Jim Baumann
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Grammar Moses: Have you misplaced your modifier?Sep 20, 2015 12:00 am - Don Buck of Wheaton wrote to express his dismay over the use of misplaced modifiers. His example deals with one of the most abused modifiers in English the language. "I...
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Grammar Moses: All right, already! Today you get plenty of optionsSep 13, 2015 7:10 am - In the spirit of getting to the point, I will launch into an olio of malapropisms, bad abbreviations, similar words that tend to be used interchangeably and words that y...
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Grammar Moses: Let's get to the point. Enough with extraneous wordsSep 06, 2015 6:40 am - Count me among book lovers who much prefer Hemingway's simple, declarative sentences to Faulkner's circumlocutory style of writing. I know I will get complaints from Fau...
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Grammar Moses: Good communicators are good readers, tooAug 29, 2015 7:40 am - Reading, as they say, is fundamental. If you're not a good reader, odds are slim that you'll be a good writer or speaker. Why? There are myriad reasons, but I'll focus o...
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Grammar Moses: A give-and-take on 'bring' and 'take'Aug 22, 2015 2:00 pm - You may know what a laser looks like and essentially what it does, but did you know that "laser" is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiatio...
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Grammar Moses: Is 'couple' a collective noun? DependsAug 15, 2015 7:40 am - Hello! For the first 27 or so years of my journalism career, I subscribed to the notion that a "couple" - as in a married couple - is a collective noun that should take ...
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Grammar Moses: On me, myself and I. Or what's wrong with me?Aug 08, 2015 7:40 am - There is no "I" in team. And apparently not enough "me" in the English language. Or as Arlington Heights reader Lynn Jensen puts it: "Where has the objective case gone?"...
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Grammar Moses: On fuzzy math and pleading the FifthAug 01, 2015 7:40 am - Rare is the journalist who has more than a passing familiarity with anything as complicated as cross multiplication. Rarer still, I surmise, is the advertising copy wr...
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Infrequently Asked Questions: Ironman athlete Brandon OrnaAug 01, 2015 1:00 am - Editor's note: Today we're debuting a new feature called INfrequently Asked Questions. Each week, we'll explore the sides of suburbanites' jobs or hobbies that you m...
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Grammar Moses: Writing with clarity is knowing your audienceJul 25, 2015 2:30 pm - Grammar and word usage are evolving things. They're not like math, which has definitive answers. Perhaps that is why I was flummoxed by them as a child. Grammarians fall...