So I followed a link from Janet Reid’s site to here and found this great post on negativity.
You know the glass-is-half empty folks who can spin from “that editorial letter was kinda harsh” to “I hate my life and want to die” in 5.7 seconds? Being around that sort of energy sucks every ounce of joy and creativity out of my brain and spits it out in a dirty napkin. . . . The funny thing about negative people is that they’re seldom happy to wallow alone. They’re generous enough to want to share their misery with others.
Yes! I thought. These are the people who drain all the positive energy from the room the moment they walk in. I remember this one person I knew in grad school . . . eventually I realized she was NEVER going to have a good day. Now I seriously suggest to my students that they avoid people like that and cut off friendships if necessary. You so do not need to surround yourself with a cloud of negativity that’s going to drag you back down every time you succeed at something.
But what I was really looking for was this post on dropping commas, because by an amazing coincidence someone gave me this cartoon:
last week, and I instantly put it up on my office door.
Hilarious!
But I kinda disagree with Tawna, though, when she says commas are a detail you shouldn’t really worry about too much. Commas are important, and putting them in the right places by feel is important. If you are a writer, grammar is your tool — language is your tool, and grammar is part of that — and if you can’t use your tools effectively, you can’t write as well as you ought to.
Not that I mean to be negative or anything.
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