Monday, June 22, 2009

The Comma: Truly Exciting Stuff


You know, I really like punctuation. One of my favorite books is Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. It's all about commas and exclamation points and apostrophes - and, yes, I read it for business and pleasure.

If you have an affinity for punctuation like I do, I highly recommend Eats, Shoots & Leaves. And if you can't quite see why any of the following examples are horrifying to someone like me, resolve to do better by checking out the punctuation game I link to below.

Have you ever written something like this?
  • Buy all three fitness DVD's and receive a set of dumbbell's for free.
  • This workout is known for its' fat burning drills.

  • Our hard-core training sessions, and fun boot camps are sure-to-please!!!

Pretty bad. I just want to fix those examples above so bad (or is it badly?).

Hey, check out the COMMA I.Q. game. Who says you can't have fun with commas? (I got one of the 10 questions wrong. Guess which one.)

http://www.savethecomma.com/game/



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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am guessing that you got number seven wrong. I took the test and that is the one, I missed. Fun blog post, good job!

Amanda Vogel said...

Hi Anonymous,

Hey, thanks for the (hopefully intentionally) misplaced comma! Funny.

I just played the comma game again. The questions are different this time. They must mix it up.

So there's no way for me to admit which one I got wrong. You'll just have to trust that I learned the lesson; I won't make that comma mistake again.

Pacific Personal Training/CrossFit Hillsboro said...

That was fun! I've been wanting to read that book. I re-posted this quiz on my facebook page. =) I'm such a grammar/punctuation freak. I think it really says a lot about the person if they take the time to proofread. Thanks!

Velma Garnes said...

We ate at an expensive Italian Restaurant, I got wrong.... TWICE! I still can't tell you what the right answer is. I only got 8 right twice. I always thought I was pretty good at comma placement. Too bad:o(

Amanda Vogel said...

Hi Velma!

Thanks for playing.

The correct answer: "We ate at an expensive Italian restaurant."

"We ate at an expensive, Italian restaurant" is the wrong answer.

You only add a comma between adjectives when it makes sense for the comma to replace the word "and."

Like this: "We ate at an expensive, trendy restaurant." This sentence also works with "and": "We ate at an expensive and trendy restaurant."

However, it doesn't really work to say: "We ate at an expensive and Italian restaurant."

Your score of eight is pretty good! I think you should continue to consider yourself good at comma placement.

Every Gym's Nightmare said...

haha- awesome. I often get told by my editors to stop using so many hyphens- like that.

Amanda Vogel said...

To Every Gym's Nightmare:

I love hyphens! I love them in place of commas, semi-colons, colons and brackets. Maybe I love them too much.

Funny, I was just pondering this morning if an article I was about to submit to an editor had too many hyphens.

Sara said...

The game is great and your post is excellent as well. So glad I found you through LinkedIn.