigar manufacturing and excellent water access.

“Especially” is a redundant adverb; so is “famously.” People would not have to backtrack if Wayne would hyphenate “Benoist-Flying-boat” before “hop.” Wayne should ditch the comma after “commerce” and the one after “connections”: these cut off a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase.

Somewhere over the century, however, Tampa Bay lost its edge as a destination. Orlando got Disney World. Tampa's close ties with Cuba were rendered moot nearly 50 years ago after Castro took over. Even Tampa's Latin population was eclipsed by Miami's, aided by the Mariel boatlift.

“However” is a redundant adverb, and Wayne has suffered a relapse into passive verbs. Edit: “Castro’s takeover of Cuba fifty years ago rendered Tampa’s close ties with Cuba moot.” “Aided by the Mariel boatlift, Miami’s Latin population eclipsed even that of Tampa’s.”

Today, if you are traveling from Latin America to the United States, you are likely to go to one of two places first: Miami or New York. Not Tampa Bay.

The progressive verb “are traveling” would be more succinct style as simple present “if you travel.” “Not Tampa Bay” is a fragment. Writers with a sure grasp of grammar and punctuation can use artful play with the rules, but Wayne does not fall into that group. He must attach the “Not Tampa Bay” as a contrasting element to the preceding sentence with a comma.

The Pinellas beaches are a big draw for foreign Disney and Universal Studios visitors who add side trips to St. Pete Beach and Clearwater to their U.S. vacations. Partnering with the Orlando airport not only makes sense but is a matter of beach tourism survival, Pinellas leaders say.

A comma should follow “visitors” for a nonrestrictive adjective clause. Wayne should complete the correlative by inserting “also” after “is”: “but is [also] a matter of beach…”

Analysis of Wayne's writing

Good: he writes a clear sentence and has a sense of structure, His tone is affable. He has a feel for a definitive ending.

Bad: Wayne overuses passive voice and redundant modifiers. The former makes a writer sound weak; the latter makes him sound desperate. One blooper on homophones such as "who's" and "whose" can neutralize a whole column by making the writer sound dumb. Wayne's style is pedestrian. His writing shows no eclat of the occasional piece of unusual diction; neither has he an ear for the music of language. He should read Tennyson to help him with the latter problem. Wayne lacks imaginative verve. He would never dare slip the surly bounds of rhetorical earth and touch the face of God. The reach of his imaginative whimsy is calling his column "Political Whore." That's stale sexism.

Teacher says this essay merits a C.

Seminole Beacon Adds to Comma Clutter

2007-10-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay are publications

Seminole Beacon

Smith still undecided on 2008 re-election bid

By BOB McCLURE

“But if I make that decision (to run again) you’ll be the first to know.”

Comma goes after close of parentheses: introductory adverbial clause.

Smith didn’t address the grand jury investigation last week, but talked about a number of issues involving the tax appraisal process in Pinellas.

Comma after “week” is redundant: it splits a compound verb.

Shrink-Shrank-Shrunk-Shrinking

2007-10-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

Grammar-punctuation blog of Tampa-Bay Publications--Sister Blog of NYT-Washington Post Grammar-punctuation Blog:

grammargrinch.blogspot.com

Bill Adair

St. Petersburg Times Washington Bureau Chief and editor of PolitiFact

Total defense forces also shrunk, from 3.3-million to 2.9-million.

Not only should “shrunk” be “shrank,” but the comma after "shrunk" is also wrong.” It cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

Romney is also correct that the naval fleet shrunk.

As if once were not enough, Le Adair repeats the “shrunk” gaucherie to nail down his illiteracy.

Washington Bureau chief Adair and the beauteous local SPTimes political editor Adam Smith both cuff around grammar and punctuation. They make the Bay-Area press sound like Dogpatch scribblers.

Distinquished Fellow Butch's Passive Verbs and Superfluous Commas

2007-10-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay area publications: sister blog of my most popular blog--Grammmargrinch.blogspot.com--that examines the grammar and punctuation of the NYT and Washington Post.

How Safe Is Your Newsroom? Can election year inspire newsrooms to stop denying their biases -- and start benefiting from them?
By Butch Ward (more by author) Poynter Institute Distinguished Fellow

What does it take to create an atmosphere in which everyone in the newsroom can feel comfortable enough with their views -- or in their skin -- to speak out on behalf of fairness, accuracy, better journalism?

Pronoun antecedent problem: Butch should make the the antecedent "people."

But I can't help thinking what an opportunity was squandered in that conservative editor's newsroom....

Passive verb, wordiness: "I think that conservative editor's newsroom squandered an opportunity...."

Can we identify that middle ground between overt politicking and hiding our biases, in order to utilize the expertise our biases and interests might have driven us to obtain?

The superfluous comma after "biases" cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. Three-syllable "utilize" should be "use."

Can we master an admittedly difficult balancing act: how to bring our whole selves -- biases and all -- to the office, and put them to good use on behalf of better journalism?

The comma after "office" separates a compound infinitive appositive: "how to bring...and [how to] put...."

Can they trust that their questions and observations won't be dismissed or ridiculed?

Passive verb: "Can we trust that colleagues won't dismiss or ridicule their questions and observations?"

Can they trust that they won't be labeled troublemakers –- or, in the current vernacular of pop management circles –- assholes?

Passive verb and prissy gloss for using vernacular: "Can we trust that their colleagues won't label them troublemakers or 'assholes'?"

In my newsroom, everyone is invited, encouraged, expected to speak up.

Passive verb: "In my newsroom, everyone gets encouragement to speak up."

Tampa Tribune Editorial

2007-10-18T22:30:00.001-07:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay are publications

Lawmakers Should Put An End To Their Property Tax Farce

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 19, 2007

Meanwhile, the House failed to pass any legislation and left town with all sorts of new ideas for tax reductions being floated….

This editorial error has the virtue of resting on sophisticated knowledge of punctuation. There should be an apostrophe after “reducations” for possessive before the gerund: “reductions’ being floated.”

Reform is needed to make Florida's property taxes more equitable and less burdensome.

Editorials suffer from wordiness; passive verbs exacerbate this tendency.

Edit: “Florida’s property taxes need reform to make them more equitable.”

2007-10-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa-Bay-area publications

Grammargrinch-Grammar-Punctuation Dispatch from New Hampshire

The below piece by SPT pin-up beauteous blonde Adam Smith arrived by email this morning because my husband is a Republican. The Florida Republican Party mailed it to all Florida Republicans because it thinks the Adams story makes Democrats look bad.

Its pile-up of lousy grammar-punctuation errors makes Smith look worse.

How did Smith get to be the political editor of the SPT, given his feeble grasp of grammar and punctuation? The SPT masthead-management sexists wouldn’t fund a woman’s larking around New Hampshire bestrewing these grammar and punctuation errors from thence with a hey nonny nonny.

Adams got his job for significant personal beauty and y-chromosome donee, not for the felicity of his writing.

Grammargrinch lee drury de cesare October 16, 2007

Democrats Won't Campaign in "Rinky-Dink" Florida

"Campaign in Fla.? They don't dare"

By ADAM C. SMITH, St. Pete Times Political Editor
October 16, 2007

PLYMOUTH, N.H. - Listen up, readers. I have a dire warning. Something sinister and mysterious is terrorizing the Democratic presidential candidates. I'm afraid I can't yet explain its dark power, but I'm working on it.

The candidates are so terrified of drawing the wrath of Democrats in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, they won't dare kiss a baby, give a speech or talk to a voter anywhere in Florida, except in closed-door, fundraising receptions. So I went to the heart of darkness - New Hampshire - hunting for answers in a place where, legend has it, candidates and citizens talk easily to one another.

Wimpy passive verb correction: “Drawing the wrath of Democrats in Iowa has terrified the candidates.”

The comma after “Nevada” is superfluous. A writer may omit a “that” if it’s not the subject of the subordinate clause; but he shouldn’t replace it with a comma.

The comma after “closed-door” is superfluous. “Closed-door” and “fundraising” are cumulative, not equal, adjectives. The best test is to reverse the adjectives and put an “and” between them: if the phrase sounds even a little strange, the adjectives are cumulative, not equal, and get no comma.

I suggest capitalizing “heart of darkness.” It’s Conrad’s. The capitals would give him oblique credit.

But Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign made it clear the terror is worse than I imagined. I wanted to ask Clinton a couple of questions: about the national catastrophe insurance fund, offshore drilling, maybe Florida's primary. Logic : This list is more than “a couple.” I might as well have asked to show the former first lady my anthrax spores.

"She's only doing local press," Mo Elleithee, a Clinton adviser, explained by phone.

Master Mo misplaces the modifier “only.” It should go before “local.” We give more latitude for errors in speech than in writing. Somebody who doesn’t like Mo could put a sarcastic “sic” after “only, however.”

"And I'm local press from Florida," I said. "But now I'm in New Hampshire, so I'm legal to talk to."

"But you're still from Florida," Elleithee sighed. "A tiger can't change its stripes."

I'm not naive. I understand why candidates might welcome a pledge not to campaign in any state that violated the national party rules by holding a primary earlier than Feb. 5.

For the cash-strapped underdogs - Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, John Edwards and Bill Richardson - signing the pledge was a nice excuse to avoid a state they can't afford to campaign in anyway. They need to concentrate on staying alive in those earliest contests.

Barack Obama and Clinton, however, have the money to compete in America's biggest battleground state. Yet they're scared even to talk to Florida reporters.

"I'm not allowed to talk to the press!" Illinois Sen. Obama shouted back at me recently after I tried shouting from 100 feet away as he left a $1,000-per-person fundraiser in St. Petersburg.

"Isn't it up to you?!"

Obama: "Nope!"

"Aren't you the guy trying to lead the country?!"

Obama: "I signed a pledge!"

None of the candidates would even risk sending their spouses to address the Florida Democratic convention later this month. Imagine the blow to the countless Florida fans of Mrs. Dodd.

Smith’s misplaced the “even” modifier. It should go before “there.”

"These states have conspired to intimidate the presidential candidates. ... They can destroy any presidential campaign," Florida Senate Democratic leader Steve Geller said, explaining why he's about to sue the four early states for alleged voting rights violations.

Candidates who contend they can stand up to al-Qaida are intimidated by the Democratic chairs of South Carolina and Nevada? They seem like such cute little states.

Feeble passive verb: “Can the Democratic chairs of South Carolina and Nevada intimidate candidates who contend they can stand up to al-Quaida?

Would voters in these early states really punish a candidate for courting voters in a major battleground state that held an election after their own?

Dump “really”: it’s that redundant adverb Strunk & White warns against.

Before visiting New Hampshire, I called one of the most influential opinion leaders in Iowa, David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register. He wasn't so sure Iowans would have rejected a candidate who refused to sign the pledge against campaigning for Florida's Jan. 29 primary, though it could have required some explaining.

Why can’t newspapers give newspapers the italics they deserve in Standard English?

"But now it's elevated to a matter of you've given your word," Yepsen said of the pledge. "My perception has always been that people in New Hampshire are much more protective of their primary than Iowans are about their caucus."

So I headed to the Granite State, which has held the nation's first presidential primary for nearly 90 years. I wanted to talk to these fearsome voters.
They didn't seem that scary to me.

In an apple orchard barn, a university gym, a historic theater and at a solar power company, I couldn't find a single New Hampshire Democrat willing to admit they would destroy a candidate for violating the Democratic National Committee's calendar.

“They” should be “he or she” for pronoun-antecedent agreement.

Over and over, these voters professed to be oblivious to the whole issue, or simply unconcerned about pledge violators. So long as Florida wasn't butting in front of New Hampshire, voters said, no big deal.

The redundant comma splits compound adverbial infinitives: “to be oblivious…or [to be] simply unconcerned.”

"You mean the candidates can come to Florida and take money, but not talk to reporters or anybody outside of a fundraiser?" said Brandon Miller, 35, a kitchen manager in Plymouth who was waiting to hear Obama speak. "That would make me mad."

"Candidates should be allowed to speak to voters wherever voters are who want to hear them," said Dana Weaver, who was at a Clinton speech.

"This has nothing to do with real voters," said Steve Medaglia, an engineering consultant. "The power guys that control the party set up these rules to maintain their own control of the party, and the candidates have to kowtow to the power structure in the party. Does anyone really think a lot of voters are not going to support a candidate because that candidate campaigned in Florida or Michigan?"

But then, at last, some Granite Staters bared their dark souls.

"You're a rinky-dink state, and it serves Florida right," barked educator Mary Ann Reynolds, before an Obama rally in Plymouth. "The people of Florida didn't stop Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris from stealing the election in 2000. We don't forget. Maybe we ought to punish Florida more for what happened in 2000."

The comma after “Reynolds” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase modifying the verb “barked.”

At a solar energy company in Merrimack, retired social worker Mary Moriarty initially professed indifference to candidates campaigning to win Florida's primary. But I pressed until she blurted out the truth: "Look what you did to us, you gave us eight years of George Bush, when Al Gore should be our president."

An apostrophe goes after “candidates” for possessive before the gerund “campaigning.” The comma after “us” marks a comma splice. It should be a period or a colon. A comma splice is a grammar felony along with sentence sense, fragment, and spelling.

Shocking, I know. It's hard to believe they could be this angry after all this time. But at least it's an answer, which is more than we're getting from the candidates these days.

Vague pronoun reference: “they” refers to nothing. The writer should replace it with “New Hampshire voters.”

To view article please visit:
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/10/16/State/Campaign_in_Fla_They_.shtml

A woman reporter would never get away with such pile-up of grammar-punctuation errors. Smith does because he is the paper’s WASP-looking-cute-blonde-white-guy born into a world in which he is superior to the female half of the world's population and to all the male coloreds of the earth as well. It's a cushy slot.

Paid for by the Republican Party of Florida. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee. www.rpof.org