This post comes from Eddie Vaughan – my personal favourite is number 5. One nice thing about teaching English is that you learn something new every single day!
1) I like semi-colons; I find them useful. And using them makes me feel clever.
2) My English teacher said, “You must never start a sentence with a conjunction like ‘and’. But times have changed.
3) Using two negatives in the same sentence creates a positive. Using two positives in the same sentence does not create a negative. Yeah, right.
4) A sentence must have a verb. Always.
5) Many texts that I read have words split at the end of the line. My latest print edition of The Economist (30 April) has numerous examples. Here’s one that I noticed: “The houses should be built of mass-produced materials tough enough to protect their inhabit -ants from a hostile world.”
Here are two more:
“…gold has risen by double dig-
its…”
“…salvaging something from the talks by hiv-
ing off the least contentious…”
How do you react when you read texts that use this technique? I find it absolutely ex-
aspirating.
6) Is it true that many people have problems using apostrophe’s appropriately?
