About My Blog
I've taken some criticism about my blog, particularly regarding my usage of commas. I told someone that I would review it and edit it, but having re-read some of it, I've determined that I do not overuse commas. I use them very deliberately and carefully. I use more commas than most people, because I am Mahmir on English Diqduq. That means that I am very old school. I'm not talking about Early-Mid-20th Century. I'm talking about 18th Century. If it were up to me, we'd be capitalizing all nouns.
If you read anything from before the establishment of the United States of America, and even a little after its founding, you will see a lot more commas in writings from that era than in my blog. Even my first post.
So, people whose last names rhyme with their attitudes, need to stop, take a step back, look around, take in their surroundings, smell the roses, and enjoy a good book. How about one of the classics - or, perhaps, may I suggest, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It's a great book, and it contains quite a lot of history of the English language and grammar.
I'll post again sometime soon.
Until next time,
Seth
posted by Seth at 2/21/2005 05:02:00 PM
1 Comments:
This is a good humra to maintain. Judicious use of commas (and the rest of the written language) makes one's writing much more understandable. A classic example of the consequences of underuse of commas is the apocrychal dedication “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” (Google found a good quotation of this on this page.) Now there's an unlikely shidduch if I ever saw one.
Also from that site (which is looking more and more interesting), Google suggested this column on "begging the question."
I'm glad to see you're following certain other advice you got from people who's last names rhyme with the flowers you want them to smell.
Speaking of metabloggery (which the aforementioned advisors suggest that you move beyond some day), what is your position on capitalizing all transliterated Hebrew (or Aramaic) words? I used to follow that convention myself, but I ended up writing sentences like "HaMishpat HaZeh Nir'eh K'tzat M'shuneh," which it does. So now, I only capitalize transliterations as I would if they were English, so Shaharit would make the cut, but not Mahmir.
I hope your other commenters don't mind my overuse of parentheses. But then, they're unlikely to care, since I'm not the blogger here.
11:59 AM
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