Posted by Jock on October 17, 2007 at 07:52:33 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: Blue skies (was Blue water) posted by John Nichols on October 17, 2007 at 01:16:20:
I am sick of my wife complaining about my English. So, I bought a grammar book from Barnes and Noble. I am slowly working through the exercises, and examining each sentence for structure.
John, I have never had the slightest difficulty in reading your English. Sometimes the subject you were trying to convey to fellow TarBoarders had me grasping for Google, but I was never stumped by a missing or surplus comma.
When I started writing in English, nobody could make any sense of my writing. I knew exactly what I meant. I would like to think that Kafka (who loving subordinate clauses, would nest his sentence structure to the nth degree) would also know what I meant. I daresay if you had translated my sentences into Polish, Polish professors of logic would have known what I meant. (Note my careful use of double brackets above.) But sadly, I was not writing for Kafka or professors of logic. My teachers, friends, parents and other mentors hadn't a clue what I was about and gave me a hard time. When I was 22, the penny finally dropped. I tried chopping my long spaghetti sentences into bite-sized chunks and, hey presto, soon I was editing the work of my English colleagues!