{"id":673,"date":"2009-05-07T04:24:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-07T04:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/blog\/2009\/05\/07\/necessity-of-good-grammar\/"},"modified":"2015-11-25T12:42:37","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T19:42:37","slug":"necessity-of-good-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/necessity-of-good-grammar\/","title":{"rendered":"The necessity of good grammar"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently discussing grammar rules with a friend, and noting how so many colloquialisms and\/or “variants” in spelling and punctuation continue to creep into our writing, when I came across this article posted on the BBC website<\/a>. You will see where readers were challenged to write a thank you letter with two meanings. They had to use the same words–or words that sound the same–but change the punctuation to alter the meaning. Very interesting, and a great illustration of how the wrong (or, right, for that matter) punctuation can challenge comprehension.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of the illustration of how changing which word gets emphasis in a sentence can also change the meaning:<\/p>\n

“I never said he stole the money” can be understood to mean several things…<\/p>\n

I never said he stole the money. (meaning, someone else said it)
I never said he stole the money. (meaning, I implied, or wrote, etc that he did it, but didn’t “say” it)
I never said he stole the money. (meaning I said someone else did it)
I never said he stole the money. (meaning I didn’t say he actually stole the money, even though he had the money)
I never said he stole the money. (meaning, I said he stole something else)<\/p>\n

So, when polishing those manuscripts, be sure you have crossed all your Ts and put the commas where you intend. And when in doubt: look it up. Strunk & White<\/a> is always good, as is CMOS<\/a>, and a number of worthy sites on the WWW.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently discussing grammar rules with a friend, and noting how so many colloquialisms and\/or “variants” in spelling and punctuation continue to creep into our writing, when I came across this article posted on the BBC website. You will see where readers were challenged to write a thank you letter with two meanings. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[504],"tags":[32,195,8],"class_list":["post-673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editing-writing-advice","tag-grammar","tag-white-rose-publishing","tag-writing-how-to"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}