Quotes from June Casagrande

As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's the Bill Maher of punctuation.

Grammar snobs are a distinct breed from their gentle cousins: word nerds and grammar geeks. The difference is bloodlust.

If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth--something a lot of writers would rather deny: The Reader is king. You are his servant. You serve the Reader information. You serve the Reader entertainment. You serve the Reader details of your company's recent merger or details of your experiences in drug rehab. In each case, as a writer you're working for the man (or the woman). Only by knowing your place can you do your job well.

Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists--they're everywhere, they're all to eager to offer their services, and they're anything but gentle.

Is that a dangler in your memo or are you just glad to see me?

This chapter is dedicated to those other delights of punctuation--exquisite little squiggles, those most delightful dots and dashes, and other tragically under-appreciated tiny tidbits! Nah. I'm just yankin' your chain.

You must now--before God, Jon Stewart, and whoever's sleeping next to you (even if these entities are one and the same)--make a solemn oath.

I hope that, by this point, you're feeling a little less intimidated by the meanies, because I've got some bad news: Meanies come in many forms, not just human. They can be not only animal, but also mineral. In rare cases, they can even be vegetable, but we can talk about William F. Buckley some other time.

Rumor had it that Professor Jerkwad had a history of holding classes in bars and using the school's senior class as harvesting grounds for a long string of wives who never seemed to stay married to him past age twenty-eight. Rumor also had it that a few years later he was canned from his job mid some rather unpleasant allegations, but we journalists can't succumb to rumor and conjecture when nonspecific innuendo is so much more titillating.

He needed to "kill his darlings"—Stephen King's favorite term for letting go of stuff that just doesn't work.

Every long sentence can be broken up into shorter ones, and if you don't know how—if you don't see within your long sentences groupings of simple, clear ideas—it will show.

Subordinating conjunctions are a much larger set. They include after, although, as, because, before, if, since, than, though, unless, until, when, and while.

Subordinating conjunctions relegate clauses to a lower grammatical status. Subordination means that what was a whole sentence is whole no more. It's a mere subordinate clause.

Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists—they're everywhere, they're all too eager to offer their services, and they're anything but gentle.

The job of a subordinating conjunction is (drum roll, please) to subordinate. It relegates a clause to a lower grammatical status in the sentence.