MT
ma(r)king time It’s the end of April and technically, it’s supposed to be a time for planting and growing seeds into seedlings, in order to see them flourish into proud young plants in the merry month of May. Sure, April was always going to be moody and fickle, offering us sun, rain, hail, thunder, snow, […]
ED
Hurray! It’s exclamation day! Last week, we celebrated international Women’s Day, today it’s *drum roll*… Yes, NATIONAL EXCLAMATION POINT DAY today! 13 March! That’s ! Day in the US, at least according to a bit of a random website. I haven’t been able to track whether it’s legit, and who proposed it, and to what […]
Is this the worst? Well, it’s certainly great semicolon use!
Is this the worst? Well, it’s certainly great semicolon use! Shakespeare’s infamously hopeless tragedy King Lear has lots of great lines when we are shocked and grieved by the incompetence of those supposed to lead us: in the play, hunger for power, greed for gold, personal revenge, and sheer malice and cruelty motivate kings, queens, and […]
Crassly Stupid: Welcome to the World of Grammar (and Rhetoric)
crassly stupid: welcome to the world of grammar (and rhetoric) A while ago, at the end of May or beginning of June, I wrote an encyclopedia entry on the role of punctuation in literature (and not a cameo appearance at that!), and was thrown back to the basics – or so I thought: the basics […]
Back to Basics: What is Punctuation?
back to basics: what is punctuation? I’ve been working on an encyclopaedia entry on punctuation in literature in the past couple of days, and it’s been a lot of fun, thinking about – well, so many things: With punctuation, you need to unpick its relationship between rhetoric and grammar, that it has a perpetual foot in […]