The Daily News

1   Good mornin'! Today's first lesson: writin'. 

2   I adore when people take the "g" off the ends of suffixes that end in "ing."

3   As in, "I was talkin' with some friends, and everyone had somethin' cool to say!"

4   Ain't nothin' better.

5   I love the English language.

6   It's so confusin'.

7   For example, and I've said this on a number of occasions: Why is there an apostrophe in the word ain't?

8  What is being shortened? Is it short for ai not?

9

10  Ah, leave it. If you glance up at item four, you might be led to believe it means "There is."

11  Oh, and before I forget, the past form of "lead" as in "She will lead us to victory!" is led, not lead. 

12   Some things drive teachers, or even former teachers to madness.

13  A lot. Two words. That one makes us go ballistic.

14  If you are a person who goes ballistic over grammar, save your time. 

15   Do this: Go to Home Depot and buy one of those orange and black rakes that are around two miles wide.

16   Rent a truck, or I'll just give you my keys to the TOOOOOOONDRA, go down to your favorite beach, and try to rid the shores of sand. 

17

18   Classic.

19   And stay WAY away from Facebook.

20  There's an entire continent of stupid if you do a simple flyover. 

21  I include myself in that idiocy.

22  I'm pretty certain that each time I compose this nonsense I make some heinous error in grammar, sometimes deliberate, sometimes not. My fellow grammarians probably tear out their hair when they read some of this. I claim I'm being colloquial. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

23  I work from old Warriner's English Grammar and Comp books bought from Amazon. They're musty and wonderful. The fourth course is the Bible. As we speak they have 11 of them on sale for $7.44. Why $7.44 I'll never know. How did they arrive at such an odd figure?

24   I also borrow strongly from Strunk and White's Elements of Style, which will teach you which its to use: its or it's. For the record, it's means "it is." Period inside quotes? Some say always. Some disagree. Writing rules, I swear. I suggest you get the most recent edition, since that stuff is a tad dated. And avoid online grammar. Just avoid it. 

25   My favorite book on writing is Stephen King's On Writing. I sit in coffee shops or pho places and read that over and over.  

26  It's much shorter than say Under the Dome. The buzz on King's writing tome is that he hates adverbs. The word "tome" might not have been my best choice. It implies a large, tedious book. On Writing is brief and easy to navigate. I suggest you buy a copy immediately. 

27  Those of you looking for these things should realize that learning grammar can be as easy as buying these books on Amazon and then studying the rules of grammar. 

28  WARNING: Don't try learning grammar online. They tend to go alphabetically, which is like trying to learn math alphabetically. Think about it. 

29  More:  You do things well, not good. "You did that well!" not "You did that good!" This is a tough one, because if someone says "You did that good!" to you, who's going to correct them without appearing rude?

30   There's a lot (two words!) to learn, trust me.

31   When people ask me about writing, I invariably lead them to Warriner's, Strunk and White, and Stephen King.

32   Why wouldn't we want to learn to write from a guy whose net worth is estimated to be somewhere between 200 and 400 million?

33  And yes, he abhors adverbs and embraces the active voice. Adverbs tell how, when, and where. I would have used the word "essentially" in there, but it is an adverb, which is a grammatical blemish, according to King. 

34  Examples: gloriously (how), then, tomorrow (when), there (where). They also tell "to what extent" for the record, but you can eliminate that by placing most "to what extent" words into the (how) category.

35  The active voice eliminates helping verbs. John threw the ball is active. The ball was thrown by John becomes wussy because of the helping verb "was." 

36   Okay I'll stop.

37   Moving On, Part One: I keep forgetting to fix my laptop.

38   The words keep jumping from one sentence to another, and I realize it has something to do with using a wireless mouse, but I never find time to fix it.

39  Dayum.

40  And I'm avoiding adverbs like the plague.

41   Whoops.

42  "As though they were the plague." Subjunctive. No wonder people never learn to write. 

43  "As though they were the plague."

44   That sounds snooty, if you ask me. 

45   Avoid cliches. Dude. I can't even write the word cliche because I can't get that little accent mark to hover over the "e" in cliche. This Blogger thing doesn't have that. Or it may have it, but I may need to take my wallet out and pay for it.

46  Nonsense.

47  Moving On, Part Two: Yesterday I parked myself in a local pho place and read yesterday's DN. Somehow my entire layout on this thing was all over the place.

48  It read like a bad William Carlos Williams' poem. 

49   Don't get me goin' on THAT guy, or this piece will be all over the place, like Mr. Chau.

50

51   I love bad analogies, ever notice?

52   For those who don't know, Mr. Chau was a restaurant guy who at one point during the 90's had restaurants all over the place. My recollection is that most served pretty terrible food, and rumors abounded that they had issues with health authorities. 

53   He even had a commercial that had him say, "We're all over the place!"

54   Now I can't find a picture of the guy. 

55   Ah, it's <wink> just as well. I worked on today's DN for around three hours. Know why? 'Cuz I could. 

56  Time to put this one to bed.

57   Have a GREAT day. 

58   See you again.

59   Peace.

~H~

fin.