Exotic Expressions

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My teacher is sitting on my head (my teacher is putting pressure on me). INDIA. In super-multilingual India, it’s not unusual for people to translate idioms from one language to another. This one comes from Hindi. My teacher’s really sitting on my head. He’s given us three essays to write by Monday. Apparently, I’m old-fashioned in believing that people are people, not things. But for the record, it is now apparently permissible to refer to people as either “the folks who” or “the folks that.” (Ew.) So how do you successfully walk those lines? How do you ensure that your posts are conversational yet correct, compelling yet credible? Macallan 25YO Anniversary Malt 1971, Cambridge DistilleryTruffle Gin, or even a flight of rare Yamazaki Tsukuriwake whisky.

In fact, as a blogger you should probably make it a point to introduce sentence fragments every now and then, depending on your personal style (sorry, Mrs. Pendergast). They let you spice up your writing by playing with pace, tension and emotion. Carl’s nasty old landlord threatened to double the rent, plus even more of an increase on top of that, if Carl went to the rent board about the broken washing machine.If this is unclear, switch the pieces of the sentence around first and then see which word works better. The second sentence, on the other hand, refers to the specific map they used. (There could be other maps, too.) “Where is the map they used to drive cross-country? It’s in the glove compartment.”

To do that, you need to look at the larger issues. Are your walls straight and attractively laid out? Does your building look inviting? Can you construct its rooms so that visitors are naturally led from one to the other in the sequence you’ve designed? Should you start a sentence with an abbreviation like FYI? (In formal writing this is traditionally frowned upon, but in a blog post it’s usually fine unless it looks clunky.) I’m not saying you should make your writing so robotically regular that it becomes predictable and monotonous. In fact, the best general rule of thumb for commas overall is that there is no general rule of thumb. Even the old grammar guide that says to “use a comma wherever you would pause in speaking” is misleading, because we all speak so differently. (Imagine where the commas would fall, for example, in Morgan Freeman’s speech as opposed to Christopher Walken’s!) Seeing the face as a mirror to the soul, Anton's portraits are an artistic look at the nuances of each person's features. And through these features, whether deep wrinkles reflecting age and wisdom or the rounded cheeks of a smiling child, viewers are pulled into the spirit of the sitter. Without any words to accompany the imagery, Anton asks viewers to look beyond the particular place a person lives and simply see the soul within. Through these worldless stories, the universal nature of mankind shines through.An omnishambles (something that has been managed or has turned out badly in every possible way) UK. First they mixed our rooms up, then the toilet flooded, and when we finally got to the beach it started raining. The entire holiday was an omnishambles! What’s occurrin’? (How are you?) WALES. This is a typical way to greet someone in the country, a little like What’s up? I strongly feel that writers should always refer to people as “who” rather than “that.” However, my research indicates that my strong opinion on the matter has become outdated. This is one example. Unless the context in which you’re writing is very formal (sorry, corporate and legal bloggers), sentence fragments are perfectly fine in blogs—and a lot of other writing—these days.

I flinch whenever I read (or hear) sentences like “Kobe Bryant is the athlete that inspired me to play basketball.” Not that Kobe needs my help, but to my ear, referring to him as “that” instead of “who” dehumanizes him.

Do you abbreviate the United States of America as USA or U.S.A.? (I strongly favor the latter, but different strokes for different folks.) But expect to run into people who will argue that ad nauseam. Numbers: A Source of “Total” Confusion It’s a horribly overworked symbol to begin with, struggling with a full schedule as a conjunction splitter, quotation clarifier and phrase definer while also moonlighting as a separator of list items. It tries so hard to please everyone, but sadly, we all disagree on its exact job description. These same guidelines apply to common Latin abbreviations such as etc. and our buddies i.e., and e.g. from just above—they are now so common that they don’t require italics. Using .Com web domains that include contextual keywords get better results from Google, Facebook, and other search apps.