COMMA-CRAZED FITZSY’S IMMIGRANT SECOND-LANGUAGE ASSISTANCE

One useful purpose for Sydney Morning Herald columns by Peter FitzSimons: they can be handy punctuation and clarity-correction guides for people studying English as a second language. Or for journalism students, but I repeat myself.

One useful purpose for Sydney Morning Herald columns by Peter FitzSimons: they can be handy punctuation and clarity-correction guides for people studying English as a second language. Or for journalism students, but I repeat myself.

Take this recent paragraph, for example:

In short, to paraphrase Mark Twain, I think, the reports of Queensland’s death last year, were exaggerated. And I suspect, too, we might find the same this year? But if I was Walters, I would throw in Ponga for Origin II. They need the “human highlights reel” as he has been dubbed, and he is the future.

Let’s work through this disaster by sequential sentences. The first doesn’t require “in short”, so that is cut. FitzSimons’s doubt over the origin of the Twain quote is quickly resolved by a quick Google search. The comma between “year” and “were” is redundant, so it is scrubbed.

Second sentence: drop two commas, “too”, and the question mark (Fitzsimons isn’t asking a question).

Third sentence: it’s better expressed as two sentences, with the removal of “and”.

End result:

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of Queensland’s death last year were exaggerated. And I suspect we might find the same this year. But if I was Walters, I would throw in Ponga for Origin II. They need the “human highlights reel”, as he has been dubbed. He is the future.

And there we go. With just a few simple adjustments, we end up with a paragraph almost worth sending as an email to someone in prison or otherwise with some time to kill.

(Via MonsterDome.)