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12/16/2011 0 Comments In Memoriam: Christopher HitchensNews today of the death of Christopher Hitchens was sad, though not unexpected.
The universe of the written word is far poorer with Hitchens' passing. Personally, I often marvelled that, armed with the same lexicon that we all have at our disposal, he did things with it that left me agog. The overall wit that he dislayed in the process, of course, was superlative. Whether you agreed with any point that he made, you had to admire his craft in making it. Choose any of his columns here to sample, and you will concur: Holiday punctuation 9-1-1 received today: Oh, Guru of Grammar, I'm writing our holiday cards and I'm stumped. Should I use dashes or commas? "We've had a rockin'-awesome-crazy-wonderful-fantabulous-extraordinary-superb kind of year."
The answer in this example is to use commas. The dashes join a string of words or a whole phrase into a single word, for syntax/punctuation purposes. But you're just using a lot of modifiers as themselves...a string of modifiers. So, separate them with commas! The example I like to use is: She got that creepy, shivery, something's-under-the-bed feeling.... See how you have an example of both adjectives separated by commas and another set of words connected by hyphens to behave like another adjective in the list? Note: Adjective = a word that describes (or modifies) a thing ![]() Hot off the virtual press: Image Management's November/December newsletter. Write and Polish has been honored to serve as proofreader on this publication. Enjoy! Post scriptum: 9 December, more on SOPA and PIPA. ![]() Social/electronic marketers, take note: this article discusses QR codes and what might be next. There is also an interesting interview with Jeff Hayzlett, former CMO/VP at Kodak. There are two vidoes posted here, the first is a snippet out of the second; skip it and just listen to the second one in its entirety (only 4 minutes). We find the ability to put a logo inside is very persuasive. Hayzlett also makes an excellent point about the continued 1-to-1 correlation between quality/success in 3D and online! |
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