Keeping your adverbials in their proper place

‘Stopping to rethread the needle twice before she got to the end, she got up and stood at the ironing board to press the skirt with a warm iron ready for collection.’

Gert is grouchy

Image: https://pixabay.com/en/old-angry-woman-person-white-face-607710/

 

No names, no pack drill as they used to say in the army, but Gert was shocked to her bootstraps to read sentences like this in a book that has received some praise:

Titivullus, a hell of a spellchecker

Boredom – so fun? Even funner!

Nietzsche Boredom is the windless calm of the soul

Have the proof-reader shot

Some nice Twainisms in David Crystal’s Guardian article about his new book Making a Point: the pernickety story of English punctuation.

That pesky comma

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God