I see at least five errors. What do you see? Scroll down.

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1. Advise/advice. The word advise is a verb. Advice is a noun.
   I advise you to take my advice.

2. Erroneous four-period ellipsis. An ellipsis suggests a trailing-off of the voice, the leaving-off of an idea before it’s been completed, a hesitation, or a fading-away. It can sometimes be used to indicate a dramatic pause, but you can use an em dash (—) for that as well. Look—he’s alive! Also: the typical ellipsis has three dots/periods. The only time it has four dots/periods is when it’s at the end of a complete sentence. My advice is… is not a complete sentence, so there shouldn’t be four dots. I would recommend using an em dash or a colon. You could even use an infinitive to: My advice is to eat more food from the ocean.

3. Capitalize “Eat”? If it’s a complete sentence after an ellipsis, one generally capitalizes, so I would leave the Eat command alone. Not a real error… unless you make an edit that fuses the two clauses into a single sentence, in which case Eat will need to be lower case:
   • My advice is to eat more food from the ocean.
   • My advice is—eat more food from the ocean.
   Otherwise:
   • My advice is… Eat more food from the ocean.

4. Do we need four exclamation points? I’m beginning to think that the person who made this meme (almost always a guy) is not a native English speaker. English learners, when they learn about English punctuation, tend to overuse it in a childish manner!!!! And doesn’t it look painfully goofy????

5. Let’s move on to the second panel. First error: missing vocative comma. A vocative comma is used before or after a person or animal or thing being addressed. Yes, sir. Hey, Kevin. Hi, Mom! Greetings, Mr. President. General, we’re surrounded. Dave, I can’t do that. Rex, get your furry ass over here. Patches, that’s the parrot’s eyeball. O Great Vortex of Unfathomable Agony, we beseech you to hear our belches. See how it works? So the command Swim should have a vocative comma after it.

6. Missing final punctuation. Here is this panel’s second error. After wasting all of those exclamation points in the first panel, I guess our hero the non-native writer didn’t have any left to spare for the one time he really needed to express some passion. Add at least one exclamation point.

So the text, once fixed, should look something like this:

(1st panel) My advice is: Eat more food from the ocean!
(2nd panel) Swim, you fat bastard!

Other fixes are possible. Suggest some in the comments.

The humor of the meme comes to nothing when the writing quality is sloppy and indicative of low mental candlepower.

A few BOEs ago, we talked about compound predicates. Do you see one above? And what other mistakes are there? Scroll down.

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1. Unnecessary capitalization. De-capitalize all of the improperly capitalized common nouns, prepositions, etc. And even though Ancestry.com might qualify as a proper noun, it’s just called that ‘ancestry’ site here, so let’s de-capitalize ancestry as well, and we’ll leave the quotation marks alone since they’re being used as something like scare quotes.

2. No comma in the compound predicate. The second sentence of the meme contains a compound predicate: two actions happening in the “verby” part of the sentence. A single comma does not belong in the predicate, interrupting the two actions. Take that comma out.

Rewritten, the meme should look like this:

I sent that ‘ancestry’ site some information on my family tree.
They sent me back a pack of seeds and suggested that I just start over.

So there we go. Sane English instead of all that drunken overcapitalization. Something I’ve remarked on before applies here: In German, all nouns—proper and common—are capitalized (das Kind, der Mann, die Frau), but English isn’t German, and 2020s English isn’t 1700s English, either, so politicians who tweet out unnecessarily capitalized common nouns aren’t doing themselves any favors. They may be smart in certain important ways, but they’re only revealing the extent to which they’re linguistic idiots. That goes doubly for the moronic meme writers we have to deal with on my Substack.

This is, frankly, endless and thankless work, and when I finally stop doing this, the idiocy will only continue unabated. Why do I bother? But I guess that’s like asking, “Why go on vacation when we’re all going to die anyway? Why do anything?”

This sort of thing has been around since forever. It shows how, with italics, the stress you place on different words in a sentence can change the sentence’s meaning, usually by evoking a contrast.

I never said we should kill him. (Someone else said it!)
I never said we should kill him. (Absolutely not me ever!)
I never said we should kill him. (Maybe I wrote it somewhere. Or thought it.)
I never said we should kill him. (Let someone else do it!)
I never said we should kill him. (Maybe we shouldn’t kill him.)
I never said we should kill him. (How about torture instead?)
I never said we should kill him. (How about we kill someone else?)

But the real problem with the meme is in the scenario above the black field: It’s list items #1 through #7, which interpret the sentences inside the black field. But where did the damn periods go? And there are other errors. Let’s correct them all.

1. Not my fault. (add period)

2. I didn’t suggest this. (correct as is except for the period)

3. Stop putting words in my mouth! (exclamation point added)

4. I thought we were going to hire a hitman. (tense control + period)

5. “Just because we could” isn’t a good excuse. (period; quote = subject of the sentence)

6. I suggested we rough him up. (add period)

7. You killed the wrong person! (exclamation point added)

I admit I had to look up TIL. It means, “Today, I learned…”

I see two hyphen errors. Scroll down.

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1. The expression self control should be self-control. A lot of self- expressions, whether they be adjectives, nouns, or something else, are hyphenated.
   self-esteem
   self-driving
   self-made
   self-assured
   self-care
   self-aware
   self-employed
   etc.

2. The expression bubble wrap factory should be bubble-wrap factory. As my refrain goes: Hyphenate phrasal adjectives when they precede the nouns they modify. Bubble wrap is, in this case, a phrasal adjective modifying factory. Don’t hyphenate if the expression comes after the noun.
   a factory for bubble wrap (no hyphen)
   a bubble-wrap factory (hyphen)

And that’s it—the two hyphen-related errors I see. Do you see any other problems?

Nice meme. Only one small error.

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Comma after introductory expression.

And yet he constantly complains about how much he hates prison.

This should be:

And yet, he constantly complains about how much he hates prison.

Don’t forget your commas.

Ha! This one’s not really a problem. As puns go, it’s a good one.

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But a lot of illiterates won’t even notice—or might be misled by—the spelling on the wall. The word nightstand is a closed-compound noun—not night stand (open compound) or night-stand (hyphenated compound). A nightstand is a piece of furniture.

The pun, though, is with the expression one-night stand, when you bang someone and then leave, with no attachments and, we hope, no regrets. Notice, though, how the expression one-night stand is a noun phrase with a phrasal adjective (also called a compound adjective) in front.

a nightstand = a piece of furniture
a one-night stand = a stand (a bang) that’s for one night only

Be sure not to confuse one with the other.

When I left my high school teaching job in the early 90s, some of my students got together and wrote me a card that they all signed. I was surprised and didn’t think they had it in them: they had struck me as utterly self-absorbed all year long. Anyway, one girl had jokingly written about how she had “black male photos” of me, which was inadvertently hilarious. That’s an example of what happens when you don’t understand the difference between a compound adjective (black male) and a compound word serving as an adjective (blackmail), or it’s an example of just not knowing the proper vocabulary (blackmail isn’t spelled “black male”).

Trivia: the expression one-night stand apparently originates in 1800s theater. It meant a traveling troupe was in town to give a performance only for a single night before moving on again.

The question in the above meme is fine. But the same error happens twice in the answer given. The answer would be funnier were the bad punctuation (or lack thereof) not sucking out the joke’s dignity.

Scroll down for more. Oh, and there’s a third error.

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Let’s go over the grammar once again.

clause = a group of words with a subject and a related predicate
independent clause = a clause that is a complete, stand-alone thought
dependent clause = a clause that cannot stand on its own

When a sentence has two independent clauses, we call that a compound sentence. The erroneous sentences above are both compound sentences—two clauses each.

(1) Because he is the Grim Reaper and he needs a scythe to reap.
(2) Otherwise he would be known as the Grimtoucher and that might get him on a list.

We’ll ignore the Because in sentence (1). In informal English, it’s fine for what it’s doing (i.e., introducing the answer to a question). Pretend sentence (1) starts with He is. So the first independent clause is He is the Grim Reaper. The second independent clause is he needs a scythe to reap. Connecting them is the conjunction and, but it should be a comma-and.

• Because he is the Grim Reaper, and he needs a scythe to reap.

The second sentence, sentence (2), has the same problem and the same solution.

• Otherwise he would be known as the Grimtoucher, and that might get him on a list.

But sentence (2) has another problem: You need a comma after Otherwise because it’s an introductory expression. So—

• Otherwise, he would be known as the Grimtoucher, and that might get him on a list.

Okay, I think we’re done.

THESE COMPOUND SENTENCES ARE CORRECT:
Sarah! Your new boyfriend’s cute, and he smells good, too!
I can play the piano, and she can play the elephant scrotum.
We charge $500 for weddings, and we bring our own food and drinks.
Ronaldo was prepared, for he had encountered this anaconda before.
The kids vomited the entire length of the ride, so they were shot by park staff.

Remember the commas when you need a comma-conjunction for compound sentences.

If you don’t know what a compound predicate is, you’re going to keep making the above mistake because, like a lot of idiots out there, you blithely assume that a comma marks a pause. While that’s technically true (commas do affect rhythm), if that’s the only rule you go by, you will end up placing commas where they don’t belong and omitting commas where they do belong.

There are other problems above as well. Scroll down.

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Let’s deal with the minor problem first. Look at the following:

a three-mile run
a ten-day fast
a nine-fingered Frodo
a pain-addled teacher
a wine-drunk Odysseus
tax-paying citizens
my thirteen-tentacled god

I’m sure you get the idea since we’ve gone over it many times before: Hyphenate phrasal adjectives that precede the nouns they modify. So a 2mm crack should be a 2-mm crack. Note, too, that you can’t write it as a 2mm crack because metric measurements require a space before the unit marker:

3 km, not 3km
2 mm, not 2mm
60 kg, not 60kg
etc.

And this is just trivia, but note that, with the Imperial system, the unit markers are abbreviations requiring periods, but in the metric system, the unit markers don’t have periods because they’re considered symbols, not abbreviations.

RIGHT: 5 cm, 10 km, 3 ft., 20 mi.
WRONG: 5 cm., 10 km., 3 ft, 20 mi

Okay, let’s move on to the main problem. In the meme above, there’s a comma before the conjunction but, but there shouldn’t be. Why? Because you can’t interrupt compound predicates with a single comma.

RIGHT: Sarah sat on the toilet and screamed.
WRONG: Sarah sat on the toilet, and screamed.

A compound predicate is when the “verby” part of the sentence (the predicate) shows two actions being done by one or more subjects. The actions are separated by a coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet so—the FANBOYS). Like above: Sarah (1) sat and (2) screamed. Even if I lengthen the sentence with other content, it’s still a compound predicate if there are two actions.

• Yesterday, Sarah (1) sat gingerly on the toilet and (2) screamed her head off.

So let’s examine the meme as originally written.

I love how a fly will get into your house through a 2mm crack in a bathroom window, but can’t find its way out even if you have the side of your house taken off.

We already know to change 2mm crack to 2-mm crack since it’s a phrasal adjective. The clause with the comma problem, though, looks like this:

[A] fly will get into your house through a 2mm crack in a bathroom window, but can’t find its way out even if you have the side of your house taken off.

The subject = a fly
The two actions = (1) will get into your house, (2) can’t find its way out

The two actions are (correctly) separated by a but (coordinating conjunction). But what is that damn comma doing there? Take it out!

Properly written, the sentence should be:

I love how a fly will get into your house through a 2-mm crack in a bathroom window but can’t find its way out even if you have the side of your house taken off.

The above might look like a run-on without the improper comma, and that’s probably part of what prompted the comma’s insertion. But the insertion is ungrammatical because it’s interrupting a compound predicate. Learn to recognize compound predicates! And know that, while interrupting with one comma is bad, interrupting with two commas (a parenthetical expression) is okay. Examples:

Lori aimed at the target, as carefully as always, and fired.
Stellan walked, full of nervous trepidation, and thought bleak thoughts.
Mr. Chandler tripped the alarm, startling the thugs, and gave them a stony look.

Also okay is a compound predicate with three or more actions, all separated by commas. Here are some examples:

My dog farted, launched into the air, and came down in a nest of vipers.
Adama sneezed, sharted, and pissed his pants—all at the same time.
Claudia greedily ate the goldfish, chased it with Everclear, and sang an opera.
Kirk killed the Klingon, made love to the Romulan, and boogied to disco.

Note the difference, though, between a sentence with a compound predicate and a sentence with two independent clauses.

1. I sneeze and create mountains. (compound predicate)

2. I sneeze, and I create mountains. (2 independent clauses)

A clause, you’ll recall, has both a subject and a verb (more specifically, it has a subject and a related predicate). In sentence (1) above, there’s only one subject and two verbs. In sentence (2), there are two subjects and two verbs.

Keep all of this in mind, O Human.

The above post is written in a certain style—a breathless run-on with a sudden stop. It’s meant to be funny, but for our purposes, since we’re about writing in better English here, we can also consider it full of errors. Walk with me, friend, as we navigate this linguistic wilderness.

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1. Capitalize the first letter of a sentence. My son…

2. Capitalize the personal pronoun “I.” …so I told him…
   The irony is when people—usually women—claim to use the lower-case “I” to indicate humility, when in fact the “i” just calls attention to oneself.

3. Comma before the “&.” The ampersand (&) represents an and, and what comes after it is a complex sentence (2 clauses, independent + dependent), all of which can be treated as a single independent clause. I’ll respect the slangy, informal nature of the ampersand itself and won’t remove it.

4. Comma after green. The phrase when it turned green is a dependent clause coming before the independent clause he asked… Since the dependent clause comes first in what is essentially a complex sentence (the same one referred to in [3] above), you have to put a comma after it.

5. Should there be a comma after witch? Normally, you’d separate two independent clauses with a comma-conjunction, but I’m going to vote no here. In principle, there would normally be a comma, but I don’t want to over-comma the sentence: it’s already full of clauses since it’s a run-on. Also: there’s a guideline that suggests you don’t need the clause-separating comma if one or both clauses are very short in length. I didn’t say no is short in length.

6. Comma after So now. Normally, you insert a comma after an introductory phrase. If the intro phrase is just a single word, you can sometimes get away with leaving the comma out. Also: capitalize So since it’s the beginning of a new sentence.

Here’s the first cleaned-up version of the above prose based on everything I’d written:

My son accidentally colored something blue instead of green, so I told him to just color over it with yellow, & when it turned green, he asked if I’m a witch and I didn’t say no… So now, I bet he’ll clean his fucking room.

Here’s a second revision (less of a run-on + tense control + excised ampersand):

My son accidentally colored something blue instead of green, so I told him to just color over it with yellow. When it turned green, he asked if I was a witch. I didn’t say no… So now, I bet he’ll clean his fucking room.

One run-on sentence is now four sentences (easier reading, better rhythm), and I changed I’m a witch to I was a witch for tense-control purposes (no need for a subjunctive were here). This flows a lot better. The problem with breathless run-ons is that they start to sound like the moronic, stream-of-consciousness babbling of little kids who have only just learned to talk, and who can’t turn the verbal spigot off.

This meme is actually pointing out one or more errors—a public service!

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If we were to insert commas into the above text (thereby ruining the joke, yes), how many would we need, and where would they go? There are two answers, one of which I think is better than the other.

1. How to cook, crack and clean a crab. Some would argue that this is serviceable. It’s good enough. I disagree, but technically, this punctuation is plausible.

2. How to cook, crack, and clean a crab. The comma before the and is what we call an Oxford comma or a serial comma. In lists of three or more items that end with and before the final list item, it’s often recommended to use the Oxford comma, and I agree. The usual reason given for using the Oxford comma is that it helps with clarity.
   • I’d like to thank my parents, God and Satan. (God and Satan = my parents???)
   • I’d like to thank my parents, God, and Satan. (I’m thanking four entities.)
   Note that there is some scholarly pushback against this sentiment. Not everyone agrees that Oxford commas improve clarity.

There is a third possible error, one that might be excusable depending on which style guide you’re following. But technically, if what comes after the colon is a complete sentence, then the sentence ought to be capitalized. So:

Step one: Use commas.

I’ve been guilty of the above error—if we insist on calling it an error—for a long time. I’m now trying to clean up my act. British English doesn’t make the same insistence about capitalization, so maybe I’ve been inadvertently British this whole time.

Getting back to the meme, though: Of course, it’s possible that the meme writer intended to provide a how-to on both cooking crack and cleaning crabs—skills guaranteed to attract the ladies.

Conclusion: The Oxford comma is technically optional but recommended.

Americans say drunk driving, but the Brits call it drink driving.

Two errors. Do you see them? Do you see any other problems?

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1. Your eyes are red, have you been drinking? This is wrong on several levels. The Your eyes are red part is a declaration of fact. The have you been drinking? part is obviously a question. Why are these together in the same sentence? Two possible solutions, one better than the other: (i) replace the comma with a semicolon, or (ii) replace the comma with a period and capitalize the following interrogative.
   (i) Your eyes are red; have you been drinking?
   (ii) Your eyes are red. Have you been drinking?
   Of the two, I think (ii) is much better because the period creates a neat separation in tone: declarative, then question, now clearly separate from each other.

2. Your eyes look glazed, have you been eating donuts? Same problem, same possible solutions. As above, I prefer solution (ii).
   Your eyes look glazed. Have you been eating donuts?

The other problem with the semicolon is that, for what are supposed to be witty, punchy, generally unserious memes, this punctuation adds a layer of seriousness and scholarliness that doesn’t belong in the world of the memes. Not funny memes, anyway.

By the way, I asked the AI god about drunk driving and bail. It said:

Bail is not always necessary for a first-time DUI as many suspects are released on their own recognizance (written promise to appear) once sober. However, bail is typically required for repeat offenses, accidents involving injury, or if the driver is considered a flight risk.

So, there we go.

I see at least three errors, maybe four. What do you see?

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1. Missing apostrophe. It should be It’s (“it is”), not its (possessive: “that thing’s”).

2. Missing period or colon. The clause …why Britain won WW2 should end with either a period (i.e., end of statement) or a colon (i.e., reason/explanation to follow).

3. Missing period. Scissors beats paper. Period.

4. (maybe… probably) Scissors is grammatically plural, so Scissors beat paper.

People can argue over that last one, but we normally say

The scissors are sharp, not The scissors is sharp.

The Merriam Webster Dictionary site has a good article on how scissors is a plurale tantum (plural: pluralia tantum), or a plural noun representing a singular object and having no grammatically singular form. Another plurale tantum: pants.

Since I lost weight, my pants are now too big for me.

Google “list of pluralia tantum” to see how many you already know.

Do you know anyone who says “a scissors” instead of “a pair of scissors”?

I remember those fried apple pies with fondness, and I also remember how McDonalds, in the interest of health (ha!), changed to selling baked apple pies. Did that help? Are Americans any slimmer these days? If anything, we’re even more elephantine, and other fast-food places sell fried pies of different sorts because nature abhors a vacuum. Thanks, Clown!

I see two errors. Do you see more?

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1. Unhyphenated phrasal adjective. It should be apple-pie filling.

2. Unnecessary apostrophe. It should be 1980s, not 1980’s.

Don’t pluralize with apostrophes. (And yes, there is one exception.)

And remember, re: hyphenating phrasal adjectives:

right-thinking people
a tax-paying citizen
a violent-weather seminar
two six-foot-tall men
a naughty three-way orgy
my two-timing wife
the four-buttocked man

Arguable exception:

It’s been argued that, if the phrasal adjective (also called a compound adjective) is so familiar as to be unmistakable, no hyphen is needed, e.g., a high school student. I think this is guideline is too subjective (“so familiar”?), so my recommendation is to err on the side of hyphenation. But take risks if you want. I can’t stop you.

Other exceptions:

1. Some argue that certain proper-noun phrases should be exempt from hyphenation, like an African American artist, a Rube Goldberg contraption, an Arnold Schwarzenegger scenario. Here, too, tread lightly. We often write, for example, the Asian-American community. That’s what the term “hyphenated American” is all about, ja?

2. If the first word in the phrasal adjective is an adverb ending in -ly, don’t hyphenate. Think: a quickly changing situation. (Not: quickly-changing.)

And remember that phrasal adjectives are hyphenated when they come before the noun they modify, not after.

• a well-written story

• The story was well written.

I see one arguable error.

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I won’t push the issue, but the more old-school people among us would say that the singular they isn’t kosher. Others counterargue that the singular they has been around for centuries. My humble recommendation would be to avoid it, but frankly, if you ignore this recommendation, you’re not going to hell.

My revision:

If one person is tailgating you, he is the problem.

You can also write she.

I see a few problems.

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1. Sentence fragment. As I’ve said before, I realize that photos captioned with When… and featuring sentence fragments are just a style (an illiterate style, but whatever). By that standard, the lack of a period at the end makes sense, and the capitalized When at the beginning isn’t really a mistake. That said, this is still a fragment.

2. Missing comma. There should be a comma after cheating given that what comes next is an independent clause.

I appreciate the humor, but it doesn’t hide the errors. Scroll down.

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1. Unnecessary capitalization. Don’t capitalize fresh start for no reason. It’s not a name, title, or anything else that would make it a proper-noun phrase.

2. Sentence-final period needed. Now that I understand that Gen Z is actively rebelling against the existence of periods, thus marking them all (i.e., Gen Z) as severely retarded, I have a better idea of the enemy, which is what’s always been, really: youthful stupidity and laziness. Add the period.

So many errors. So little time. Scroll down.

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I snagged this one off a comment thread on Instapundit, where I’ve learned not to say anything, but where illiteracy and carelessness abound. The average age of the Insty commenter is around 60, so age and the sloppiness that comes with age might explain so many of these typos. It could also be lack of education plus ingrained bad habits, or any combination of unfortunate factors. Alas, there’s no way to beam literacy into people’s brains, and since the people who most need correction are generally the people who most hate to hear correction, Substack is where I must go to vent my spleen. Which you get to see for free. Yay. Scroll down.

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1. Before I left high school is an introductory phrase, and most introductory phrases take commas. Before I left high school, I learned…

2. After the phrase the wisdom comes a proverb (“F—em if they…”) that’s set off by quotes. The em should have an apostrophe before it, and the F should have a single em dash, not three hyphens, after it. F—’em if they…

3. Assuming this is a US writer (as most Insty commenters are), the period at the end of the quote should be inside the quotation mark. If this is a UK writer, then there’s no problem. “F— ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

4. The opening phrase Of course is, again, an introductory phrase, so it should be italicized. Of course, that was in the…

5. The number 1950’s should not have an apostrophe. It’s 1950s. No apostrophe.

6. Right after 1950s, there should be a comma because a comma-and needs to separate the two independent clauses. Of course, that was in the 1950s, and sensitivity was not in vogue.

What a slog. So the corrected sentence should look like this:

Before I left high school, I learned the wisdom of “F— ’em if they can’t take a joke.” Of course, that was in the 1950s, and sensitivity was not in vogue.

Jesus Christ, people.

Well, you’re not a good garbageman if you resent your chosen job, so I should quit my whining. It’s in the nature of people to be, with few exceptions, careless slobs and drooling idiots (as I can be in certain aspects of my life), and language mostly evolves through fuckups that propagate through the population (but, yes, also less often through deliberate rebelliousness and creativity). Once widely accepted, the fuckups become, as they say, received English. Life is always in process; you can’t get attached to the idea that things ought to stay the same forever. Nothing concrete ever stays the same. Things are always in process, and reality is a mix of structure and fluidity. Why do galaxies so often repeat the starfishy spiral pattern? Why does Earthlife so often exhibit axial or radial symmetry? These are fixed patterns constantly iterating and reiterating themselves. And yet the tangible forms that exhibit these patterns grow old, decay, die, crumble, wash/blow away, and get replaced. The static and the dynamic, as Robert Pirsig noted in his novel Lila.

The errors here are humorous enough that I almost don’t want to correct them. Their sheer stupidity somehow lends a weird, awkward dignity to the sign, which was obviously written by an illiterate moron. Scroll down.

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1. Decapitalize the unnecessarily capitalized common nouns and noun phrases: tongue, tissue paper.

2. After selection, there should be a period.

3. If you insert the abovementioned period, the capital T in Thank you now makes sense, but you should end with another period.

4. But what the fuck does Please use tongue or tissue paper even MEAN? Ah, I got it.

In my own head, a better sign would read:

Use tongs or tissue paper (provided) when picking up product. Thank you.

Learn how to spell tongs, and remember that tongs, like pants, is plural.

You can do this.

This sloppy meme presents a great opportunity to talk about parallelism. This refers to when you’ve got a series of groups of words that, ideally, all use similar grammar and diction (word choice). One major grammatical error, a pet peeve of many teachers, is that of faulty parallelism—i.e., when one fails to keep the parallel structure. Even those of us who claim to know better are guilty of this sin, which can creep in when we’re not looking. But the above meme is just plain sloppy.

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1. Comma splice. Use a semicolon or make two sentences. Florida is very dangerous; stay away. (or) Florida is very dangerous. Stay away.

2. Hyphenate phrasal adjectives that precede the nouns they modify. It should be man-eating snakes, not man eating snakes.

3. Also, the second sentence is where we get all of the faulty parallelism. Rewritten a bit better, it ought to be:

It’s very hot and humid in the summer, with raptor-sized mosquitos and bugs, man-eating snakes, weekly hurricanes, gaping sinkholes, and teeming Republicans!

Note the structure I chose to make parallel: adjective + noun. This improves the flow greatly and increases the prose’s impact. Analyzed:

with raptor-sized mosquitos and bugs, [adjective + nouns]
man-eating snakes, [adjective + noun]
weekly hurricanes, [adjective + noun]
gaping sinkholes, [adjective + noun]
and teeming Republicans! [adjective + noun]

Before, the prose was sloppily all over the place:

very hot in the summer, [adjective phrase containing prepositional phrase]
[no “with”] mosquitos and bugs the size of raptors, [nouns + adj. phrase]
man-eating snakes, [adjective + noun]
hurricanes every week, [noun + adjective phrase]
sinkholes will swallow you whole, [independent clause]
and there are Republicans everywhere! [independent clause]

The original sucked because it had no rhythm. It had no rhythm because there was no parallelism. It sounded slapdash and all over the place. Sure, I get the spirit in which it was intended, and I’m sure the writer, probably an old guy, probably meant no harm, but there are moral lessons to be learned from this. First: being older doesn’t make you wiser or more careful. If anything, it makes you clumsier and stupider (and yes, I realize my own day is coming: time stops for no one). Second: there’s always time to put aside one’s stupid pride or incuriosity and learn something new, beneficial, and harmless. The result will be less pain for everyone around you. (Everyone who’s educated, anyway. Dumbasses, being dumbasses—and hanging with other dumbasses—will remain blissfully unaffected. You can’t fix stupid.)

The above, written by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, is articulate but contains two mistakes, both of the same kind. This is a mistake that Reynolds makes fairly often, along with comma splices. But the above errors aren’t comma splices.

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The errors are, however, comma errors. What’s the problem? Reynolds inserted commas into compound predicates—twice. As I have ranted elsewhere, if you go through life thinking only that commas mark a pause, then you are going to both leave them out where they’re needed and insert them where they’re not needed. Commas mark a pause is technically true, but there’s more to the story.

Commas come with rules. Let’s talk about one.

Solution: remove both commas— the ones after up and falsification.

Remember what a compound predicate is. It’s the two actions done by a single subject, and the two actions are never separated by a single comma (but they could in theory be separated by a pair of commas).

WRONG: The sphere-like alien settled on his eye, and began chewing.
RIGHT: The sphere-like alien settled on his eye and began chewing.

WRONG: He sat, and lit a cigarette.
RIGHT: He sat and lit a cigarette. (1 subject, 2 actions)

Pair of commas (parenthetical expression):

Sarah squatted and, in a moment of evil glee, sprayed diarrhea over the whole camp.

Don’t confuse a compound predicate (CP) with a compound sentence (CS). A compound sentence has two independent clauses separated by a semicolon or a comma-conjunction (FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).

CP: Joel saw the gutted horse carcass and puked. (1 subject, 2 actions)
CS: Joel saw the gutted horse carcass, and he puked. (2 clauses)

It’s possible to combine compound predicate and compound sentences.

Joel saw the gutted horse and tried to hold in his lunch, but he puked.

But what if there are three actions in the predicate? In that case, you can use commas and treat the actions as if they were a series or a bunch of list items.

He happily jammed his fork into the juicy steak, took a bite, and exploded.

I hope this helps.

“And that’s the way it is,” said Cronkite.