On Fri, 4 Mar 2011 07:11:10 -0800 (PST), Cindy Hamilton
wrote:

On Mar 4, 5:50*am, "Percival P. Cassidy" wrote:
On 03/03/11 11:56 pm, HeyBub wrote:





No argument there. Being able to read at a level above Dick& *Jane
or basic math for everyday functioning seems to be optional in some
places.

Not only optional, but wildly popular.

Ever read a book by Robert B Parker? He's the author of those Jesse
Stone tv movies starring Tom Selleck. Read one of his books. They
read like an old Dick and Jane reader.

Hi.
Hey.
OK?
Sure.
Great.
You?
Eh....

No kidding. It's like MTV videos. Apparently, can't keep a thought
going for more that half a page. One book had eighty chapters. And
the guy routinely makes the best seller list. Even worse, he's not
the first best selling author to write like he flunked 4th grade
english. A sad case of knowing what the market will bear, I guess.

He writes the way people talk.

His readers (of whom I am one) are looking for light entertainment,
not a struggle to parse a sentence.

Whose prose do you like?

Here's the opening sentence to "Off for the Sweet Hereafter":

"That was the summer we lost the bald Jeeter who was not even mostly Jeeter
anymore but was probably mostly Throckmorton or anyway was probably
considered mostly Throckmorton which was an appreciable step up from being
considered mostly Jeeter since Jeeters hadn't ever been anything much while
Throckmortons had in fact been something once previously before the money
got gone and the prestige fell away leaving merely the bluster and the taint
and the general Throckmorton aroma all of which taken together hardly made
for a legacy worth getting stirred up over but any one of which taken singly
still outstripped the entire bulk of advancements ever attempted and
realized by Jeeters who had scratched around in the dirt but were not much
accomplished at farming and who had speculated in herds of cattle but were
not much accomplished at speculating either and who at last had turned their
energies to the construction of a henhouse which commenced ramshackle and
got worse but became nonetheless the chief Jeeter advancement along with the
hens and the little speckled brown eggs and the localized ammonia cloud
which was itself most probably the primary Jeeter success though no
particular Jeeter or group of Jeeters together actually contributed to it or
could prevent it either so when the bald Jeeter, with the fat Jeeter as her
maid of honor, exchanged vows with Braxton Porter Throckmorton III in the
sanctuary of the Methodist church on Saturday June the twelfth, 1942, and
afterwards set up house in Neely proper she got away from the hens and the
henhouse and out from under the ammonia cloud which was most likely
beginning to expand in June 1942 since it set in to expanding most every
June and swelled straight through August and on into September, especially
this past August and especially this past September when it was bearing down
on the town limits and posing some threat to the icehouse which was regular
and ordinary for the season, particularly in August and particularly in
September, so we were having what had come to be our usual summer straight
up to the moment Mr. Derwood Bridger laid his ladder against the
Throckmorton clapboard and climbed to the upper story where he pressed his
nose to the bedroom windowscreen and shaded his eyes and called and hollered
and shrieked at the bald Jeeter until he was satisfied that she was gone
from us for good."

Frankly, I couldn't have said it better.

Was the author hoarding punctuation marks in case he needed them later?


Remember, every punctuation mark used is one
that is not available for someone else to use.
Be sparing of your punctuation so that there is
enough to go around for everyone.

I see you belong to the fixed-sized pie group.

There's a worldwide shortage of apostrophes,
because of the greengrocer's apostrophe.

I thought the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes took care of that shortage.