Adjectives

Everyone knows how to use commas ? right up until the moment they think about them. As if on autopilot, most people will put commas in ?It was a dark, stormy, scary night,? just as they?ll leave them out of ?It was a bright green convertible sedan.? Just don?t ask them why. Put these two sentences next to each other, ask the author why the first has commas and the second doesn?t, and there?s a good chance he will have no idea. There?s even a chance that the next time he?s writing a sentence like this he will do a worse job of using commas, not better.

An NPR reporter, a music professor and a grammar columnist walk into a bar. The NPR reporter says to the bartender, "I'd like a drink served strongly." The music professor says to the bartender, "I would like a beer served frothily." The grammar columnist says to the bartender, "It's OK. I'm driving. So these two won't turn up on the side of the road deadly." As you can see, crafting side-splitting jokes is every bit as easy as using adverbs correctly.

It's a billboard custom-tailored to grammar buffs. "Every day we help people get back to their everyday," proclaims the ad for Keck Medical Center of USC. In that single sentence, the copy writer does more to help people with grammar than I probably will in this whole column. But I'll give it a long-winded shot anyway. The best thing about this line of marketing copy, grammar-wise at least, is that it succinctly illustrates something far too few people know - that both every day and everyday are valid forms.

A user on a writers' message board wants to know about commas. He has written a sentence to the effect of, "The man had shiny black hair and large, twitchy ears," and now he's wondering whether that's right, wondering what the "rules" are that govern when to put commas between words like "shiny" and "black" or "large" and "twitchy." To him, it doesn't make sense that one pair would get a comma and the other would not. Yet that's the only way that "looks" right. Welcome to the best reason you'll ever hear to never study punctuation or grammar again: Your instincts are often your best guide.

The Great Pumpkin was not among the 800 golden globes Tuesday in Bret Harte Elementary School's pumpkin patch. Nevertheless, all the pumpkins, donated by the school's PTA, were eagerly snapped up by the students, and will be used for lessons all week, second-grade teacher Bonnie Shatun said. "In their journals, I will be asking them to describe their pumpkins using as many adjectives as possible," Shatun said, adding that students will also use the pumpkins in math classes.

It's a billboard custom-tailored to grammar buffs. "Every day we help people get back to their everyday," proclaims the ad for Keck Medical Center of USC. In that single sentence, the copy writer does more to help people with grammar than I probably will in this whole column. But I'll give it a long-winded shot anyway. The best thing about this line of marketing copy, grammar-wise at least, is that it succinctly illustrates something far too few people know - that both every day and everyday are valid forms.

Everyone knows how to use commas — right up until the moment they think about them. As if on autopilot, most people will put commas in “It was a dark, stormy, scary night,” just as they’ll leave them out of “It was a bright green convertible sedan.” Just don’t ask them why. Put these two sentences next to each other, ask the author why the first has commas and the second doesn’t, and there’s a good chance he will have no idea.

An NPR reporter, a music professor and a grammar columnist walk into a bar. The NPR reporter says to the bartender, "I'd like a drink served strongly." The music professor says to the bartender, "I would like a beer served frothily." The grammar columnist says to the bartender, "It's OK. I'm driving. So these two won't turn up on the side of the road deadly." As you can see, crafting side-splitting jokes is every bit as easy as using adverbs correctly.