QUOTE (Bill Sweetland @ Ragan.com)
In your writing, any cluster of run-on adjectives and nouns totaling three (or more) likely means you’re talking like a vice president or a CEO, and you’re jabbering in a foreign tongue: German
In 1880, Mark Twain wrote a famous essay titled, The Awful German Language. He parodied a peculiarity of German writers: They pile up nouns and adjectives one after the other in ridiculously long phrases unrelieved by verbs, prepositions, or commas.
Twain named this bad habit “the compounding disease.� The only punctuation marks in these long strings were the lowly hyphen and its first cousin, the parentheses. Well, we Americans have gone the Germans one better: We’ve eliminated the parentheses, and we use hyphens when our inner writer’s light tells us we should, which is to say, very inconsistently.
Leave it to corporate America to let them off the hook. We have out-Germaned the Germans.
Possible copyright infringement removed by admin. See guidelines.
In 1880, Mark Twain wrote a famous essay titled, The Awful German Language. He parodied a peculiarity of German writers: They pile up nouns and adjectives one after the other in ridiculously long phrases unrelieved by verbs, prepositions, or commas.
Twain named this bad habit “the compounding disease.� The only punctuation marks in these long strings were the lowly hyphen and its first cousin, the parentheses. Well, we Americans have gone the Germans one better: We’ve eliminated the parentheses, and we use hyphens when our inner writer’s light tells us we should, which is to say, very inconsistently.
Leave it to corporate America to let them off the hook. We have out-Germaned the Germans.
Possible copyright infringement removed by admin. See guidelines.
