Grammarama

Comma splices are tricky things. In most cases, grammar and style guides consider them a big no-no. A comma splice is typically two separate and independent clauses joined by a comma without a conjunction.Take these awesome Foreigner lyrics, for example:I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me.Looks like a run-on sentence, doesn’t it?There are a few easy ways to correct the problem.1. Insert a conjunction after the comma:I wanna know what love is, and I want you to show me. 2. Make the clauses two separate sentences:I wanna know what love is. I want you to show me. 3. Make one clause dependent on the other clause:Because I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me. 4. Change that misguided comma into a semicolon:I wanna know what love is; I want you to show me. Easy enough, right? But here’s the thing - in some cases, such as in poetry and song lyrics and even biblical verse, comma splices are okay. So Foreigner passes today’s class.

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This week, I had the opportunity to write distractor choices for the English test questions we’ve been working on. The student would be presented with one paragraph, and then 5 choices of potential matches - one of which would be the same identical paragraph and the other 4 would follow the same structure, pattern, and beginning word letters. I thought writing these would be fun, almost like Mad Libs, but boy was I wrong. After you’ve used 8 different verbs that start with the letter “h”, there aren’t many left. I had to take a sentence like, “Paul was a blacksmith in Boston before the Revolutionary War,” and turn it into “Paula was a bodyguard in Brooklyn before the Real World,” and “Polly was a bookkeeper in Berlin because of Reading and Writing.”

Once my brain stopped being able to come up with new ideas, I did a little googling and found these sites, which I’d imagine would be useful for writers in any area.

Free Action Verb List for Writers
List of Common Adjectives

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University of Pittsburgh Press tries digital publishing

I’m all for the digitization of books and media for the ultimate goal of universal access, but as this article states, we’re still pretty far from reaching that, and that’s a pretty great expectation to begin with. Like, in a perfect world, everyone could access the same resources at the same time from completely different places. Sounds cool - but there’s so much more involved, and copyright is a major factor that’s still in the works. As a first semester MLIS student, this stuff fascinates me, but I don’t feel qualified enough to say much about it, except that I like it. I think.

I think it’s pretty sweet that Pittsburgh has two solid digital publishing projects off the ground - this and CMU’s Million Book Project.

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On Friday, I was trying to find a rule regarding whether or not a comma is ever needed before the word ‘then’ (when used as a conjunctive adverb - as in, “Then, we went to the park.”). While I was searching, I happened upon this absolutely lovely website for the Music City Romance Writers.

It is a Nashville-based collective resource for writers of romantic fiction, among other things, and it has this handy grammar section that’s totally amusing and informative. Their resident “Grammar Wench” posts about the inherently evil nature of present participle phrases and the proper ways of punctuating dialogue (which, when it comes to steamy sex scenes, I’d imagine could wander pretty far from the rules.) Some gems from her handy posts:

“Blah, blah, blah,” said the Grammar Wench. “Comma, comma, comma chameleon.” You’ll notice that punctuation is inside the quotation marks — the comma after that last blah, the period after chameleon, the question mark after stuff. The quotation marks are double apostrophes, if you will, and if you quote something inside them, you use a single mark. This follows the conventions of American printers, as opposed to British. This has such few exceptions I’m not going into any of them here.

Using his ghostly ability to cop a feel allowed Sir Pennywhistle to discover that Amelia was one bodacious babe.The subject is “using (etc.)”. The verb is “allowed”. Sir Pennywhistle is a perv. The gerund phrase is the subject, not a participial phrase, which is more evil than a noun phrase or Sir Pennywhistle’s appreciation of Amelia’s bounty.

Another example:“My goodness!” Amelia said. She quickly realized [that being felt up by a ghost was practically orgasmic], so she invited Sir Pennywhistle to materialize in her bed.The subject of the noun clause which beings with “that” is “being (etc.)” and the verb is “was”. Just be aware that the ingyness of such can still trip up a reader’s ear if overused, especially in the first example.

I am thankful to have stumbled upon the Grammar Wench. She’s wonderful. By the way, a comma before the conjunctive adverb ‘then’ is necessary if the adverb is in the beginning of the sentence - as is my example above. Then comma we went to the park. This information is according to

The Holt Handbook

by Kirszner, and Mandell, fifth edition.

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