Writing Glitch #806

Today’s glitch:

This, friends, is an example of how bad grammar has the potential to ruin lives.

Consider for a moment what this example sentence means. Then indicates when something happens, relative to other events. As written, the example is a break-up letter: I want to fight with you, and then I want to love someone else.

What the writer meant to say: “I’d rather fight with you than love someone else.” (Still weird, but now they’re not announcing an intention to leave the person they’re addressing to be with someone else… although if fighting and loving are mutually exclusive options, maybe they ought to. I’m just here to fix grammar and sometimes explain science, though; your personal lives are your own business.) Notice that you is now spelled out as a real word, and that the sentence now has end punctuation.

 

 

 

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Writing Glitch #805

Take three — they’re small. 🙂

Today’s third glitch:

I admit that I laughed out loud at this one. Bear hands… Wow. I am uncertain if I have ever encountered this particular homophone glitch “in the wild,” so to speak.

Unless the lady is of a distinctly ursine persuasion, that should be bare.

“She could destroy the world with her bare hands.”

 

Writing Glitch #804

Today’s second glitch:

Add a comma after killed.

That’s all.

“How we didn’t get killed, I don’t know.”

(If you don’t like the comma, change the order of the words: I don’t know how we didn’t get killed. As you probably notice, though, that changes the emphasis.)

 

Writing Glitch #803

Today’s first glitch:

More than one troll with a bridge means there’s more than one bridge, right? Change their bridge to their bridges.

The name of the bridge is misspelled. It’s Golden Gate Bridge, not Goldengate Bridge. (*facepalm*)

Trolls grow in size to match their bridges. The one living under the Golden Gate Bridge just woke up.

 

 

Comments are back… maybe. I hope…

Well, it looks as if WordPress is allowing me to receive comments on my blog posts again. Yay! So, y’know, feel free to tell me what you really think, and all that.

And now I’m going to back away from the internet for the rest of the day, before I start talking too much. Again.

Writing Glitch #802

Today’s second glitch:

I appreciate the snark (even if it is based on a misinterpretation of what was originally meant by in his image — not everyone gets Renaissance-era English, y’know?), but the punctuation… *shakes head*

Get rid of the comma after God. Also get rid of the comma after man. Those commas look kinda like what are occasionally joked about as “Shatner commas.” If you do want to write in such a way that the reader knows you’re inserting pauses in odd places for no apparent reason — like William Shatner reciting lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for example — use real ellipses, neither truncated nor over-extended. And speaking of over-extended ellipses,  delete two of the five (WTF?) dots before invisible.

“If God made man in his own image, why aren’t we all, like… invisible?”

 

Writing Glitch #801

Today’s first glitch:

*rolls eyes*

This can be made okay — not good, but passable — by deleting extremely. This is not because Adverbs Are Bad (those are sarcasm/irony capitals, friends: see CMoS 7.47 for details), but because the adverb used is the wrong one. In context, quickly seems like an appropriate replacement.

Also, the antecedent for it could be misunderstood. (Does it refer to the hair or to the hair loss?) I recommend replacing it with a noun.

“Guava leaves can quickly stop hair loss and make your hair grow.”

(I never put strange plant extracts on my hair, because I’m allergic to far too many things. *shudders, remembering the henna shampoo incident decades ago*)