Conservative in Politics, Terrorist in Grammar and Punctuation

September 18, 2008

Wall Street Journal

Will McCain Waste Palin?

By Daniel Henninger

Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

The credit-market turmoil is serious, but no campaign has the information Treasury or the Fed are using to work the problem.

Compound subjects joined by “or” or “nor” make the verb agree with the closer subject.

She took on: her party's state chairman, her party's state attorney general, GOP Gov. Frank Murkowski's tainted gas pipeline project, and then she supported a GOP candidate who ran against Alaska's "untouchable" GOP congressional earmarker, Don Young.

Don’t plunk a colon down in the middle of a sentence: a whole sentence precedes a colon.

John McCain should ask the American people if they want this to go on, because it's nonsense to vote for government to do "more" and then whine when it doesn't work or degrades into sweetheart-deal hell.

Don’t cut off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause with a comma.

Mr. Henniger:

That a deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal doesn’t know basic grammar and punctuation present a sign of how far the country has fallen.