Your Language Arts Grade: 90%Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know “no” from “know.” Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).
Your Language Arts Grade
Three Famous Commas
- THE FATAL COMMA
Czarina Maria Fyodorovna once saved the life of a man by transposing a single comma in a warrant signed by her husband, Alexander III, which exiled a criminal to imprisonment and death in Siberia. On the bottom of the warrant the czar had written: `Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.’ The czarina changed the punctuation so that her husband’s instructions read: `Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.’ The man was set free. - THE BLASPHEMOUS COMMA
In several editions of the King James Bible, Luke 23:32 is changed entirely by the absence of a comma. In the passage that describes the other men crucified with Christ, the erroneous editions read: `And there were also two other malefactors.’ Instead of counting Christ as a malefactor, the passage should read: `And there were also two other, malefactors.’ - THE MILLION-DOLLAR COMMA
The US government lost at least a million dollars through the slip of a comma. In the tariff act passed on June 6, 1872, a list of duty-free items included: `Fruit plants, tropical and semitropical’. A government clerk accidentally altered the line to read: `Fruit, plants tropical and semitropical’. Importers successfully contended that the passage, as written, exempted all tropical and semitropical plants from duty fees. This cost the US a fortune until May 9, 1874, when the passage was amended to plug the hole.
I always think these sorts of grammatical stories are apocryphal, but these seem to me to be persuasive examples. They are taken from a Canongate Books website for The Book of Lists by By David Wallechinsky & Amy Wallace. Their other lists include 13 Sayings of Woody Allen, 17 Pairs of Contradictory Proverbs, 23 Obscure and Obsolete Words, and 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names.
Top Ten College Student Errors
1. Wrong word
2. Missing comma after an introductory element
3. Incomplete or missing documentation
4. Vague pronoun reference
5. Spelling (including homonyms)
6. Mechanical error with a quotation
7. Unnecessary comma
8. Unnecessary and missing capitalization
9. Missing word
10. Faulty sentence structure
11. Missing comma with a nonrestrictive element
12. Unnecessary or missing apostrophe (including its/it’s)
15. Fused (run-on) sentence
16. Comma splice
17. Lack of pronoun-antecedent agreement
18. Poorly integrated quotation
19. Unnecessary or missing hyphen
20. Sentence fragment
This list is the result of a recent updating of a survey first done in the late 1980s. Here’s a kind of explanation or summary from one of the researchers:
First, with the help of technology, spelling errors have dramatically declined. But the study also found that wrong-word errors–for example, the kind that result when a student spells definitely incorrectly and allows a spell-checker to change it to defiantly–are the new number one error. Second, new problems related to research and documentation appear in the top twenty today. In 1986, no documentation mistakes appeared in the top twenty because students were writing personal narratives or were doing close readings of a literary text. Today, students are writing research-based essays and arguments, which demand at least some use of sources–and hence a completely understandable increase in errors related to the use of those sources.
Perhaps most importantly, the research points out that students today are writing longer, more complex work for their college courses (more than twice as long, on average, as essays written in 1986)–without a significant increase in the rate of error.
Andrea A. Lunsford, Lundsford Handbook Website
I think this is useful information, particularly for students, who might use the list as a starting point for their own revision process. Dr. Lunsford’s summary is persuasive as well. The details of the research project don’t seem to be available on the site. I would love to see this research correlated with the socioeconomic changes of the last twenty years.
I wonder, too, about the demographic profile of the essays the researchers used. Were they mostly PhD granting institutions or did they also include community colleges and the so-called comprehensives? And, finally, I wonder if it is at all possible that the research included samples from the emerging (alternative or second) system of online writing education? My guess is that it did not. How do we know that final papers are due soon? My geeky friends check the statistics on the popular search engines.
One good place is the Yahoo Buzz website, which is a kind of blog about the Internet company’s various projects and related interests. Gordon Hurds notes that the use of particular search terms rise sharply around this time of year. “Search is indeed a useful tool, but it’s no replacement for the real thing. No matter how much you search for “spark notes” (+202%), “cliffs notes” (+186%), and the like, none of that will replace actually reading “The Great Gatsby” (+174%).” F. Scott Fitzgerald was never my favorite, I wish more folks were teaching Dorris Lessing or Octavia Butler.
Broken English
The term “haji” is not simply an ethnic slur, like “gook,” “jap,” “jerry” or “nigger.” All ethnic slurs entail hostile stereotypes, but “haji” is a specifically religious stereotype based on hostility toward Muslims. In our 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Deception [15], John Stauber and I described the efforts that the Bush administration has undertaken to rebrand America in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on projects including Radio Sawa [16], Al Hurra [17], a “Shared Values [18]” campaign, and the Council of American Muslims for Understanding [19]. Through glossy brochures, TV advertisements and websites, the United States has sought to depict America as a nation of religious tolerance that respects and appreciates Islam. These words, however, are constantly being undermined by the actual deeds and attitudes of the Bush administration’s most ardent supporters, including soldiers in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the White House has tried to frame the war in Iraq as a “war on terror,” its own supporters keep reframing it as a war against Islam. This is a serious, if not fatal error. Rather than fighting a few thousand actual terrorists, the United States is positioning itself in opposition to one of the world’s major religions, with more than a billion adherents worldwide.
–Sheldon Rampton, from “Hadji Girl”
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4887/print
This is an excerpt from Rampton’s response to a controversy that begin last summer when a group called The Council on American Islamic Relations complained about a video in which U.S. soldiers were “cheering a song that glorifies the killing of Iraqi citizens.” The video was posted online last March. The council reminds us that “A “Hajji” is a person who has made the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, but the term has often been used as a pejorative by U.S. troops in Iraq.†Perhaps fortunately, the video has been removed from it original spot on YouTube. Continue Reading →