Home > Author > Jenny Baranick
1 " Oftentimes, people meet our writing before they meet us; our writing is our first impression.People read our résumés, cover letters, proposals, and emails, and that's the basis on which we are judged first. If our writing is full of grammar and punctuation errors, even though the content may be great, it’s like wearing a beautifully made Prada dress that has deodorant stains "
― Jenny Baranick , Kiss My Asterisk: A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar
2 " You may think that you don't need to worry about actually learning the grammar rules because spell check and grammar check will come to your rescue. And I get it: spell check and grammar check are great. Every time I spot a red or green line in my writing, I check it out, and many times, although I hate to admit it, I have made a mistake. But spell check and grammar check are like vodka: they are definitely helpful but shouldn't be solely relied on to solve our problems. "
3 " If you want to see a truly long sentence, pick up a copy of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which reportedly contains a 4,391 word sentence. And when you’re finished with that one, Jonathan Coe’s book The Rotters Club contains a sentence made up of 13,955 words. "
4 " I don't agree with Freud's theory about women having penis envy. Don't get me wrong, gentlemen; your penises are great. I'm just not personally interested in possessing one myself. To be honest, the last thing I need is to worry about the size of another one of my body parts. "
― Jenny Baranick , Kiss My Asterisk - A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar
5 " when certain married words neglect to wear their apostrophes, they might be mistaken for their single friends: The identity of he’ll just went to hell. She’ll is like a shell of its former self. We’ll looks like it wishes it were a well. "
6 " Use the semicolon like you would use any powerful weapon (your best pick-up line or your most effective push-up bra): carefully and sparingly. "
7 " Possession is tricky. It brings up issues of jealousy, codependence, self-esteem, and incorrect apostrophe placement. "
8 " When I think about Richard Gere, I can’t help but simultaneously think about the colon. "
9 " Even is such a dependable word. It means steady, unchanging. Though, on the other hand, is the opposite. It means despite the fact that, which means it is always dealing with varying circumstances. Though would be too much drama for even. "
10 " One of the most pressing questions of our time is arguably this: Does size matter? Is it about quantity or quality? Is it the size of the boat or the motion of the ocean? Is it the length of the magic wand or the power of the spell? Obviously, I am referring to sentence size. "
11 " Subject = Boat Verb = Sank Completes a thought = If you went up to someone and said, “The big boat sank,” the person may think that it’s a weird way to start the conversation, but he or she would understand what happened. "
12 " A run-on sentence is when we fuse two or more sentences together without using any punctuation to separate them. For example: I had the strangest dream last night on my couch Johnny Depp was whispering sweet nothings in my ear my mom was telling me to clean my room. "
13 " A comma splice means that a comma has been inserted between two complete sentences. "
14 " So we’re seemingly in quite a pickle. Sometimes a period provides too much pause between these two sentences, but the comma doesn’t provide enough. Luckily, the period and the comma had a drunken one-night stand and produced this adorable little spawn they named the semicolon. "
15 " The semicolon, my friends, is the punctuation mark we use to join two complete sentences. When we want to separate two complete sentences, we use the period. When we want to hold them together, we use the semicolon. "
16 " We might also want to use a semicolon to hold together two sentences to avoid giving the reader too much time to think about the first sentence before we hit them with the second one. For example, let’s say that I was writing an email to my husband explaining why the bank account might not be quite as full as it was earlier in the day. I might include this sentence: I just bought a plane ticket to Cabo; Sharon just went through a divorce and she needs me. "
17 " We use the en dash when we want to express a range of values: Goldilocks will only sleep on Egyptian cotton sheets with a 300–400 thread count. She only eats porridge that is 98–100 degrees. "
18 " Like an exclamation point, the em dash may be used to provide emphasis, but the exclamation point must go at the end of a sentence—the em dash can go anywhere: There’s a little blonde girl—in my bed. None of my porridge—not even one little drop—is left. "
19 " The closest we can get to set hyphen rules are that the prefixes ex, self, and all always require hyphens while adverbs ending in ly never do: Goldilocks first told the jury that she had been walking through the dimly lit forest and mistook the three bears’ house for an all-inclusive resort. When the jury seemed skeptical, she changed her story and said she had been in a highly emotional state and was suffering from low self-esteem because her ex-boyfriend Jack left her to climb a beanstalk. "
20 " In high school, I was such a slut. And I was not alone; most girls in my high school were total sluts. We didn’t sleep around or have loose morals, but for some reason, in high school, slut was the insult of choice. "
