Wednesday, September 23, 2009

A day to remember

Our day: Hi, gentle editorial folk. Happy National Punctuation Day (sixth annual). Today, we can celebrate syntax, hyphenations, colons, semicolons, commas, periods and ellipses. And we can explain to non-writers or copy editors that an ellipses has nothing to do with the moon covering up the sun.

Needs editing: I found this newspaper critique about a TV analyst — Collinsworth needs to drop a verbal tic that leads him to start sentences with the meaningless, “I’ll tell you what” or “I’ll be honest with you.” If you’re going to tell us something, just tell us. We assume honesty.

I once knew a TV sports guy who larded his work with extraneous words, and he wound up on one of the Major League movies. Maybe they liked the flabby verbiage.

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