Roundup

Some stuff I've been saving up:

Here's a Minneapolis Star-Tribune story about the grammar mistakes in songs that get readers' goat. A few examples:

• "In this ever-changing world in which we live in" from WingsÂ? "Live and Let Die"
• "What if God was one of us" from Joan Osborne's "One of Us"
• "You keep lyin' when you oughta be truthin'," from Nancy Sinatra's "These Booths Are Made for Walkin'" (Actually, I like that one)
• "You know he knows just exactly what the facts is," from the Steve Miller Band's "Take the Money and Run"

The letters policy from a paper in Concorde, Mass., is cracking me up. Here's the main reason: "Letters will be edited for legal reasons, clarity, space and sometimes grammar -- double negatives especially will be rooted out."

A story in a university newspaper quotes John Bremner:

Two stories ran side by side Friday on the front page of the Redlands Daily Facts. Both headlines contained the word demolition. We try to avoid this kind of redundancy in newspapers, but not too hard. As the late copy editing teacher John Bremner said, "Never call a banana a yellow elongated fruit."

I hear a lot about the sin of verbing (Googling, Netflixing, etc.). But Stephen Wilbers, who has a column on business writing at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writes this week about nouning, or nominalizations. That's what turns "She recommended we study this issue" into "She made a recommendation that we undertake a study of this issue." More good stuff here.

Need help brushing up on how to fix dangling modifiers? James Kilpatrick has an exercise.

A Houston Chronicle column discusses the ethics of a print shop not fixing someone's grammatical mistakes.