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DOWN WITH CRIMINAL SENTENCES!!
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"The Writer" Magazine Column
In 2009 and 2010, The Writer published 20 online columns and one print article of mine. These essays covered everything from semicolons to wordiness. The full text of all 21 are here on my blog!
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- I'm a copy editor and writer. I wrote The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier: How to Solve the Mysteries of Weak Writing, published in 2006 and now available in paperback. In 2007-2008, I wrote "The Sentence Sleuth" column for Writer's Digest magazine.
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2010
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February
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- Criminal Sentence 350: Looking for a Good Instuctor
- New Grammar Girl Episode: Pronouns and Antecedents
- Criminal Sentence 349: Comma or Semicolon
- Criminal Sentence 348: Redundant Besides
- Criminal Sentence 347: "Od" Ice Cream
- Poll Results 75
- Criminal Sentence 346: Confusing Outfit
- Writer Mag Column 18: Pronouns
- Criminal Sentence 345: Size Matters
- Criminal Sentence 344: New Vehicle on the Road
- Criminal Sentence 343: Sad Death, Sad Verb
- Poll Results 74
- Criminal Sentence 342: In the Past (Participle)
- Criminal Sentence 341: Breakfast Grammar
- Criminal Sentence 340: Things Are Lookingup
- Criminal Sentence 339: "The" or "they"?
- Poll Results 73
- Criminal Sentence 338: Two Naughty Prepositional P...
- Criminal Sentence 337: Who Died?
- Writer Mag Column 17: Semicolons
- Criminal Sentence 336: Microwaving the Kids
- Criminal Sentence 335: I'm Losing My Site
- Criminal Sentence 334: punctuation and capitalizat...
- Poll Results 72
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February
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3 comments:
This morning, I came across this intentional pronoun confusion:
Researchers at the University of Bath in England have created software that allows a 3D scanner to recognize individual noses. It turns out, noses are unique just like fingerprints. Police may someday be able to identify suspects by following their nose.
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Who is ‘their’ referring to? The police or the suspects? How about both at the same time!
Cool example! But perhaps "their noses" would be better than "their nose"? And maybe "The authorities" instead of "Police"?
Excellent rewrite. I thought about using a plural nose, but it didn't quite seem right. Changing the collective noun 'police' to an obvious plural certainly fixes the issue.
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