Grammar

(116 votes)   From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. ''After dinner, the men moved into the living room.'' I explained to the professor that this was Rose' way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.

James Thurber
1894-1961, American Humorist, Illustrator

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(100 votes)   Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

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(99 votes)   My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

Ernest Hemingway
1898-1961, American Writer

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(97 votes)   Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

Mark Twain
1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer

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(96 votes)   Grammar is the grave of letters.

Elbert Hubbard
1859-1915, American Author, Publisher

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(89 votes)   The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

Edgar Allan Poe
1809-1845, American Poet, Critic, short-story Writer

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(83 votes)   When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862, American Essayist, Poet, Naturalist

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(82 votes)   Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Source Unknown

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(79 votes)   Spel chekers, hoo neeeds em?

Alan James Bean

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(77 votes)   Grammar, which can govern even Kings.

MoliFre
1622-1673, French Playwright

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