“Why do you want to quit smoking?” the interviewer asked two groups of people.
“I want to breathe more easily in the morning …”
“I don’t want other people knowing I smoke…”
These two answers appeared in a research report I recently edited, but I wasn’t sure why the author... (Read More)
“They thought it was best to keep a lower profile and hone in on their specific policy areas.” That’s what Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to say this summer about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s temporary retreat from the public eye.
A few days later, Ruth Bader Ginsberg reminisced about her... (Read More)
“You Can End a Sentence With a Preposition” will be sent to 500 subscribers from the list, “Professional Contacts for Weltchek Weekly”.
That’s the notice I recently received from MailChimp, the service that distributes this bulletin—but it’s incorrectly punctuated.
In American style, periods (and commas) always go inside the... (Read More)
I recently received a flurry of emails that share the same mistake: They all include statements incorrectly punctuated as questions. As a result, the authors sound uncertain, which I know was not their intent.
Here are the words—each with a hint of possibility—that seemed to trip them up.
Hope
“You have to use condoms and know with whom you go to bed.”
That’s what Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the now 90-year-old sex therapist, said in a recent interview with a New York Times reporter as she recalled some of the groundbreaking advice she gave in the early 80s.
She’s a... (Read More)
Howard Schultz’s recent letter to customers about Starbucks’s racial bias training was well written and took responsibility for the incident that led to the arrest of two men in one of the company’s stores. I couldn’t help but compare it to the letter Oscar Munoz, the CEO of United... (Read More)
I’m pretty sure when I need a comma; I’m not so sure about a semicolon. That’s what Keith Hernandez told The New York Times about his struggles with punctuation.
The baseball star turned memoirist and social media maven is not alone. In my workshops, I often spend a lot of... (Read More)
The Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side bills itself as “the funeral chapel.” That phrase, in fancy italicized font bracketed by quotation marks, is emblazoned on Campbell’s awning as if to say, “This is the swankiest send-off money can buy.”
Problem is, when you use... (Read More)
I just bought a pair of shoes from a company whose website says I can wear them everywhere and everyday. In an article about relationships, I’m told that everyday I have the opportunity to inspire my partner to become his best self. And a neighborhood restaurant that specializes in comfort... (Read More)
Bobbi Brown, founder of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, was talking about what it was like when the Estée Lauder Companies bought her brand back in 1995. As a creative person, she bristled at the nonsense of corporate-speak. “Things like ‘optimize’,” she recently told The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, flummoxed her.... (Read More)
