grammargrinch

Mr. Brooks, See Me in My Office After Class

2008-12-05T21:08:00.001-08:00

copy to all Hillsborough County board members and upper-level administrators; copy to Mr. Brooks's bosses and fellow opiners of the op-ed page, on which sits one lone woman, Ms. Dowd.

Mr. Brooks: As usual you knock teachers’ unions for problems with education. All that good teachers unions do is fight for fair pay and decent treatment for teachers. What’s wrong with that? Before there were labor unions, we had child labor and hideous abuse of workers by the owners of industry. Then workers formed unions and fought for fair treatment. Now they have it for the most part. This circumstance just kills Republicans like you. You yearn for the return of this feudalism.

I was a career-long member of a teacher's union at the college at which I taught for twenty-eight years. In fact, I served for a time as the union’s president and am proud that I did. We leaders of our college union stood up for the teachers we represented. We fought the administration thugs for teachers' dignity and fair treatment. I am proud that I did that service to the conviction that labor is a product the owners of which deserve fair treatment.

With Obama, whom I supported, you Republicans who hate labor think you have a chance to bust teachers' unions. I don't think so. I think I judge the man whom we elected as president rightly--not to mention his formidable six-foot Valkyrie of a wife, First Lady Michelle.

You must exult that too many teachers’ unions are in bed with corrupt administrations that exploit teachers. Teachers pay these union leaders’ salaries, yet the union leaders kowtow to the bosses. This is the case in the Hillsborough County schools in Tampa, Florida. The CTA serves not the teachers but the administration that mistreats teachers by not even ceding them a place on the board agenda to voice their concerns.

You prattle about revolution to improve schools and cite merit pay as the goal to achieve that end. Merit pay is not revolution; it’s backsliding. Corrupt administrations such as that in Hillsborough County, Florida, would use merit pay as a weapon to reward collaborators with the administration’s anti-teacher, anti-education policies and punish teachers who do not collaborate.

What would be revolutionary is to pay teachers high wages so that the profession would attract intellectually gifted young people. The meager pay presents no lure for intellectually gifted students. Yet what is astonishing is how many smart college graduates still choose to teach despite the salary penury. They love the job despite the meagre pay.

In Hillsborough County the superintendent makes $300,000 a year. The decorative potted-plant board members who rubberstamp her agenda make $41,000 a year. A beginning teacher makes $33,000 a year. The administration sloths, who are the current or the previous superintendent’s buddies and sycophants, make from $130,000 to $140,000 a year. One of these administrative leeches doesn’t know the difference between “who” and “whom.” Smart people teach; dumb people clog the ranks of administration drones.

People caterwaul about how teachers should get higher pay than quarterbacks who say "He don't" in half-time interviews. Then they fund stadiums and turn down school initiatives. But this hypocritical chorus never results in one dime more to the teachers in salaries, which means many teachers must have two jobs to get by. In the last two years the Hillsborough County administrators got a nine percent raise while teachers got a 2 percent raise. Figure out how much a two percent raise is for $31,000 versus a 9 percent raise for $140,000. The people who pulled this scam off are the ones who will decide merit pay.

The reason for this disparity is that the administration gets its cut before the teachers, students, and schools get a dime. The Hillsborough County school system runs on the spoils system paradigm for the administration's sole benefit.

Republican columnists like you beat up on unions—even the good ones—and never mention how featherbedding administrations eat up tax dollars and live royally at the public trough although many of them have to get help from the schools’ Public Affairs people to edit their illiterate messages to the public. The Hillsborough County school system has to call in pricey consultants to flash-card the heads of departments on how to do their jobs. These department heads don't have doctorates or even relevant master's degrees. A recent consultant had to tell the administration how to get out of the mess its stupidity had created in bus transportation. It cost tax payers $350,000 for the Romper Room advice 1. to get scheduling software and 2. park the buses in convenient places. That the Hillsborough County administration couldn't figure that out without paying $350,000 for the color-by-the-numbers advice says something about its members' intelligence.

You have said in the past that the late William F. Buckley influenced your writing during your friendship with him when you were young. It’s too bad he didn’t guide your grammar and punctuation and assist your rhetorical ease. You abuse commas to a faretheewell, evidence that you don’t know the structure of a sentence. You overuse passive verbs. You are wordy. You are a cliche indulger. You are not at ease with normal syntax.

You need one of those tough public-school teachers of the sort that teach in Hillsborough County while enduring the abuse of a thuggish administration and lackadaisical school board. This pedagogical stalwart of literacy would teach you grammar, punctuation, and how to write pellucid prose. Superintendent Elia with board collusion recently forced such teachers to practice grade inflation so that she would be eligible for more bonus money for the pseudo statistics of student success that these fake grades would produce. She slammed teachers’ professional pride with not a murmur from the supine board. Ms. Elia's goal is to augment her salary as high as possible so that at her retirement she will get a pension that equals that of the AIG Republican CEOs when they exit the debacle they created in the financial industry.

I edit today’s essay for you below to show how bad your case is. If you weren't y-chromosome and if the dimwitted dauphin of the New York Times didn't hire right-wing male columnists to show how cool he is instead of more women to give Ms. Dowd company in the paper's male sweat lodge of opiners, you would not be able to get a job in a writing business.

lee drury de cesare

Who (Whom) Will He Choose?
Pronoun case: “Whom,” object of “will choose”

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: December 5, 2008

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening : flabby progressive verb: use crisper “happen” within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, Wordiness: Revise to “Reformers such as Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee…”charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who The redundant comma cuts off a restrictive adjectival clause. emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms. Wordy; revise: “On the other hand, teachers’ unions and members of the ed-school establishment emphasize…” No rule supports capitalizing “Ed School” just as there is no rule capitalizing biology department."Ed School" drops its capitals and hyphenates as a word acting as a single adjective before a noun.

During the presidential race, Barack Obama straddled the Cut superfluous words, even articles for tighter sentences. two camps. One campaign adviser, John Schnur, represented the reform view in the internal discussions: Wordy: omit. Another, Linda Darling-Hammond, was more likely to represent the establishment view. Their disagreements were collegial (this is Obamaland after all), This comma is redundant: it splits a compound predicate adjective. but substantive.
In public, Obama shifted nimbly from camp to camp while education experts studied his intonations with the intensity of Kremlinologists. Sometimes, he flirted with the union positions. At other times, he practiced dog-whistle politics, sending out reassuring signals that only the reformers could hear.

Each camp was secretly convinced that at the end of the day, Omit this wordy, moss-grown cliche. Obama would come down on their side. The reformers were cheered when Obama praised a Denver performance pay initiative. Wimpy passive verb: Obama’s praising a Denver performance pay initiative cheered the reformers. The unions could take succor from the fact Dump. that though Obama would occasionally wordy redundant adverb talk about merit pay, none of his actual Redundant adjective: dump it. proposals contradicted their positions. You violate Strunk & White with redundant modifiers.

Obama never had to pick a side. That is, until now. Dump. There is only one education secretary, and if you hang around these circles, the air is thick with speculation, anticipation, anxiety, hope and misinformation. Every day, new rumors are circulated Passive circulate and new front-runners declared. It’s kind of Omit this pretentious colloquialism. like being in a The experience is like that of a Trollope novel as Lord So-and-So figures out to whom he’s going to propose.

You can measure the anxiety in the reformist camp by the level of nervous phone chatter each morning. Weeks ago, Obama announced that Darling-Hammond would lead his transition team and You here omit a comma for a compound sentence. reformist cellphones around the country lit up. Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford, is a sharp critic of Teach for America and promotes weaker reforms.

Anxieties cooled, but then one morning a few weeks ago, I got a flurry of phone calls from reform leaders nervous that Obama was about to side against them. I interviewed people in the president-elect’s inner circle and determined that reformers had nothing to worry about. Passive verb in a wordy sentence. “People in the president-elect’s inner circle assured me that reformers had nothing to worry about.”Obama had not gone native. This is your second cliche. It’s worse than the first. Come up with a standard-English sentence for the idea that this noxious phrase smothers.

Obama’s aides point to his long record on merit pay, his sympathy for charter schools and his tendency to highlighting his commitment to serious education reform.

But the union lobbying efforts are relentless Another omission of a comma in a compound sentence and in the past week prospects for a reforming education secretary are thought limp-wristed passive verb: Just say “have dimmed.” to have dimmed. The candidates before Obama apparently redundant adverb include Joel Klein, the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions; passive verb: "whom the unions have blackballed" Arne Duncan, the reforming Chicago head who is less controversial; Darling-Hammond herself; and some former governor to be named later, with Redundant comma: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. Darling-Hammond as the deputy secretary.

In some sense, Wordy: dump. the final option would be the biggest setback for reform. Education is one of those areas where implementation and the details are more important than grand pronouncements. If the deputies and assistants in the secretary’s office are not true reformers, nothing will get done.

The stakes are huge. For the first time in decades, there is real momentum for reform. It’s not only Rhee and Klein — the celebrities — but also superintendents in cities across America who are getting better teachers into the classrooms and producing measurable results. There is an unprecedented political coalition building, Redundant comma cuts off restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.among liberals as well as conservatives, This comma is redundant: the “for’ prepositional phrase is restrictive.for radical reform.Hillsborough County does not have this kind of superintendent. Her main goal is to bloat her salary so that her pension payout will be huge. She also wants the community to stay ignorant of what's going on under her command when she targets teachers for firing when they speak up about the evils she promulgates; so she builds cases on teachers to fire them if they speak out. Her assistant in this ugly ritual is Ms. Linda Kipley, who has a home ec degree and a talent for sadism.

No Child Left Behind is about to be reauthorized. Awkward passive verb: "Congress will soon reauthorize No Child Left Behind." Everyone has reservations about that law, but it is the glaring spotlight that reveals and pierces the complacency at mediocre schools. If accountability standards are watered down, as the establishment wants, then real reform will fade. Passive verbs are limpwristed. Try this: “If the establishment waters down accountability standards, real reform will fade.”

This will be a tough call for Obama, because No comma: it cuts off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause. will mean offending people, but he can either galvanize the cause of reform or demoralize it. It’ll be one of the biggest choices of his presidency.
Many of the reformist hopes now hang on Obama’s friend, Arne Duncan. The comma cuts off a restrictive appositivee. Obama has more than one friend. In Chicago, he’s a successful reformer who has produced impressive results in a huge and historically troubled system. He has the political skills necessary to build a coalition on behalf of No Child Left Behind reauthorization. Because he is close to both Obamas, he will ensure that education doesn’t fall, as it usually does, into the ranks of the second-tier issues.

If Obama picks a reformer like Duncan, Klein or one of the others, he will be picking a fight with the status quo. But there’s never been a better time to have that fight than right now.

There has never been a better time to fight illiteracy on the pages of the NYT either. It scares the children and frightens the horses. Get out your grammar primer. And be more reverent toward teachers. If you had just one tough English teacher that had hammered the basics into your head before Mr. Buckley turned it, you would not wallow in such a pile-up of grammar and punctuation errors in this slovenly piece of writing.

lee drury de cesare

I shall post this homily on Grammargrinch.blogspot and send a copy to Ms. Obama. I supported Obama. You didn't. The sisterhood will figure out a way to get teachers better treatment with the new president. He's an intellectual. He will see around corners. I think the reason why so few Republicans are intellectuals is that their lust for money has acted like the deadly pyridium in the comet bollide that smashed into the earth at the end the Jurassic and killed both the dinosaurs and most of the species thoughout the world.

The Pile-on Is Getting Tiresome

2008-11-15T11:38:00.001-08:00

Mr. Cavett:

All that you say in your column on Ms. Palin is true. And yet I begin to feel protective of her because of the pile-on, which you have now joined.

I don’t see how her presidency could be any worse than Bush’s were the McCain-Palin ticket elected. Could she do worse than lie the nation into a war that has killed over 4000 of our troops, maimed many more, and killed uncounted civilians? Has she called off all the regulators so that the financially greedy could rape whatever financial instrument they had access to and plunge the country into financial jeopardy? Could she do worse than endorse torture behind the scenes and continue Gitmo?

I am beginning to think that Palin’s being a woman has something to do with her condemnation. Men get away with utter stupidity as part of the male affirmative action plan and have done since the Ascent of Man with the cover excuse of “he’s just a guy.”

I know there is sexism in this trashing of Sarah somewhere if I could just track it down.

I suspect Sarah’s being beautiful is a big part of the hostility toward her. The attitude seems to be “How dare a woman that beautiful think she can have a piece of power in addition to an exquisite face and good legs? Isn’t it enough for her that she is a knockout l and shapely? That’s purely greedy on her part to want political power too.” Only men get to be greedy. Women must be self-sacrificing.

I know Palin’s reproductive attitude is awful and that she shoots baby wildlife from helicopters. But every time I see her toting Trig around on her hip as she deplanes somewhere to harangue her loving fans, I can’t feeling positive toward her. And then she has that doting, attentive husband. I know he wants Alaska to secede, but he carries Trig around as much as Sarah does without losing his masculinity or his movie-star good looks.

And to top it off, Todd is his wife’s Number One fan. How many men could stand their wives being the center of attention instead of them? Todd stands modestly in the background on stage, outdoing Cindy in self-effacement. Speaking of Cindy, why doesn’t’ the press and public pile on her? She wears tacky, gaudily expensive clothes and jewels and looks like a female android from Dr. Spock’s home town. Yet nobody criticizes her because she defers to her husband obsequiously and puts up with his infidelity with a lobbyist as recorded on the front page of the NY Times. Such a rich, servile ditz who wears her improbably blonde hair starlet shoulder length despite her being 54 years old is the country’s ideal woman.

I want you to lay off Sarah for the duration of her place in the sun. Take your snide preciosity to another target. One shrinks back to think of the caricature of herself as portrayed in the press that poor Sarah may become in the future. I hate to think of the chortling observers when she crashes and burns, and they have to look around for a new freak.

In Sara’s defense, I will correct two of your comma errors below.

The ones she resolves to splinter and bulldoze her way through upon glimpsing the opportunities, revealed from on high.

You have cut off with a redundant comma a restrictive past participial phrase. You speak of the opportunities revealed from on high, not the ones revealed from hell.

…affecting the sense, if any.

The comma after “sense” cuts off a restrictive elliptical adverbial clause (if there are any).

Give Sara a rest, sirrah.

(ms) lee drury de cesare

To a Junior Grammar Critic

2008-11-09T13:59:00.000-08:00

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Excuse Me While I Teach Grammar to the New Preside...":

'As the object it should be, as you say, "Michelle and me," but when speaking I hear so many people make this mistake b/c they are over-correcting and not thinking.'

This is another common error. Misplaced modifiers regularly produce hilarious results. Did you mean that when you were speaking the people make the mistake (as you have written) or that the people make the mistake when they were speaking?

There is a difference here between your error and Obama's. Most of the English-speaking world knows exactly what Obama meant, but your ambiguity means that I don't know what you are trying to say.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.
Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 11:19 PM

Oh, stop it already. You are out of your depth, or you would not have fallen into a dangling modifier:"but when speaking I hear so many people make this mistake b/c they are over-correcting and not thinking."

Your "when speaking:" is a dangling modifier in a construction in which your purport to correct me for some fugitive error. You are not in this league of grammar-and-punctuation savvy, so just retire and lick your wounds, sugarbritiches. If you are interested in grammar-punctuation big-time, keep in contact with my Grammargrinch.blogspot blog.

Most people's eyes glaze over in the dicussion of grammar. Only a few of us find grammar and punctuation enthralling.

The Grammargrinch blogspot forewarns that grammar is what it is about. I have been suprised at the hits I get on that site. Its aim is newspaper writers. Newspaper writers are interested in correct grammar. They are professinal writers and should be interested. lee

Love and kisses to a grammar wannabe, lee

Possessive Before Gerund

2008-11-08T22:25:00.000-08:00

A Political Manners Manual

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: November 7, 2008

Since Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, needs the vote, you could understand him telling Lieberman that he’s still welcome.

"Him" should be "his": possessive before gerund.

Presidential-elect Abuse of Pronoun Case

2008-11-08T07:08:00.001-08:00

Mr. President: In your Chicago speech or maybe it was your first press conference, you said that the Bushes "invited Michelle and I [sic] to the White House."

The "I" should be "me" for object of the verb "invited."

For two years I sent you all my money saved from not buying a single dress or pair of shoes. That sacrifice requires a president who knows pronoun case. If you learned Constitutional law, you can master pronoun case.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Appositives

2008-11-07T07:10:00.000-08:00

Commute or Relocate? In Capital, an Enduring Question

By JOHN M. BRODER

Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, came to Congress as a single man, but fell in love with a Senate professional staff member, Julia Hart, on a Congressional delegation trip to Afghanistan in 2002.

The comma after "man" splits a compound verb. "Julia Hart" is a restrictive appositive, so the commas surrounding it are superflous. Delete "a."

Conservative in Politics, Terrorist in Grammar and Punctuation

2008-09-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Nagourney and Zeleney: Grammar Thugs

2008-08-23T11:03:00.001-07:00

Obama Chooses Biden as Running Mate

Selection Ends Two-Month Search

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who Mr. Obama had defeated in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, had slipped out of contention…

Is pronoun case passé at the NYT? Or do macho Nagourney and Zeleny consider using “whom” too girly for their rockum-sockum copy?

Biden and the Foreign Policy Call

By Mark J. Penn

Mr. Gore complimented Bill Clinton and projected an image of a new generation to government.

The word you want is "complemented" as in “completed.” Good lord. That such language baboons get the front-page, above-the-fold perch signals a march to the swamps of illiteracy.

Posted on Grammargrinch.blogspot.com as a cautionary tale lee drury de cesare

Elliptical Clause Eludes Friedman

2008-08-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist
Flush With Energy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: August 9, 2008 To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea.

“Than us” should be “than we” because “we” is subject of the elliptical clause “we [are].” If the writer thinks “than we” sounds funny, he should finish the clause and write “we are.”

La Dowd Messes Up Comma

2008-08-06T07:45:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist

McCain’s Green-Eyed Monster

MAUREEN DOWD

Published: August 5, 2008

WASHINGTON

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Not since Iago and Othello obsessed on the comely Cassio, not since Richard of Gloucester killed his two nephews, not since Nixon and Johnson glowered at the glittering J.F.K., has there been such an unseemly outpouring of boy envy.

The comma after "J.F.K." cuts the basic sentence in two: "Not since Iago obsessed on the comely Cassio...has there been..."

Dowd flunks possessive before gerund again

2008-07-27T09:50:00.001-07:00

Stalking, Sniffing, Swooning

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: July 27, 2008

That Dowd doesn't use the possessive before the gerund goes against the advice of the Times's style book and the grammar rule. It can't be that she can't master this grammar rule. Anybody who has absorbed all the minutiae of pop culture's patois as she has done has enough brains to use this rule.

He thinks most people recognize that “there is a concrete advantage to not only foreign leaders, but foreign populations possessive before gerund liking the American president, redundant comma before a trailing adverbial clause because it makes it easier for Sarkozy to send troops into Afghanistan if his voting base likes the United States.”

How does he like the McCain camp possessive before gerund mocking him as “The One”?

Collins Doesn't Agree

2008-06-26T06:16:00.001-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist

United We Campaign

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: June 26, 2008

The winning side would like to get back to their campaign and reward the losing side by welcoming them into the ranks of willing workers. No hard feelings!

“Their” should be “its.” The antecedent “side” is singular.

Flossy Harvard Professor Needs Remediation

2008-06-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

Professor Pinker:

You need to hear from your readers. We should be like that guy who stood behind the conquering hero on the chariot as the hero entered Rome in triumph and whispered into his ear, “Remember, you are only a man.”

You almost had a convert for The Language Instinct's contention that we are born language adepts, that our parents get no credit for our speaking. You contend language is all there in our heads: subjects, verbs, phrases, clauses, the whole pitter patter of talk.

Then I got to the last chapter but one in which you attack language mavens. I'm one. I taught English in a community college close to my home for twenty-eight years. It was close enough that I could get home to greet my four children as they returned from school—to whom, according to you, I helped not a whit to learn to speak.

I don't think you know what you are talking about in your attacks on grammar mavens. To show how fusty your erudition is, you start with condemning the moss-grown split-infinitive and terminal-preposition lore about which teachers in little schools in the rural fastness of my home state, Georgia, regale the children of peach farmers. Then you lapse into some fiddlefaddle about pronoun case's being whacko and must yield to your skepticism, I say, sir, that “whom” will last far longer than “youm. The formidable Fowler endorses “whom.” Curme goes on for pages about it. Both outrank you.

You prance around lauding descriptive language as opposed to maven prescriptive language. One supposes that swashbuckling pose makes you think to look cool to nubile teaching assistants. Don't kid yourself, professor. It makes you look hypocritical because you use prescriptive language in this and every book you publish. You probably emailed the University of Chicago mavens' grammar site to help you with footnoting and bibliography cuneiform.

You advise people to avoid passive verbs but then festoon your book with passive verbs.

Not only that , you are shaky on commas. I may have to write your boss in the Harvard psycholinguistics-intergalactic department to assign you exercises in your grammar primer. And you use too many words.

Let's get down to work:

447: ...and I would be surprised if there were differences in design between them.
Passive verb edit: Different designs between them would surprise me.
\
198: At this point some of the meaning of the sentence must be inferred.
Passive verb: One must infer some of the meaning of the sentence at this point.

434: That is, the “similarity” Possessive before the gerund guiding the child's generalization has to be an analysis of speech to nouns and verbs and phrases, Redundant comma cutting off a restrictive past participial phrase computed by the Universal Grammar built into the learning mechanisms. Wordy sentence 44 words

Edit: The similarity's guiding the child's generalization must be Universal grammar's analysis of speech to nouns, verbs, and phrases built into learning mechanisms. 23 words

Without such innate computation Possessive before gerund defining which sentence is similar to which other ones, the child would have no way of correctly generalizing—any sentence is “similar,” in one sense, to nothing but a verbatim repetition, of itself, and also “similar,” to any random rearrangement of the words, and “similar,” in still other senses, to all kinds of other inappropriate word strings. 64 words

I don't know how you justify the quotation marks around “similar.”

The structure of this sentence makes reading it feel like getting whiplash. You should show mercy to the reader: Put the hyphenated interruption into its own sentence.

Edit: Without innate computation's defining which sentence is similar to others, the child can't generalize. Any sentence is “similar” to a verbatim repetition of itself; similar to random rearrangement of the words, and similar to other kinds of appropriate word strings. 14And 26 – 40 words

Is this how those devil-may-care, maven-despising, descriptive linguistics street cats talk these days? You have dropped your descriptive pose and lapsed into a structural quagmire of abused Standard English. People notice that your practice is not coincident with your conviction.

The 64-word metastasis shows no mercy on the reader. Anybody who writes sentences this long must be aces in punctuation. You are not. Break down the sentence as a favor to your readers, who struggle to assimilate the verbs, nouns, phrases, and clauses bouncing around in their heads somewhere near the parietal lobe.

432: A computer is pre-programmed to with the assumptions underlying big competitive sports, so No comma: “so that” is a subordinating conjunction, not a coordinating conjunction. that it will not interpret players' motions as a choreographed dance or a religious ritual.

432:A theory of the universal mind is doubtless going to be as abstractly related to the universal people as X-bay theory is related to a list of universals of word order. 32 words Passive verbs and wordiness:You overuse modifiers.

Edit: A theory of the universal mind relates as abstractly to the universal people as X-bay theory relates to list of word-order universals. 24 words

Children generalize from role models, or from their own behaviors that are rewarded or not, rewarded.16 words

Redundant comma; passive verbs Awkward construction.

Don't put a comma between compound adverbial prepositional phrases.

Edit: Children generalize from role models or from rewarded or unrewarded behavior. 11 words

Perhaps the next time you are in a supermarket you Put one of your redundant commas after “supermarket” to mark an introductory adverbial clause. will look for club soda, one out of the tens of tens of thousands of items that are available, and Don't split a compound verb with a comma. then not touch it until months later when a particular subject and particular object come together.

420:
Roughly, the idea that cognition saturates perception belongs with (and is, indeed, historically connected with) the idea in the philosophy of science that one's observations are comprehensively determined by one's theories; with the idea in anthropology that one's values are comprehensively determined by one's culture; with the idea in sociology that one's epistemic commitments, including especially one's science, are comprehensively determined by one's class affiliations; and with the idea in linguistics that one's metaphysics is comprehensively determined by one's syntax [ire., the Wharton hypothesis—SP], 94 words

I know you try to here to use deliberate repetition for effect, but it doesn't work. The sentence lurches along without style or grace. You have no ear for the music of language, professor. I would steer clear of such contructions.

Edit: In science, that cognition saturates perception belongs with the idea that one's observations determine one's theories; in anthropology that one's culture determines one's values, in sociology that one's class affiliations determine one's epistemic commitments; in linguistics that one's syntax determines ones metaphysics. 42words

The above excerpts present a representative sampling of your style and comma problems. You overuse passive verbs to a faretheewell, you are wordy, and you are not on solid ground with commas. For the last 400 years, commas have waned. When in doubt, leave it out is a good rule.

Don't believe those aesthetes that you write with “acid verve.” Acid verb would scare those rhetorical dandies to death. You try to write with acid verve and come off as Peck's Bad Boy, escaped from the tree house. Write plain English. You can't beat it. Never mind the preciosity puffers at the Atlantic Monthly Atlantic Monthly. If they're so astute, why haven't they written another Divine Comedy? I bet they wear argyle socks and red ties to show how daring they are.

I don't believe you can spot a passive verb. In old-fashioned maven litany, a passive verb is a) a verb phrase; b) the main verb is the past participle; c) one of the helping verbs is a form of “to be”; d) you have in the sentence or can put in “by somebody or by something.” The object of the “by” phrase is your subject in converting the passive to active voice. Be sure to credit me with this epiphany when you get your first Pulitzer.

A Natural History of Rape by Thornhill and Palmer that you defended against the feminist critics amazed my husband and me. These guys convinced us, and I have been a feminist for forty-five years. I read it first, and when my husband took it up, he would scream from his Stratolounger sports vantage at half-time, “Come here and listen to what those damn bugs have grown on their backs by natural selection to trap the bug girls!” The boy bugs are the villains in the rape Olympics. Men pale in comparison. But then in a billion or two more years natural selection will change men's and male bugs' gears so that they stop raping women and female bugs. Geologic time ensures that the girls have time on their side in this matter.

I have two of your books that I got with the language-instinct book. Blank Slate and Words and Rules. I am on to your gambols now and will read with a jaundiced eye. I will also monitor passive verbs, wordiness, and botched commas. You have far to go in those areas, Professor Pinker.

My husband and I both think you have astonishing hair. It reminds us of that of our oldest grandson's, whose Samson hair is such an attraction that it has caused amongst the nubile female genera hereabouts a lightening-fast case of natural selection on the Gulf of Mexico beaches.

I will mount this email on my grammar blog Grammargrinch.blogspot.com to alert people not to trust to the grammar, punctuation, and logic of a Harvard psycholinguistics professor's breezy theories, especially those with Samson coiffures.

I suppose you know you repudiate Darwin's theory in this book. Hubris you don't lack. It matches your hair.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

c: Professor Chomsky, MIT; Professors Randy Thronhill, University of Mexico, and Craig T. Palmer, University of Colorado

Will Muffs Commas

2008-06-17T03:37:00.001-07:00

Contempt Of Courts

McCain's Posturing On Guantanamo

By George F. Will

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect?

“Unmentioned in the document” is a restrictive past participial phrase: no comma around it. The participial phrase modifies “constitutional right.”

Critics, including Chief Justice John Roberts in dissent, are correct that the court's decision clouds more things than it clarifies.

“Including Chief Justice John Roberts” is a restrictive present participial phrase: no commas. The participial phrase modifies the general noun “critics.”

Abuse of Colons by Brooks

2008-06-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

Mr. Brooks:

But the crucial issues are: What do you do with teachers and administrators who are failing? Don’t plunk a colon down in a sentence between the linking verb and predicate nominative. Just drop this colon and keep the capital on “what” because you begin a question in the middle of a sentence. The best rule of thumb is to have a whole sentence before a colon. ldd

Possessive Before Gerund

2008-05-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

Editorial

Missing Records

Published: May 4, 2008

In March, this newspaper’s medical reporter, Dr. Lawrence Altman, wrote about interviews with several experts not connected to Mr. McCain’s case concerning the probability of melanoma recurring.

"Melanoma's recurring": possessive before the gerund as the Times Style Book points out.

David Brooks Misquotes McCarthy and Maims Commas

2008-05-06T06:02:00.001-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 6, 2008

…as Mary McCarthy would say, “and” and “the.”

Mary McCarthy’s quote was “including “a” and “the.”

If elected, she’ll have the power to take the Hobbesian struggle she perceives, and turn it into remorseless reality.

The comma after “perceives” splits a compound verb: “perceives” and “turn.”

Nagourney and Hulse Mess Up Comparative-Superlative

2008-05-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

Clinton May Be Hopeful, but Obama Rolls On

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and CARL HULSE

Published: May 2, 2008

First, Mrs. Clinton must win the Indiana primary as a means of demonstrating to supporters and donors that she is building on momentum after Pennsylvania, they said, and she must run strongly enough in North Carolina to avoid the perception that she did no better than an even split. Then she must win in a state that catches people by surprise, like Oregon or Montana.

The Clinton campaign must also persuade the Democratic National Committee to seat at least some of the delegates she won in the disputed votes in Michigan and Florida. It must also persuade superdelegates to include the popular votes cast in Florida, and maybe in Michigan, in calculating the overall tally.

Without that latter success, it would be all but impossible for her to match Mr. Obama in the popular vote total. With two items, you use comparative; more than two, use the superlative: "without the last."

Sir Flossy Will Flunks Commas and Research

2008-04-25T06:33:00.001-07:00

Education Lessons We Left Behind

George Will Washington Post April 24, 2008

Mr. Will:

Your column displays obtuse customary kick at teachers’ unions as major cause of what’s wrong with education.

It’s clear that you nor other pundits who deliver this same old argument about teacher unions’ demanding higher teacher salaries as major cause of failing education have done no recent research.

What about administration salaries and administration greed and mediocrity?

In Hillsborough County, the superintendent got her job through politics as the inside candidate who would continue the gravy train for administration insiders and board incumbents. She bamboozled a somnolent, complicit board, but its members cooperated in hiring her not because they thought that she demonstrated concern for education or that she was an exemplar of it but that she was an advocate of administrative greed and power hunger.

The board lowered the Ph.D. requirement to Ms. Elia’s master’s from an undistinguished institution so that she could take the job away from Ph.D.s who applied from first-rate universities with distinguished careers of varied experience and publishing.

Besides not being able to punctuate and write beyond junior-high level, Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia is greedy and power mad.

She makes $300,000 a year despite her deficiencies, the highest superintendent salary I can find on the Internet. She augments her salary by taking a “performance bonus” for the work teachers do to raise student scores to bloat her salary even more.

The teacher’s union that you cite as the major problem to excellence in education eked out only $34,000 starting salary for teachers while the part-time school board voted itself over $40,000.

When I objected to this circumstance at a political meeting, Board Member Dr. Jack Lamb screamed at me that he didn’t want to hear from me ever again. This outburst came after he had taken an oath to defend a citizen’s Constitutional right to approach public officials for redress of grievances.

With board collusion, Ms. Elia hires sycophantic, highly plaid administrators with early childhood degrees to fill slots that should have professionals in them. She does not advertise these crony bloated-pay jobs with the board’s acquiescence, equal opportunity and academic excellence bedamned.

When these crony administrators can’t do their jobs, the board rushes in pricey tax-paid consultants to teach them what they don’t know, which is mostly everything.

None of the administrators are interested in education. They are interested in their pocket books and how to raise their salaries even higher. They use their boss as role model for this yen.

The bullying superintendent imposes decrees onto teachers without consulting them while the board pares its cuticles. She forced teachers to accept a grade-inflation scheme so that her performance would look better; she has most recently bought a gim-crack education do-dad for over three million dollars a year that abandons text books for the faux learning of an industrially-produced Skinner-box thing-a-ma-jig that makes money for producers, leaves students bereft, and gives Ms. Elia another bonus for student recruitment.

This Spring fraud on education has proven in other places to be a bust. The board, of course, sat by and didn’t ask if Ms. Elia had consulted teachers on this Spring gimcrack revolution teachers must carry out in the classroom. Only after the local Tampa Tribune editorialized against the state of affairs did one board member make the tardy suggestion for a workshop, which was closing the barn door after the critter had escaped. Ms. Elia has already signed the deal while the board snoozed.

This too-late “workshop” will be a fraud for show to propitiate the press with hope it looks elsewhere so that the board, Ms. Elia, and her early-childhood-degreed myrmidons can get back to managing the schools so the students get the worst education possible and so that Ms. Elia and her administrator crew get as much money as possible leeched from the taxpayers.

Ms. Elia and her myrmidons never consult teachers. They treat them with contempt if they dare come to the board to let the board and administration know their views. Ms. Elia considers teachers not professional educators but her class-room field hands whose existence makes possible her control over a lot of state money to bloat her salary and to buy the intoxication of abuse of power which her psyche requires.

To solve her problems at the beginning of this school year, Ms. Elia sprang an extra class on high-school teachers that takes away their planning time and latitude to sponsor student clubs among other things.

This extra class has produced a lot of tired-out teachers who can’t do their best by students because of fatigue and low morale. These teachers are the heart of the school system that never get an invitation from the board to come and share their insights and never get a say in how Ms. Elia runs the schools because Ms. Elia is Captain Queeg.

If a teacher gets out of line to the point of criticizing Ms. Elia’s tyranny, the Professional Standards office steps forward with a manufactured case against the teacher to terrorize him or her with the threat of job loss.

The school board, supposed to be Ms. Elia’s boss, is her puppet. Its members pose as ceremonial potted plants on the board dais when not lollygagging around Tampa attending community functions so that they can preen as benefactors of education. They don’t visit schools. They don’t even deign to respond to parent pleas for meetings.

One board member, Dr. Lamb, refused to meet with parents in his district to discuss a boundary change but never misses Chamber- of-Commerce breakfasts to chat up how powerful he is with the other piney-woods mandarins of the town. Dr. Lamb’s conduct shows that board members have little interest in education but a lot of interest in amour propre.

The elected board signs off on every one of Ms. Elia’s outrages and salary boosts while the graduation rate and the minority students’ performance plummet. Yet the board Web site touts its allegiance to “excellence in education.”

The single black board member, one Ms. Edgecomb, is an Aunt Tom who never mentions black children’s dilemma in the schools. As Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in An American Dilemma, Ms. Edgecomb is just glad to have made it out of the Black ghetto into whitey’s world. She participates with enthusiasm in the state’s double dipping of pension- and-salary largesse, making over $90,000 a year of tax money in a system in which children come to school ill fed, ill clothed, and too poor to buy supplies they need to participate in class projects.

The next time you do an education column, Mr. Will, don’t report stale research. Expand your research into how the hordes of featherbedding, concupiscent, minimally-educated, greedy administrative parasites injure education.

Come down to the Bay Area to do your research on the Hillsborough County board and administration.

Travel to some of the Florida school administrative bureaucracy’s back-to-back conferences staged at posh hotels and paid for by unsuspecting taxpayers. You will find there throngs of C-student minds with “PhDs” from diploma mills like NOVA, which allows its matriculants to escape with advanced degrees after letting slide theses packed with grammar-punctuation errors, not to mention risible writing and logic.

Concentrate on the supine, complicit elected boards such as those in Hillsborough County, which lie to the taxpayers about candidates’ devotion to education to get elected but in office continue this evil system that betrays students. It is one that rots from the top and prevents children from getting a good education so that they can compete in the world they will face when they exit the auditorium with their often worthless diplomas.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com;

Grammargrinch.blogspot.com

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Sentence from your essay today:

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada.

Those commas, a retired teacher and once president of the faculty union explains, are redundant. The “measured” past participial phrase is restrictive. It modifies “determinant,” which is the cited standardized-tests measure, not that of some other metric.

You need some new research, Mr. Will. Your analysis is dated. Come on down!

School Dropouts, Superfluous Comma, and Tricky Gerunds

2008-04-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

Clueless in America

By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 22, 2008

We don’t hear a great deal about education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball.

The unneeded comma after "whiskey" separates compound gerund phrases. You use a comma between two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction, not two dependent clauses or two phrases.

"Hillary" and "Barack" should be possessive "Hillary's" and "Barack's" for possessive before the gerund.

Bitter Fruit; Bad Pronoun Case

2008-04-14T20:33:00.000-07:00

Some Perspective on ‘Bitter’

By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 15, 2008

If I were him, I’d try to re-ignite that flame.

The "him" should be "he." "Were" is a linking verb; the predicate nominative that follows it must be in the nominative case.

Mr. Obama needs to get back on that message of unity and hope, appealing to the better angels of the working classes, while at the same time fashioning an economic message more compelling than what we’ve heard to date.

The comma after "classes" is redundant. It splits compound present participial phrases "appealing" and "fashioning" that modify "Obama."

Mr. Obama has stumbled into a diction faux pas by using a subtle and accurate adjective in the wrong crowd. Mr. Herbert suggests that Mr. Obama should have used "angry" instead of "bitter." Obama's word choice was right. "Bitter" connotes the defeat and helplessness these people feel. "Angry" is a euphemism.

"Angry" is a common word that appeals not only to people with shallow understanding of language but also to defeated men beating their chests in protest about being borne down by the trickle-down economics of the Republican years, which these bitter poor whites supported without realizing they were digging their own economic graves. They can't retreat to euphemisms and guns and beating their chests to solve their problems now. Their voting for George Bush twice has borne bitter fruit. They must deal with that.

Is the Civility of "Whom" Dead?

2008-04-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

The Revenge of Lacey Davenport

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: April 12, 2008

If they choose someone else, she’ll resign as nominee and let them appoint whoever.

Use "whomever," for God's and grammar's sake, Ms. Collins.

Representative Andrews says [that] he is absolutely not going to make Lautenberg’s age a campaign issue, and that “the question is: who has plans and energy and focus to get things done.”

The redundant comma after "issue" splits a compound noun-clause object. Parallelism: use "that...that" or use nothing. Don't use one that to begin a noun clause an omit before the other noun clause.

The colon after "is" is wrong. A sentence precedes a colon: "The question is this:" Or you can capitalize "who" for its beginning a question in the middle of a sentence.

Brooks Messes Up in Politics and Punctuation

2008-03-27T22:35:00.001-07:00

Tested Over Time

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: March 28, 2008

McCain opened his speech with a description of his home on the day of Pearl Har father leavingbor, and then being gone for much of the next four years.

"Father's leaving, " not "father leaving": possessive before gerund

Comma after "Harbor" is redundant: it splits compound gerund phrases that act as object of the preposition "of."

2008-03-07T23:48:00.000-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist

And the Good News Is ...

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: March 8, 2008

The good news is: While Barack may understand the audacity of hope, only Hillary really gets the audacity of audacity.

People abuse the colon all the time. You need a whole sentence before it most of the time. Here Ms. Collins does need the introductory sentence. ldd

Les Girls Collins and Dowd Cuff Around Grammmar and Punctuation

2008-02-25T11:06:00.000-08:00

Gloria and Lee at an early '70s conference in Houston

Op-Ed Columnist

Captive to History’s Caprice

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: February 17, 2008

he is just giving false Hopi...

Strunk & White pleads with us not to use superfluous adverbs.

The passionate palaver about Hillary versus Barry rages on, with each side certain it is right about our fate if we end up with a President Obama or another President Clinton.

The comma after “rages” is redundant: it cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause. You have a better sentence if you dump the redundant adverb "on."

She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.

Redundant adverb should disappear : Strunk & White.

But is she right, that he’d be a callow leader, too trusting of Republicans, dictators and terrorists?

The redundant comma after “right” cuts off a restrictive adverbial clause modifying the predicate adjective “right.” "That” clauses are almost always restrictive.

Is Bill right, that voters should not be swayed by eloquence and excitement? (Unless he’s running.)

The comma after “right” is wrong for the same reason as above.

The parenthetical “unless he’s running” is not a sentence so should not have a capital or period inside the parentheses. Solution:” …excitement (unless he’s running). Or this would work: “…and excitement—unless he is running.”

Or is Obama right, that Hillary would ensure that the acrid mood of the last 15 years would continue to paralyze Washington, appall Americans and shrink our standing in the world?

The comma is wrong for the same reason as the above two citations.

I covered W. promising a humble foreign policy and no nation-building.

“W’s promising”: possessive before the gerund. This is the umpteenth time I have pointed out this error. Your style manual cites it.

Voters try to figure out who they trust to have life-and-death power over them

Dowd joins Collins ( below) in cuffing around the objective pronoun: “who” should be “whom,” object of the verb “trust.”

…or how they will be buffeted by the caprice of history, and the randomness of crises.

The comma after history is unneeded: it splits a compound object of the preposition “by.” The passive verb weakens the sentence: "...or how history and the radomness of crises will buffet them."

They inevitably get hit with trouble that they never could have imagined or prepared for, and that can trigger self-doubt and self-destruction and self-pity.

“Inevitably” is a redundant adverb that should go.

Why didn’t J. F. K. simply toss out the C.I.A. plan developed under Eisenhower to send 1,200 exiles to overthrow a popular Cuban leader with a force of 200,000?

“Simply” is the style-killer redundant adverb.

She knows now that being obstructionist and secretive don’t work.

Here’s a grammar felony subject-verb agreement error. The subject of the verb is one gerund phase with two adjectives “obstructionist” and “secretive” The verb should be singular:” doesn’t work.”

The Mittification of McCain
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: February 16, 2008

The Mittification of McCain

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: February 16, 2008

The Senate votes on a Democratic economic stimulus plan, which would give more help to the unemployed, veterans and senior citizens than the version President Bush wants.

The comma after "plan" cuts off a restrictive adjective clause unless the Democrats have had only one stimulus plan since the beginning of time.

McCain’s inconsistency is actually nothing new.

"Actually" is the redundant adverb against which Strunk & White pleads. This one makes Collins sound like a California valley girl.

McCain opposed the tax cuts as unwise and unfair, and then opposed getting rid of them under the theory that it would be a shock to the upper-income people who benefited from them and never noticed they were scheduled to expire.

The comma after "unfair" splits the compound verb "opposed" and "opposed."

…being has to remain on the books for all eternity.

My ear says dump "all"; it's wordy and spoils the music of the sentence. Somerset Maughm admitted he had no ear for the music of language. The affliction must be like my oldest's sister not being able to carry a tune. We used to run from her when we wanted to harmonize.

The senator from Arizona is clearly unhappy about the possibility of having to run against Barack Obama, who he has disliked ever since Obama had the temerity to present himself as a campaign finance reformer without McCain’s permission.

"Clearly" is the despised redundant adverb.

Ms. Collins joins Ms. Dowd in backhanding the objective case for “who.” Maybe they are trying to gain admittance to the masthead boys’ treehouse by cuffing around “whom” to sound rough and tough.

And the fact that the 46-year-old Obama keeps referring to the 71-year-old McCain as a military hero, in tones that suggest the conflict in question was the Spanish Civil War, doesn’t help.

“The fact that” is a cliché and usually inaccurate. It is here.

The commas around "in tones..War" are redundant: they cut off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

After all the questioning was over, the Democrats felt Clemens was a liar and the committee chairman called Brian McNamee, his weaselly ex-trainer, “very credible.”

This is the rare omitted comma needed before a coordinating conjunction joining two independent clauses. I know Ms. Collins is not an Aunt Tom because she wrote a good book on women’s struggle. But she must stop the "chairman" linguistic discrimination and convert it to "chair" so that we sisters can enter the language. Language not only reflects reality; it also perpetuates it.

Meanwhile, the Republicans on the committee said McNamee was an unreliable drug dealer and their leader suggested Clemens was the victim of a “lynching.”

Compound sentence needs comma after "dealer."

health care negotiations

“Health-care” should be a hyphenated adjective before a noun.

Do you wonder if this is really going to work when the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was posturing for network news and still couldn’t even agree on whether Roger Clemens is a jerk?

Two redundant adverbs blight this sentence. The first one is the deadly California valley girl patois. Dump them.

2008-02-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

Left: Taken at the Women's March for Choice, at which we had a million march to protect women's right to abortion. To the right is my husband of 51 years at the wedding of a young woman in San Diego who was our first baby born in the old Tampa NOW after we formed it. She grew up to be a gynecologist who must dodge the anti-choice crazies, which is why I don't give her name. lee

At last somebody who will let me use his name pops up. I met this young man at the teacher protests at the board against the extra period that Elia downloaded on the teachers without warning.

My belief is that it is liberating to attach your name to what you say and what you do. In reputation lies safety is my view. And people like Elia and her hangers on, which include the board, will never crumple to dust unless we fight and fight in the open. Hats off to Bruce. lee

It was nice to see your e-mail, and to know that you are still fighting for our students. Teacher morale is lower than I can remember in my 23 years of teaching, and many great educators have quit the system rather than put up with the exploitation. It seems the only hope we have is to change the board, for our superintendent gets little resistance from the present group. Some well placed reporting on the issues raised in your note would help shake things up a bit. I will be more than happy to discuss the issues with any interested reporters. Keep in touch. Bruce

By the way, I was punished severely for speaking out. I lost my dual enrollment classes and was given regular level world history to teach. I taught honors level for 16 years, but those classes were given to first and second year teachers who were more cooperative with our administration. Many others were punished as well. It has been a rough year, but we will get through it with our dignity intact. Since the arrival of our present APC dual enrollment has shrunk to one class of Freshman English, whereas we used to have classes in science, social studies, math and English. We do have ten sections of AP Human Geography, though, for ninth graders. Remember, Ms. Elia's bonus money in part comes from the numbers enrolled in AP, not how many actually pass the test. Yes I teach history. I have been at Armwood for 23 years and until the present APC arrived was considered one of the better teachers here. I still am with the faculty and students, which in the long run is all that matters. The retaliation was for speaking out against the 6/7 day. Our administration even went so far as to tell faculty members in their evaluation session to stay away from those teachers who are "cancerous to their careers". James Goeb was chosen Teacher of the Year this year, which must have been a slap in the face to the administration, for he was the most vocal opponent of 6/7.

I hoped the principals were not involved in Elia's dirty business, but apparently they are. I guess they know that they will lose their jobs if they don't play along. But wouldn't it be wonderful if just one of them stood up and said, "No, I will not punish my teachers for using their Constitutional right to free speech. We can't have a democracy unless we have free speech."

I'd like to slap those young first- and second-year teachers silly for participating in the punishment of older colleagues by taking the jobs that the principals and department heads removed from teachers such as Bruce for protesting the extra class. They are ingrateful, short-sighted little twits. lee

Use my note as you wish, just keep it honest. I don't fear any further retaliation. I am a Vietnam Veteran so what else can they do to me? I speak and perform as a highly professional educator, so if the powers that be have a problem with me then their own professionalism is in question. Keep fighting for our children. Bruce

Elia Reigns Cracker Jack Queen

2008-02-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

Press Release for Immediate

Release

Tampa, Fla. (February 14, 2007)

Contact: Mickey Mouse or Goofy at the

Office of Hot Air at the ROSSAC administration-board bunker.

The Intergalactic Cracker-jack Gimcrack Education Foundation Group for Cracker Jack Nobels

Names Elia Superintendent of the Millennium!

–The award carries with it all the esteem that it deserves, says the Intergalactic Crackerjack Education Foundation Group for Cracker Jack Nobels;

It also carries with it a Dempsey Dumpster of Cracker Jacks dumped on Ms. Elia's ROSSAC bureaucrat bunker on the podium in the board room.

This coveted award comes from the following Elia achievements:

*Pumping up her salary to $300,000, highest among the nation’s greedy superintendents;

*Stealing her “bonus” money from the teachers’ work of raising student scores;

*Keeping her bonus money tied to how many are enrolled in AP, not how many pass the test;

*Dominating a servile board into working for her, not for taxpayers, students, and teachers;

*Letting the adulterous Board Chair La Belle Dame sans Merci Man-eater Falliero savage parents when they come to the mike in board meetings to petition for redress of grievances;

*Mauling the English language by not learning basic grammar and punctuation that the students in her education-plantation racket must pass to graduate;

*Inserting kindergarten sycophants, early-childhood suck-ups, and home-ec sadists into $100,000 plus administrative perches who often need pricey consultants with flash cards brought in to teach them how to do their jobs;

*Laughing all the way to the bank

Hillsborough County Intergalactic Cracker-jack Gimcrack Education Foundation President Daffy Duck Bill Hoffman nominated Elia for her support of the Foundation and its programs.

Daffy Duck Bill specifically notes Elia’s active support for the Foundation’s Shut-the-Teachers-Out-of-All-Decisions-Affecting-Education

*Punishing teachers by such petty retaliation as messing up teachers' schedules if they spoke at the board in protest of Elia’s dumping another class onto teachers’ daily class load in the Elia sneak attack not opposed by the supine board;

*Making the Professional Standards Office the Hillsborough County Schools Abu Ghraib of the state;

*Treating sniveling board members like her palace varlets;

*Gadding around the state with swelled head and hypertrophied ego to attend bureaucrat summits on how to keep teachers demoralized so that the bureaucrats can continue lord it over school populations, to jerk around school employees, and to continue to raise their salaries because they have received so many Crackerjack prizes from other bureaucrats for achievement of Foundation goals of ripping off the teachers and reducing them to ciphers even though they and their students are the reason why there are schools in the first place.

*Training school-board members to mimic Pavlovian dogs’ automatic acquiescence every time she whistles that it is time to jump. These performers of doggie tricks are the duty of

Jennifer Faliero, Chair

Carol W. Kurdell, Vice Chair

Doretha W. Edgecomb

April Griffin

Jack R. Lamb, Ed.D.

Candy Olson

Susan L. Valdes

Elia received the award in the category of districts larger than 50,000 students. And in districts where the obsequious board members don’t give a damn about students and teachers.

Thunder! Lightening! Drum rolls! Ta tum-de diddle dum!

Backing up of the Cracker Jack dump truck to unload a gazillion Cracker Jacks on ROSSAC. Crash! Crunch! Grind! Pulverize! Macerate! Obliterate! Detonate! Entomb! Spread on the Sands of Time at Ozymandius' tomb!

2008-02-13T18:47:00.001-08:00

A Lament arrives in the mail below:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " Ms. Elia:...":

They will never answer, because they have no defense. They are just blatantly doing as they please and to hell with the taxpayers. They will continue this unless more and more people start criticizing them.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 4:28 PM

My dear, do not despair. A granny with ten grandchildren for whom to make the world a place better is on the case. lee

I see below that I misfiled a piece that should have gone into my Grmmargrinch blog. It critiques the grammar and punctuation of the Washington Post and NYT and has a lively readership. I will leave this misfiled piece on Casting-room-couch to remind what skills a good English teacher at HHH and a great Latin teacher there gave me fifty years ago.

Teachers affect eternity: not administrators, not board members but teachers. Teachers must remember this legacy and cast a cold eye on the C-student didoes of ROSSAC and never fear to ream out those clowns that think the universe moves when they tell it to. lee

copy editors as villains

2008-02-13T07:41:00.000-08:00

I yearned to meet Times copy editors responsible for letting slip by punctuation—and sometimes grammar--errors. I thought were not sufficient copy-editors to catch all errors I see The Times’s pages. Now I discover that the place swarms with them: 150. After reading the punctuation lucubrations of the army of Times copy editors in this piece, I discover that the copy editors need copy editors.

All 150 are to see me in my office after class.

The copy editors’ main flaws are the ones I saw in freshman English classes before I retired: redundant commas and modifiers ensconced in wordiness. Too many commas come from these copy editors’ frail grasp of sentence structure and lagging understanding that we use fewer commas now than in the past. Wordiness comes from redundant modifiers, passive verbs, and indulgence in throat-clearing fillers.

Times copy editors should heed what Wilson Follett says on commas:

“One, the loose or open system, corresponds to the natural pauses in the voice in speaking or in reading aloud; it may be called the oratorical or even rhetorical principle…. The second code of punctuation is the tight, closed, and structural; it depends…on the grammatical--which is to say the logical—relation of the parts (page 417).

“The historical trend for the past three or four hundred years has been away from the rhetorical style of punctuation…. The drive toward lean punctuation is such that even if we still wrote the complex, periodic sentences of Johnson and Macaulay, we should punctuate them much less heavily (page 418).

I come to NY for the Met’s Kirov Ring Cycle in July. Are there tours of the newsroom to see the swarm of copy editors? I will swap a lecture on redundant commas for this treat for a citizen from the outback just agog at NY sophisticates—especially the sophisticated NYT copy editors.

Ms. Perlman: Please share this greeting to all 115 copy editors from a close reader in the provinces. I live on the Gulf of Mexico: it's Chekov's "Seventh Ward."

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Here follow my interpolations on NYT copy editors’ depredations:

But they also want to be sure that they, and thus you the reader, aren't left with a sense that they've come into the middle of a movie, or that they don't understand how something works, or that…

“The reader” is a nonrestrictive appositive: put a comma after “you.”The redundant comma after movie separates compound adjectival dependent clauses. to the Newsroom: Director
of Copy Desks Merrill Perlman Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Kristol Mauls Commas

2008-02-04T18:32:00.001-08:00

By WILLIAM KRISTOL

Published: February 4, 2008

Mr. Kristol is a conservative in politics but a profligate in commas. Is it too much to ask that a professional writer know comma lore?

lee drury de cesare

Normally reserved columnists and usually ebullient talk-radio hosts vie to express their disgust with McCain, and their disdain for the Republicans who are about to nominate him.

The redundant comma after “McCain” splits a compound object of the infinitive “to express.”

The ways of the world, and the decisions of our fellow Americans, occasionally warrant such a reaction.

Kristol splits a compound subject “ways” and “decisions” with a comma.

William F. Buckley, the father of the conservative movement, skewered liberals, but always with wit and élan.

The unneeded comma after “liberals” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

By 1980, bolstered by the growth-oriented doctrine of supply-side economics, and speaking the language of American uplift more than that of conservative despair, Ronald Reagan won the presidency.

The redundant comma after “economics” splits compound introductory participial phrases modifying “Ronald Reagan.”

Don’t tell us that it doesn’t matter if the next president voted to confirm John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, or opposed them. Don’t close your eyes to the difference between pro-life and pro-choice, or between resistance to big government and the embrace of it.

The unneeded comma after “Court” splits compound verb “voted” or “opposed.”

The redundant comma after “choice” splits compound adverbial prepositional phrases.

SP TIMES EDITORIAL WRITERS COMMIT SUBJECT-VERB FELONY

2008-01-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

SP TIMES Editors:

My husband and I disagreed on your editorial since he favors Hillary and I Obama. That you made none of your customary comma errors quite beguiled me in addition to your recommending my choice for president.

You, however, made one error that is rather more sophisticated than your usual comma errors. Here it is: “What separates these two candidates are not the issues.”

Your subject is the single noun clause “What separates these two candidates.” Your verb should be “is,” not “are.” One makes the verb agree with the subject, not with the predicate nominative “issues.”

Lee Drury De Cesare

2008-01-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Le Matus Wrestles with Commas

By RON MATUS, Times Staff Writer
Published November 2, 2007

My guess is that some biggy assignment person at the SPTimes told Mr. Matus to write this article on fake degrees because the editor considers Ron smart.

Making dopey mistakes when the subject is such would look ill.

Mr. Matus seems one of the smart kids in the back of the class who does well on his essay, but he has trouble with what plagues most writers: commas.

Yet experts say there are still hundreds of institutions cranking them out, and hundreds of thousands of them listed on resumes.

Matus here makes the most common comma error: superfluous comma. The comma after “out” splits a compound predicate nominative. “hundreds” and “hundreds.”

"Many state governments still allow use of fake or substandard credentials by their own employees" and many local governments are "stuffed" with them, said Alan Contreras, who heads Oregon's Office of Degree Authorization and testified on the issue before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 2004.

The easiest comma rule is the two-independent-clauses rule. Here Matus misses it: a comma follows “employees” inside the quotation marks at the end of the first independent clause.

In an initial interview, McNeil said he couldn't remember the names of any classes or instructors, or whether he wrote a master's thesis.

The comma after “instructors” is redundant. It splits compound direct-object noun clauses of “said”: “said [that] he couldn’t remember…” or “whether he wrote…”

Since the department requires academic degrees for some promotions and pay raises, "we better make sure it's a legitimate degree," Slapp said.

The beginning of a quoted sentence gets a capital.

I can't keep the text from blowing up this way below. Commas I know. Graphics are a mystery.

CHEA thinks states can do more. In a letter to all 50 governors earlier this year, the organization offered its help in crafting state laws, and cited a federal bill filed by Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minnesota, as a model. Substandard degrees everywhere

The comma after “laws” is redundant: it splits a compound verb: “offered” and “cited.”

Verification is lax, particularly in public sector jobs.

The comma after “lax” is redundant: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase modifying the predicate adjective “lax.”

That his boss makes worse errors below may assuage Mr. Matus's ego. From the looks of Mr. Tash's essay, one would infer that inferior writing skills lead to the top in the newspaper racket. ldd

grammargrinch

Mr. Brooks, See Me in My Office After Class

The Pile-on Is Getting Tiresome

To a Junior Grammar Critic

Possessive Before Gerund

A Political Manners Manual

Since Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, needs the vote, you could understand him telling Lieberman that he’s still welcome.

Presidential-elect Abuse of Pronoun Case

Appositives

Commute or Relocate? In Capital, an Enduring Question

Conservative in Politics, Terrorist in Grammar and Punctuation

Nagourney and Zeleney: Grammar Thugs

Biden and the Foreign Policy Call

Elliptical Clause Eludes Friedman

La Dowd Messes Up Comma

McCain’s Green-Eyed Monster

Dowd flunks possessive before gerund again

Stalking, Sniffing, Swooning

Collins Doesn't Agree

United We Campaign

Flossy Harvard Professor Needs Remediation

Will Muffs Commas

Contempt Of Courts

McCain's Posturing On Guantanamo

Abuse of Colons by Brooks

Possessive Before Gerund

Missing Records

David Brooks Misquotes McCarthy and Maims Commas

Nagourney and Hulse Mess Up Comparative-Superlative

Clinton May Be Hopeful, but Obama Rolls On

Sir Flossy Will Flunks Commas and Research

School Dropouts, Superfluous Comma, and Tricky Gerunds

Clueless in America

Bitter Fruit; Bad Pronoun Case

Some Perspective on ‘Bitter’

Is the Civility of "Whom" Dead?

The Revenge of Lacey Davenport

Brooks Messes Up in Politics and Punctuation

Tested Over Time

And the Good News Is ...

Les Girls Collins and Dowd Cuff Around Grammmar and Punctuation

Captive to History’s Caprice

The Mittification of McCain

Elia Reigns Cracker Jack Queen

copy editors as villains

Kristol Mauls Commas

SP TIMES EDITORIAL WRITERS COMMIT SUBJECT-VERB FELONY

GrammarGrinch2

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Le Matus Wrestles with Commas

CHEA thinks states can do more. In a letter to all 50 governors earlier this year, the organization offered its help in crafting state laws, and cited a federal bill filed by Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minnesota, as a model. Substandard degrees everywhere

The comma after “laws” is redundant: it splits a compound verb: “offered” and “cited.”

Verification is lax, particularly in public sector jobs.

The comma after “lax” is redundant: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase modifying the predicate adjective “lax.”