Content Tagged ‘Oxford comma’

A salute to sentences

July 2, 2014 | 15 Comments

We like the Oxford comma II

June 22, 2012 | 3 Comments

Thanks to Leslie Miller, friend and fellow blogger, who corrected some wit’s work and sent it to me. Quick as you please. She moved the series into proper order, per the drawing, and capitalized proper nouns. Hope the (surely visual) artist who did this doesn’t get mad. But then, s/he probably stole the idea from a book, maybe from Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Here’s one I use in class to try to show the importance of commas, which most undergraduates …

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Reading and re-reading pleasures

November 6, 2009 | No Comments

Doctorow’s great story, Ragtime, and its fine sentence rhythms. Ragtime: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow. Random House. 336 pages. I read Ragtime more than thirty years ago when it first appeared, and was impressed by its prose—which seemed like nothing I’d ever read and which was rumored to be in ragtime rhythm—and was gripped by its story. What strikes me now, having just reread it, is the spare beauty of its language and its narrative audacity. So, much the same. The bestseller …

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