“What did you learn in school that turned out to be false?” asked a recent Redditor. One of the response threads by u/KhalilRavana took up the “I before E except after C” chestnut. This post title poked fun at that,…
Oxford commas
I’m on record as being ambivalent about the oxford comma, but I’ve come across a couple good cartoons on the subject lately. and explanation of the other comma:
The Relevance of Composition class
Yet another business person on the importance of writing “correctly” to hiring and working in the real world published in the Harvard Business Review. I tell students every year the LJW and the KC Star post similar letters from business…
using quotes in papers
Quotations – and quotation marks – mean something. In my class and in my edublogs I’ve discussed scare quotes and why quotation marks should not be used to indicate irony – or used merely to emphasize words. When instructors see…
in-text citation – ellipsis
Ellipsis (plural ellipses) deserve some discussion. Check out the following sources: wikipedia Purdue’s online writing center the JCCC writing center on ellipsis In prose, ellipses are not generally needed at the beginning or end of a quote. The rule is…
Semicolons and colons
One of the punctuation issues that recurr most often involves the use of semicolons. This matters because – the way a semicolon functions – if one uses a semicolon where a comma or colon are needed, it creates a sentence…
Scare quotes are Evil
As written earlier I’m seeing too “many” superfluous quotes. Wikipedia calls this Scare Quotes. Avoid this. I don’t like irony conveyed through quotation marks. Use words. And scare quotes don’t work for emphasis. Serious explanation here. Check out the blog dedicated…