Grammar. Pronunciation. Accent. Phrasing. Blending.
I mentioned on my previous post that I am taking a training on Basic English Skills. It’s now on its 3rd day and I say, I am learning from it. All the things that I already know were refreshed and many new things were even added. The title tells a few and let’s try to add some more next time. I’m talking about the post. It’s my 2nd time to have plain blank. Wow.
and the tenses
and the spellings
June 30, 2009
Dear Fellow Communicators in English,
You must have thought that it was the British sports columnist Lynne Truss who started the big English punctuation rush with her best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I thought so, too, until I stumbled on The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon, an American who used to teach English and a consummate grammarian with a Gothic touch. It turns out that Karen Gordon had come up with her delightfully instructive punctuation handbook 21 years before Lynne Truss did, and had actually released an expanded and illustrated edition of it in 2003—at least a year before Eats, Shoots & Leaves hit the London bookstores!
This is just one of the exciting and provocative features lined up this week by Jose Carillo’s English Forum for your enjoyment before, after, or in-between your English shoptalks inside the Forum. Look at the full story lineup to see what I mean:
THIS WEEK IN THE FORUM (June 27-July 3, 2009):
• Advice and Dissent: Who Really Started the Great English Punctuation Rush? (It’s an American former English teacher with a Gothic touch!)
• My Media English Watch: Grammatically, Semantically Troublesome Threesome (Front-page leads trip over commas, a wrong conjunction, and a misplaced modifier!)
• Essays by Jose Carillo: When Even the Passive Voice Isn’t Enough (Dare to cleave single-clause sentences for semantic emphasis!)
• Going Deeper into English: A Huge Treasure Trove of Great Short Stories (The very best from Miguel Cervantes to John Updike!)
• News and Commentary: Philippines Warned to Boost English Skills or Risk Ending Its Current BPO boom (But do we really need an Australian to tell us that?)
• Getting to Know English: Lesson #9 – Getting to Know the Prepositional Phrases (Some verbs and adjectives are so picky with their partner prepositions!)
• Time Out from English Grammar: Twixt Mathematics, Technology, and Ancient Religious Belief (Is mathematics a human invention or a cosmic—and possibly divine—order?)
I know that you couldn’t wait to read these stories, so come on over now without delay. See you at the Forum!
With my best wishes,
Joe Carillo