Comments on: A grammatical interlude

By: Luke

Luke — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:39:26 +0000

Because you shouldn’t write fragments;;;

By: kristen

kristen — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:33:27 +0000

dr. shipe was all about that peer review shit. he said we’d be bombarded with it in college and… i can only recall doing it in one class (a gordon rule class, but of course).

i’m all about freedom from crippling sentence structure! and i’m all about using latin phrases. if there was a “like” button on this page, a la facebook, i’d be all up on it.

By: Jordon Kalilich

Jordon Kalilich — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:27:00 +0000

It really is peer editing, if you could call it editing. I’d call it kind of a waste of time.

By: TJ

TJ — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 13:50:38 +0000

yeah… i hated peer review BS… i hated having to turn in a rough draft for that matter. my teacher would make us turn in a rough draft (not for a grade, but would affect our final grade) and exchange copies of our rough draft with people in the class. it was such a waste of time. i never really got constructive feedback. and other times i would just feel really bad, cause some of the essays i read felt like they were written by a 5 year old.

By: Keith

Keith — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 03:41:03 +0000

we peer-reviewed each other’s research papers. And no, I’m not talking about fact checking; I mean basic stuff like proofreading

Isn’t that called peer editing? That’s what it was called when I was in English 099 and English 101 anyway.

it assumes that each person knows more about writing than someone else

I think the reasoning behind it is to get a second opinion.

liking cookies too much might make you fat

I’m visual proof of that.

So, English teachers, can you please stop saying that a sentence can never begin with “because”?

They also tell us not to end a sentence with a preposition. What do they do that for? Seriously, as long as you use the object correctly (“Whom am I hiding from” to quote Star Trek II), it’s valid English (it’s my understanding the the preposition limitation is based on a limitation of Latin and isn’t a valid criticism of an English sentence; ditto with split infinitives).

And yes, I realize that I’ve started a sentence with a coordinating conjunction seven times

If it’s good enough for the Bible, it should be good enough for at least 80% of us :)

I thought it was obvious, but there’s a long Wikipedia article about it: the evenness of zero.

Not that it makes that much difference.

The price of a first-class stamp is going up so often that by the time I remember what it is, it’s changed again.

People still use mail? It reminds me of the part of that episode of Seinfeld:
Kramer: I want to stop getting mail.
Newman: But how are you going to contact people?
Kramer: Telephone, telegrams, email
Newman: How are you going to pay your bills?
Kramer: I’ll let the bank take care of it.
Newman: The bank. It’s true, no one needs the mail. You think you’re so smart for figuring that out?