Conservative in Politics, Terrorist in Grammar and Punctuation
September 18, 2008
Wall Street Journal
Will McCain Waste Palin?
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.
posted by twinkobie at
7:38 PM
2 Comments:
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].
Make sure your verbs agree with the subjects they follow. That is, "present" should be "presents" to concur with the singularity of the noun clause.
Further, do not allow an adverbial clause to act as the object of a prepositional phrase.
I notice you did not approve the comments I left you. Do you have a reason for not doing so--a reputation of grammatical perfection you have (yet fail) to keep, perhaps?
Shame. I don't even know if you understood the corrections I was making in your analyses.
I am generally not this conniving, but I read your profile and caught wind of your contentious spirit. Now I am just trying to instigate. We grammarians have little else to do.
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