drupagliassotti @ March 28, 2008 # 2 Comments
One disagreement I occasionally face with my writers is how to capitalize and punctuate nouns of direct address. Here’s everything you need to know about these nouns in a few easy paragraphs:
“Now, wait a minute, Son. You don’t want to fly off the handle like that.”
“Say, Professor, when’s our assignment due?”
“Aw, Dad! Cut it out!”
“Hey, […]
drupagliassotti @ March 17, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The other day I was driving behind a big SUV with a “Proud to be an American” sticker on the back. The phrase offended me, but not because I’m anti-American.
Now, setting aside the question of whether pride is a desirable emotion in any context, I admit to being proud of a few things in my […]
drupagliassotti @ March 10, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I despair at all the advice out there to “eat healthy.” No, I don’t have any problem with promoting the consumption of nutritional food. But I do have a problem with using an adjective in the place of an adverb.
Now, I know words like “adjective” and “adverb” make you tremble because you were traumatized by […]
drupagliassotti @ December 27, 2007 # No Comment Yet
I’ll be in India from this evening to Jan. 20, so this blog will be quiet for three weeks. I’m one of two professors taking a class of 14 students, and two other adults, overseas. We’ll be seeing Delhi, Amritsar, Varanasi, Agra, Bhanderaj, Jaipur, Mandawa, Chennai, Mahabalipuram, Madurai, Trichy, and Pondicherry. Whew! I’ve never been […]
drupagliassotti @ December 19, 2007 # No Comment Yet
Why do American writers have such difficulty grasping the difference between tenses? I can only imagine that it’s the collective-cultural result of our being traumatized by hellishly pedantic high-school English grammar teachers who forced us to diagram sentences, a pastime I thoroughly detested as a teenager but have started to believe may have deserved closer […]