Sunday, 8 May 2005

Grammar Shmammar. (rants)

Do you know what I detest? What I detest beyond imagining?

People that don't use punctuation in their email.

Worse than that are unpunctuated, uncapitalized run-on sentences that can mean six things depending on where the reader puts in the commas.

Most of the time, this is no big deal. Who cares if you misread what happened to your busom buddy's boyfriend. She'll correct you if it comes up and you have it all wrong.

But sometimes, it means a lot. Just take the classic grammar example:

An English teacher wrote a sentence on the board and asked the class to punctuate it correctly. What he wrote was simple enough:

A woman without her man is nothing

The males in the class all punctuated it the same way:

A woman--without her man--is nothing.

The females were also uniform. They wrote it as:

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

I'm not the only person that feels so, either.

Lazy bastards. X-|

erin posted this on 8 May 2005, 06:13 PM · updated 8 May 2005, 06:32 PM
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