Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Preparatives. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Preparatives Quotes And Sayings by 94 Authors including Steven Pinker,Robert Lane Greene,William Shawn,Gilbert Highet,William Strunk Jr. for you to enjoy and share.
For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?
for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, "grammar." And
Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.
Know the subject; love the subject; like your students; know your students.
1. Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's.
The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.
It's so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it's easier.
Often turn the stile [correct with care], if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice.
[Lat., Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus.]
If you can read this, thank a teacher.
constructions, and I
I do not intend to give you any homework - no difficult math questions, or anything like that, and conjugating English verbs is outside my sphere of interest. However, from time to time I'll give you a short assignment.
Nouns and verbs hold the power but syntax casts the spell.
If grammar is medicine, then Roy Clark gives us the spoonful of sugar to help it go down. A wonderful tour through the labyrinth of language.
As with anything you set out to learn in life, you don't get from point A to point Z without touching upon all those letters in between.
Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language
One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and in reading or one does not. What Sophomore English does (or tries to do) is little more than the naming of parts.
The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
Trying to straighten the question mark!
An aspersion upon my parts of speech!
The fact that [English] has shed most of the old grammatical forms which time has rendered useless and scarcely intelligible, has made English a model, pointing the way which must be followed in building the Interlanguage ...
Grammar is nothing
But a slave-master of words:
Unchain your language!
Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.
English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.
a favourite master, Mr. Grove, liked to say that if we learned to master the semi-colon we could expect to be successful in whatever path we chose in life. One
There is room for words on subjects other than last words.
It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.
Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.
Punctuation lets your writing breathe...
Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.
Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.
Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.
My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
I have to write in sequence and only in sequence.
I am Psmith," said the old Etonian reverently. "There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis.
Don't try to defile the English language. I can think of a few other things I'd rather dirty up.
Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
Penelope did not understand how this [study] group was ever formed. It consisted only of her mortal enemies. However, these were things you seemed to put aside during exam period.
When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.
Writing is a game of hits and misses. Throw out the hits and keep the misses.
How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it,' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.
Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.
Begin my studies with the paper and this pencil and i'm working through the grammar of my fears.
I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.
The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. She was merely a detail in the poverty of our area.
Michael walked to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. "You all right?"
I made my twin brother hate me.
I can't try out for basketball.
I gave my number to some girl who thinks I'm a thug.
Gabriel looked back at his textbook. "Yeah. Fine.
Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians
I would die at the stake rather than change a semi-colon!
Punctuation are like road signs; without them we just may get lost...
It is true that writers often owe their most inspired thoughts, their most extraordinary phrases, to their generous typesetters, who assist their flights of fancy with so-called typographical errors.
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar.
My honors are misunderstanding, pesecution and neglect, enhanced because unsought.
For life's not a paragraph/ and death, i think, is no parenthesis.
His body forced itself into a comma as a result of the trauma. The
There are a lot of other things besides nouns.
weareheretogetagoodfoundation sowecangotocollegeliveuptoourpotentialgetagoodjoblivehap pilyeverafterandgotoDisneyWorld,
Smooth words in place of gifts.
[Lat., Dicta docta pro datis.]
My grammar be's ebonics, gin tonics, and chronic.
Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.
I despise the proper constructions and cases, because I think it very unfitting that the words of the celestial oracle should be restricted by the rules of Donatus [a well-known grammarian].
Don't use language instrumentally
Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
orr we find a typo in a book.
discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed down in the traditions of usage. The
The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.
Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas
a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.
Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.
In language clarity is everything.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood.
I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.
Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And
in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.
If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.
[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.
Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.
I am better at math than spelling.
We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon,
I hate commas in the wrong places.
I'm a little bit backward. I didn't really go to school.
The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical ... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.
The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding.
Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.
Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.
When I write a paper, I change my notation much more than I change my concepts.
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson's frequent use of "it's" for "its" and "recieve" for "receive,
All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one's discourse, not studied, as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm ...
I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare;' I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning;' I say I 'passed a school'.
English and Gym. That's it. Look, do you know how difficult it is to write about being at school convincingly? It's been years since Stephfordy graduated, so it'll save us all a lot of time and effort if we just stick to two real subjects...