Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

If you have not read the above titled book "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves", you will not know that it refers to a definition of a panda.  Obviously, the punctuation is wrong.  No commas needed.

Yesterday, while reading the newspaper online, I came across a sentence with 44 words and 6 commas.  There was no list in the sentence, just a bunch of commas separating phrases and making it difficult to read and understand.  One comma did not even belong there.

I thought that copy editors were supposed to correct these mistakes in sentence construction.  A large part of the GMAT exam for graduate business school acceptance is a series of questions involving grammar and construction.  Any copy editor worth his salt (old school for 'salary') should have rewritten the sentence into two wholly understandable sentences with NO commas.

Lately it seems that everybody feels the need to place commas wherever and whenever they please in a sentence.  With a seeming inability to spell and write among our younger generation, I wonder what do English teachers actually teach nowadays?

For an online story about this, check this out:  Click here.

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