I received a press release this morning from a "veteran" English teacher promoting her new book, "My Dog Bites the English Teacher." The press release touts the book as a grammar primer that will help you to improve your college essays and to get a job with your stellar cover letter. However, the author of the press release isn't wowing me with her grammar guru status. A few examples:But it is.
(So the author has a penchant for starting sentences with conjunctions. Yet she says later on that fragments are bad. And that's puzzling to me.)
This gives a negative first impression which can lose you an interview.
(This gives a negative first impression that the author does not understand the distinction between "that" and "which.")
Picture this ever so common situation:
(It is an ever-so-common problem to forget your hyphens when you are modifying a noun with an adjectival phrase.)
So Anders is on a mission to change the way grammar is taught.
(The second part of this sentence smacks of passive voice. Who is teaching this grammar, anyway? I hope not Anders.)
5 comments:
To give the smallest benefit of the doubt, the press release may have been written by someone else. Even if that was the case, though, it's pretty foolish to have let that slip by like that.
True, but given the contact information on the press release, I did not see any other probable guilty parties. I think the grammar lady is going to have to assume full responsibility for this one.
Interesting.
1) "So the author as a penchant for starting sentences with conjunctions." Which word is not spelled correctly? Make sure the house you build isn't made out of glass.
Ah, typos, the bane of every blog. It goes to show how the allure of instant publishing erodes even the best attempts at accuracy. Thanks for being my copy editor. The error is fixed.
Snarky.
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