Friday, July 13, 2007

Grammar Rules, or How to Write Good

You've probably seen most of these, but not all in one place:

Grammar Rules for the Unenlightened; Or, How to Write Good

Don’t use a big word where a diminutive one will suffice.

Don’t use no double negatives. Don’t never use no triple negatives.

No sentence fragments.
Corollary: Complete sentences: important.

Stamp out and eliminate redundancy.

Avoid clichés like the plague.

All generalizations are bad.

Take care that your verb and subject is in agreement.

A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.

Avoid those run-on sentences that just go on, and on, they never stop, they just keep rambling, and you really wish the person would just shut up, but no, they just keep going, they’re worse than the Energizer Bunny, they babble incessantly, and these sentences, they just never stop, they go on forever …

You should never use the second person.

The passive voice should never be used.

Never go off on tangents, which are lines that intersect a curve at only one point and were discovered by Euclid, who lived in the 6th Century, an era dominated by the Goths, who lived in what we now know as Poland…

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations.”

Excessive use of exclamation points can be disastrous!!!!!

Don’t use question marks inappropriately?

Don’t obfuscate your theses with extraneous verbiage.

Never use that totally cool, radically groovy out-of-date slang.

Avoid tumbling off the cliff of triteness into the black abyss of overused metaphors.

Keep your ear to the grindstone, your nose to the ground, take the bull by the horns of dilemma, and stop mixing your metaphors.

Avoid those abysmally horrible, outrageously repellent exaggerations.

I've told you 100,000 times not to exaggerate.

Avoid awful anachronistic aggravating antediluvian alliterations.

This sentence no verb.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Happy Fourth of July


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Originally uploaded by
galbr8th
It isn't a Fourth of July without fireworks. History note: The rockets' red glare and the bombs bursting in air over Fort McHenry didn't occur on the Fourth of July or during the American Revolutionary War, but in 1814. Fireworks on the Fourth date back to 1777 in Philadelphia, thirty-seven years before Francis Scott Key wrote what became the National Anthem to the tune of an old British drinking song.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Gay Pride, St. Petersburg, Florida


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Originally uploaded by
galbr8th
Whatever San Francisco can do, St. Petersburg can do. . . maybe not better, but enthusiastically.

I'm a confirmed hetero and as straight as can be, but we had to go check it out. What we found was a mellow crowd having fun on a hellishly hot day. A few protestors drove down from Georgia, if you can believe it, but we didn't see them.