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#grammar

22 posts21 participants2 posts today
Public
New Yorker Cartoons

Journalists must remain vigilant and rigorous in the face of a second Trump Administration. To help them do so, we are releasing an updated version of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” with some timely new examples. Please refer to it when writing and reporting, for as long as that’s still allowed, and sign up for our humor newsletter at the link in our bio for more painfully relevant satire. #humor #journalism #grammar #comedy

newyorker.com/newsletter/humor

Public
Kevin P. Fleming

Random English language advice:

The phrase "My laptop was stolen a few weeks ago." and the phrase "I had my laptop stolen a few weeks ago." do not mean the same thing.

The second version implies that you were somehow involved in causing the act to occur, which is probably not what you intended to say.

Summary: Don't use "I had" (or variations of it) as a substitute for "was".

#English#Grammar#SayWhatYouMean
Public
William Smith

I'll go ahead and say it. Predictive typing is as advanced as just throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks.

The typo in "hour” is mine. The suggestion to complete the sentence with "horseshoe” is Microsoft Outlook’s.

Even worse, I have "Check spelling as you type” and “Check grammar as you type" both turned on.

Screen shot of one sentence I was composing in Microsoft Outlook. “I’d like to meet with your for about an horseshoe” I started mistyping “hour” as “hor”, but Outlook’s predictive typing suggested “horseshoe”.
#computers#grammar#predictive
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RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2504.04 — What are some tips and tricks you use to convey strong emotions?

I think this is where my use of Grammar B helps me. Strong emotions, even things like anger, I think are associated with confusion and levels of self-doubt, which leads to cycles of justification or re-evaluation on the fly, quickly, immediately, erratically. or it just might conceivably—or very possibly since MURPHY in all things, right?—get worse, far worse; that type of thing.

The last sentence is a short example of a Grammar B run-on. It is non-grammatical; your high school English teacher would grade it a Fail. What it does is breathlessly fire off thought after thought in a continuing sequence, no sequence dependent on the sequence before. It flows. Like a speech. The reader never needs to backtrack to deduce meaning. Such a construct could be cut into individual sentences, standardized. But. Why? Rhythm of any sort drives the reader forward. It creates tension. All useful when writing emotion. A flood of description to overwhelm the senses, like the emotion itself.

Another construction I think works, usually mixed carefully with the run-on to break repeating rhythms, is telegraphy. I used that in the previous paragraph. Did you. Notice? Short, non-grammatical sentences. Missing a verb, a noun, or what not. It works like a drumbeat, focusing the reader on individual word or unsupported phrase meanings—and you get extra credit if you use a word with multiple meanings that could conceivably apply in context; emotion is confusion, innit?

In a sense, Grammar B is like finding poetry in prose. Used right, it uniquely depicts emotion. This is why I call myself a "prosaist."

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

#BoostingIsSharing

#gender #fiction #writer #author
##writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion #grammar #grammarb

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Mark Connolly 🍻 🚴🏼‍♀️ (he, him, his)

I have a question, Mastodonians!

In English, city night be referenced using the preposition "of", and the first letter of the city doesn't affect the preposition.

- city of Ottawa
- city of Kitchener

But in French the preposition gets contracted if the first letter is a vowel (or sometimes an "h"?):

- ville d'Ottawa
- ville de Kitchener

What are examples in other languages (that use Latin alphabet) that have the behaviour for places that written French does?

#FediMind#Language#Grammar
Public
Blender Dumbass ( J.Y.Amihud )

From: blenderdumbass . org

People often point out various grammatical errors in texts people write. As if having better attention to words makes the argument presented more or less valid. So I suppose I'm gonna rant about this.

Read or listen: blenderdumbass.org/articles/st

blenderdumbass . orgStupid Correct English
More from Blender Dumbass ( J.Y.Amihud )
#English#Language#FreeSpeech
Public
Søren Sandager Sørensen

In 1803, Johan Werfel published a grammar of Danish that was supposedly "for women". It was also both "practical and theoretical".

I digitized the book for the @internetarchive and wrote something about the book for #Lingoblog [In Danish]. I'll try to summarize the most interesting points here! I was curious about what it meant that it was "for women" (besides a general interest in reading old grammar books) 🧵

lingoblog.dk/en-sexistisk-gram
#linguistics #grammar #sexism #women

Lingoblog · En sexistisk grammatik? Dansk grammatik "for kvinder" anno 1803 | LingoblogI 1803 blev bogen Theoretisk og practisk Dansk Grammatik for Fruentimmer udgivet, skrevet af Johan Werfel. Jeg er usikker på hvordan jeg er endt med at have
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