GrammarPhile Blog

The following guest post was written by one of our former editors, Lynnette Goldy. Here's an example of something that really gets Lynnette steaming!

Has this affliction crept into your writing? Keep an eye out for “There is” and “There are” beginnings to your sentences. They can almost always be turned around for tighter prose and for variety’s sake. 

Today, I thought I'd share a question from a visitor to our site and the response given by Phil Jamieson, president of ProofreadNOW.com.

We, like many people I know who frequent sites like Amazon, ESPN, and even my newest favorite, BackyardChickens.com, have recently been overrun with banner ads for a new 'proofreading' service. It seems a group of Internet enthusiasts convinced some California venture capitalists to come up with $5 million and started what they hope is a competitor to ProofreadNOW.com. Replete with content-free buzzwords ("the 'secret sauce' is in how we process documents"), this service offers cheap proofreading in a blistering 24 hours.

I don't know about you, but personally I'm glad to see the end of 2010! It was a challenging year for many of us. I can't quite remember a year when I have known so many people who have lost their jobs, been forced to move, or have lost loved ones.

The world of proofreading is not immune to the sugar-cookie siren song of the holidays, and at this time of year (yes, I really do this) I like to take a moment to re-read a favorite essay about punctuation.

It’s no secret that proofreaders have their pet peeves. For this proofreader, the error that leaps off the page of nearly every written communication—from emails, to letters, to newspaper articles, to business documents, to her children’s compositions (a painful admission)—is the often undiagnosed comma splice. So prevalent has this mistake become that it fails to catch the attention of even the most prolific writers and copyeditors, and is considered normal and acceptable punctuation.

Thanks for reading our GrammarPhile blog.

Have you ever noticed that many professional letters you receive at your home or business are absent one very important piece of information—the date? If I had a gold dollar for every piece of correspondence that was prepared without a date at the top to indicate when the news was issued, I could afford to miss every deadline imposed by their limited-time offers:

Everyone remembers that childhood game, right? The one where you couldn’t take a step forward unless you asked the game leader, “Mother, May I?” Funny how we were grammatical as children, but we lost that ability as we aged.