14 Sep Fun with Grammar
Reading a justifiably nasty review of Meghan McCain’s Dirty, Sexy Politics, I came across this unintentionally funny gem:
The most obvious problem with Dirty, Sexy Politics is that grammatically, the book appears to be the work of a high school sophomore. To be more accurate, it appears to be the first draft of an essay written for a high school English class; the one turned in before the teacher makes all the pretty red marks in the margin that helpfully keep students from turning in final papers riddled with comma abuse, sentence fragments, and incorrect punctuation. Each subsequent page of this book contains one grisly crime against the English language after another.
Pop quiz: how many of the errors decried by the reviewer does the reviewer himself commit?
My punctuation skills are poor, so I only see one, maybe two errors. The semicolon in the middle of the second sentence should be a comma; my rule is that the part following the semicolon needs to be able to stand as a proper sentence on its own.
Would “To be more accurate:” be better?
But this paragraph is a gem, is it not?
sean s.