 So several years ago Sarasota author and editor Liz Corson realized her county's library system was throwing away perfectly good books, a lot of good books. And so after trying and failing to convince his leadership to allow her to distribute these books, she partnered with other counties and private individuals and to date has given away more than 15,000 books to homeless and needy people in her community. An enthusiastic reader and lifelong advocate for literacy, Liz is here to talk to us about right, right, right now. Say that 10 times fast. Right, right, right now. So ladies and gentlemen, help me give a warm welcome to Liz Corson. What I'm not sad just now is that one of the pivotal points of my book giveaway to homeless people in my Sarasota Florida community was one day I was in a dumpster. And I had figured out the dumpster routes of all the libraries in the county and I would go there the day before the dumpsters were empty. And I climb right in and I start looking for the books that I was going to save, rescue and give away. And I tried to be subtle about it. I tried to do it sort of off hours, but one day right during the middle of the day I found myself in a dumpster at the main library in downtown Sarasota Florida. And the security guard came over to me and he said, listen, he said, the next time you are in a dumpster we're going to have you arrested for trespass. And I said, you know, I can't imagine a bigger public relations nightmare for the county library system than you arresting a middle-aged lady who feels compelled to jump in your dumpsters and rescue discarded books. And so I said, this is the end of this problem. I called the only person I know who could help me, which is the publisher of the Sarasota Herald Tribune. And I said, I've got to tell you that the library is a grown boy of books. And he said, I'm on it. I'm setting a recorder. And so he came over to the recorder and I had 17 boxes of children's biographies, mostly of African American leaders. So imagine probably, I think the count was 447 of these children's biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, luminaries like that. And these had been thrown away. They had been in a dumpster in my county. And once the article hit the paper, I'm glad to say that the library stopped normal boy books. But did they give them to me? No. Now, all of those apparently sent off to some place in Indiana where I guess they're resold. And so there was no leadership about that particular issue in my county. One of the ways you can really demonstrate leadership is by your good writing. Your good writing demonstrates authority and credibility. And I'm going to show you today how to make $250. Who among us would like to have an extra $250? I see some people don't really care, but I know that I'd like to have an extra $250. But I'm going to do it better than just $250. I'm not talking about $250. I'm not talking about $250 a month. I'm not talking about $250 a week, a day, or an hour. I'm not even talking about $250 a minute. Today I'm going to show you how to make $250 a second. Now, who among us wouldn't like to make $250 a second? Well, there's somebody who says, yes, absolutely. I thought I would like to make $250 a second. And that's one of the things I'm going to show you this morning. Get this. There are all these things to juggle. I'm here today to talk about punctuation and grammar in American English. I have 47 style guides in my library. 47 different publishers who have said, this is the way to use a semicolon. This is the way to use a comma. This is the difference between a punch of a hyphen and a dash. But I have combined the three authorities. The New York Times, Chicago, and, believe it or not, Princeton University. And I've come up with a style that I call modern American academic style. It is unassailable. If you use the style that I have blended from these three authorities, you can go toe-to-toe with the grammar geek in your office. You can go toe-toe with any grammar geek that you have as clients. Because the whole length of the point is here this morning are absolutely non-negotiable. It's going to be a fast workshop. I want you all to think about Serena Williams, the tennis star. I want you to think about fundamentals. In Serena's case, the fundamentals are tennis. I guarantee you that the minute Serena Williams first stepped on the board, she did not care and did not question about the width of the court, the height of the net, the length of the racket, or the size of the balls, because she was there to play tennis. Today we are going to be talking about fundamental rules of American English that are non-negotiable. You don't entertain every question that you have except for one. And that question is why? Why? Who knows why? Who cares why? Because this is just like playing tennis. So just relax, sit back, and come with me on a grammar exploration. We are going to take a quiz. We are going to take this green sheet. It is March quiz, 21 seconds quiz number one. It is designed to figure out what you know, what you don't know, and perhaps most importantly, that mushy little ground of things that you're not sure about, because it is my expectation that when you walk out this door this morning, you will know. You will know for sure. I want you to recognize these basic principles, and I'm also hoping that at the end of this workshop you will think like an editor, because that's really my goal here. This stuff is easy. This stuff is basic. This stuff should take you about three minutes to go through this sheet. It's all easy, it's all obvious, and I don't want you to linger on anything because there's nothing tricky about this quiz. Absolutely nothing. So I want you to go through this. I'm going to ask for three minutes. I actually need myself three minutes. Starting right now. I guess we're not sure. Just circle it, analyze it. This is all stuff that we all should have learned in eighth grade, but sadly many of us did not. Three more seconds. The introduction didn't say it, so I published ten books about American English punctuation and grammar best practices. So I can answer any questions, but boy, if you ask any questions that aren't about tennis, we can take it out into the hall afterwards because we have got a very specific agenda, one of those proverbial long way to go, not a lot of time to get there. So let's get started with sentence number one. You'll notice that there is sort of a theme to these questions or these sentences, and yes, they all are WordPress developer website sentences. It's unfortunately so simple to go on a WordPress site and pick out a lot of mistakes. Here we go. I have been working with WordPress since it's in inception. Number one mistake in American English is IT apostrophe S versus ITS. I make this mistake all the time and I have to slow myself down when I get to ITS versus IT apostrophe S. IT apostrophe S is the contraction it is or it has. It's how intuitive in American English, which is why you have to go slow because you automatically, when you do a possessive with it, you put that apostrophe in there. You've got to watch yourself. You've got to watch yourself. Unfortunately, if you spell check and word, it is a blue line. So watch those blue lines, but watch yourself because this is a huge mistake. It's a beginner mistake and it should not be made by anybody at this level. Number two, in American English, I want to focus on this a little bit because we seem to have fallen into error. In American English, the noun drives the bus. A singular noun means a singular verb form, means a singular pronoun. Now it's true in Britain, people who write in British English, they have fallen by the wayside. But last time I looked, they drive on the wrong side of the road. So let's be careful that we are writing in American English for an American audience. So sentence number two, if the person, singular person, singular person, is not enthused about what they are doing, no, it's here she. Remember in the 60s, if you weren't here, let me tell you, in the 60s, women went into the workforce in droves. It used to be that you could assume that when you had a profession that was mentioned in sentence, particularly a doctor or a lawyer, it was a key. But then all of a sudden, women came into the workforce and you can't say, they cannot pay her a plural pronoun with a singular noun. Yes, sir. So what's your position on the current class person? Do you convey this in your sentence? Well, I think I'm making my position pretty clear because I do not feel like you have a, you don't have a workaround. There are plenty of workarounds to this issue. And there's so few times that a newspaper would want to try to use that. This is a really in-lead question and it is controversy. And I'll just tell you, this is my position. Singular noun, singular pronoun, that's it, that's all. That's it, that's all. Yes ma'am, in technical writing, if you're doing technical writing, I guess I might give you a pass. But if you're writing content on the internet that's made for the masses, I would definitely want to see he or she. Now, however, here we have if the person is not enthused. Okay, so how about if people are not enthused, how easy is that? That's easy. That workaround is easy. So it's not as though we don't have options to make this work in American English. So we have, if the person is not enthused about what they are doing wrong, it will come through in their content. So we have two pronouns in this sentence that are both wrong. I'm a personally pluralized person here because I'd hate to see a sentence that said his or her, him or he or she in the same sentence. That would really be absolutely an overload. So that's easy, but workaround is so simple. So we have several sentences about this. Google. Google, last time I looked, Google is a company. It cannot be a bag. I don't care what the Supreme Court says, a company is it. And that's all there is. So when Google changes its search algorithms, the rest of the sentence is fine, but Google is not a bag. It is not a bag. It is not a plural noun. Now here we get into some weeds here. So follow me. There is an exception to this rule. Actually it's sort of, but not really an exception. It's a kind of different thing. They're called collective nouns. You are an audience. But audience is treated as a singular noun. A singular noun. So let's look at four and five. Our team. Our team is singular. Now you don't have to worry about what follows team because you've led the team. That is your noun. Our team provides. Our team provides. They do not provide. Our team provides web analytics. Five. This will help us provide our audience with the focus of each presentation. So they. Now this is dicey. It's really hard to, in my opinion, and it's sort of disrespectful too, to call a group of people with it. Which is technically correct. So what I would say is this will help us provide our audience with numbers. Numbers is plural. No problem there. Also you could use listeners, participants. We have workarounds. We have workarounds here. But audience, team, staff are all collective nouns. Oops, I'm not keeping up. Am I keeping up? There we go. Collective noun. And I also listed up here. Team, audience, room, staff, clergy, and committee. So these are collective nouns. Watch out for them because they will trick you up. Number six. What does this take into account? So it's actually assumed because it was in the previous sentence. So I apologize. I could not have that previous sentence in there. So whatever this is has been discussed and clarified in the previous sentence. Now I do a two-hour workshop about the properties of commas. So don't get me started about commas. But there is one mistake of seeing content right to me all the time I thought was worthy of a very brief discussion here. Very brief. Number six. Susan has been, oh, by the way, I changed all the names. So please don't google these sentences and think you're going to come up with Susan in Huntsville because you won't. They're all changed. They're all changed. I'm not trying to embarrass anybody. I'm trying to actually just educate. Susan has been a web developer since 2005 and lives in Huntsville, Alabama, where she is the co-organizer of the word camp Huntsville. Gotta have a comma after Alabama. Got to. Got to, got to, got to. That's in the middle of the sentence. It needs a comma. It is the end. It needs a period. But you can't have the name of the city and the corresponding state without that state having a comma as well. Yes, sir. Would you love to eat it? No, because where is your conjunction? And you're just repeating Susan with the sheet. So I would just do the Alabama comma where she is the co-organizer. Susan after Susan? No. No. No. All you need is that one comma after Alabama and you're good. You know, yeah, you can make it. This is why I do a two-hour workshop with that comma. Because you can have, actually, of all punctuation marks in American English, you can have a conversation about commons. I'm not trying to have a conversation about anything here because I'm telling you that this is, yes, ma'am. If you change subjects, you definitely need to have a comma plus conjunction or a semicolon. But I will, again, this is a place where we can have a conversation. We can have a discussion about commons. But the only comma that I would put in there and require as an editor is the comma after Alabama. The rest of it doesn't bother me. Okay? Okay, number seven. This is a real common mistake. I saw it, actually, this morning. Seven. Don't drive traffic to your website. It's not set up. Set up. Set up. In this situation, as one word is noun, we need the verb phrase set up. There we go. So that's the problem with number seven. You think you're seeing it being here? About our sentences? Because remember, we're looking for correct sentences? We're not going to find any. So keep going. Number eight. This is the number one misspelled word in the Sarasota Multiple Listing Service. I wouldn't have any doubt. It's probably close to the top. In Seattle and L.S. as well, the color scheme complimented the logo. Oops. This is the wrong version of complimented. Complimented is a hominem. There's one with an in the middle and there's one with an in the middle. I'm going to give you a trick to remember the two because this is the way I have to remember myself. Compliment with an I. I compliment you. I say something nice about you. Or the second way to use compliment with an I in the middle is I'm by lunch. Your lunch is complimentary. Now the other compliment that we needed in the sentence to make the sentence correct is the compliment with an E in the middle. And here's how to remember that. To compliment with an E in the middle is to mean complete. To complete. So complete ends with an E. Some tricks. I read on them all the time. Number nine. Word camps are locally organized conferences. Never ever, ever, ever, ever hyphenate an L-Y adverb. Look to see if your adverb has an L-Y that it does do not hyphenate it. That is a real common mistake. Oops. It's awesome to combine technology and style. Since when is technology or style a proper noun? No. Stop this. Stop this. And can we please stop saying awesome every third word? They're really very few things that are actually awesome. I don't want to think of two. God and Mother Nature. Nothing else. So try to start to mitigate your use of awesome because I'm over it. The technology and style is certainly not proper nouns and do need to be lower cased. But some things need to be capitalized that aren't. Number 11. Using correct posture while doing Pilates exercises improves safety. Well Pilates actually happens to be a real person, Mr. Pilates. And so if you write that it's lower case, that's not correct. Same thing with dumpster. Same thing with Xerox. Same thing with believe it or not, some of you people were about my egg. Rolodex. Proper nouns. So never assume all these little things up so you're accurate and you're correct. Number 12. Number 13. Well quotation marks. Everybody's all over the board about quotation marks. I don't know. I said it would be straight, at least you all here in the room. Okay in American English, in American English, quotation marks are always, always placed outside periods and commas. There are no exceptions to this rule. If you think you've found one, you have not. You have nots. There are no exceptions to this rule. So quotation marks, outside periods and commas. The placement of quotation marks with semicolons and colons, always those marks of punctuation go outside the quotation marks. And if you come to an exclamation point or a question mark, the placement depends on the context and the sentence. So you have to really think about those. But here, you don't have to think about anything. Quotation marks, single and double. Now, at word press court when somebody asked me this question, so I'm going to quickly not try to go off the rails here, but I'm going to say that you always lead in American English with double quotes. British people, lead with single quotes. That's one of the ways you can really tell who's writing in British English. But here, we are writing for American market double quotes. If you need to have a quote inside your quotation marks, single quotes. Because all punctuation in grammar is you're trying to communicate with your reader. You want your reader, in this case, to know who's talking and when they stop talking and start quoting somebody else. So double quotes you lead with always and anything quoted inside those double quotes, single quotes. Single quotes. The 12, the quotation mark should be outside that period after company. And 13, impossible layouts that quotation marks should be outside that column. The other thing I want to say, I'm sure many people here have heard of Grammarly. Grammarly. I have a bone to pick with Grammarly if Grammarly is listening. The Grammarly website Grammarly says that quotation marks always come in pairs. And hey, on the surface, it kind of sounds like, yeah, they have to come in pairs. Don't they? Of course. No. Not at all. Take out any fiction novel that you might have still sitting on your shelves. Take a look at your fiction novel and watch what happens when a character speaks into a second paragraph. Because when you have a character who speaks into a second paragraph, you do not end quote at the end of that first paragraph. Because again, you're trying to communicate with your readers. You want your readers to know that that same person is speaking and will continue to speak and will continue to speak until you put those end quotes on. So, Grammarly, if you're listening, you need to change your website because that is incorrect. Quotation marks do not always come in pairs. Okay, so, so far, we're batting zero with our correct sentence. We have not found one yet. I want to tell you a little bit about telling time. Number 14. Here's the problem with the sentence. There are two ways to tell the time correctly or express time correctly in American English. You can either use lowercase a-m-p-m and periods, or you can use capital a-m-p-m, no periods. Those are the rules. Always have a space between your number and a-m-p-m. I also take off the colon and the two zeros at the top of the owl. So, I'll say four space a-m-p-m. If it's 4.30, of course, you can't do that. But I like my text to really clean. I don't like anything in my text that's extraneous. So, those are the rules about a-m-p-m. So, this one's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Now, let me tell you a little to tell whether you need to use quotation marks or italics. I think I made this rule up because I moved it the other day. I didn't find anything else and I think I can take credit. I call it the rule of pie. So, everybody imagine your favorite flavor of pie. There's a pie. Key lime pie with a grand cracker crust is my favorite. So, I'm imagining the kind of sickly green of the key lime. Anything that can be sliced in the larger pie is put into quotation marks. The pie itself is put into italics. So, I really enjoy reading that New York Times article. New York Times is the pie. The article is the piece. And then, so the article title would have quotation marks. New York Times and italics. Article name in quotation marks. My favorite song on Joni Mitchell's album, Court and Spark. Album is the pie because it can be sliced. My favorite song on Joni Mitchell's album, Court and Spark is Court and Spark. Quotation marks. So, you just told your audience that album title is Court and Spark, but there's a song on the album called Court and Spark. So, the pie is in italics. The pieces are in quotation marks. The rule of pie that is a gentleman. So, here's somebody who says, he is the author of the International Best Seller quote, How I Fixed the Internet. I find that people don't know the rules generally at egos the size of the moon. Sixteen. I need to hire more people. E.g., a designer receptionist and an accountant. E.g. and I need always have periods and they always are followed by a comp. Always. I've noticed that British English people are pulling away from this rule to begin. This is America. We are talking about American English. So, 16 needed a comma after E.g. 17. Look stuff up. You've got to look stuff up. I have to look stuff up all the time. And I'm surprised I don't get more pop-ups about cancer and things like that because I'm looking up things for my clients and a lot of them are sickly type people and I have to look at all these technical things about various types of cancer. So, if I ever got a question about any insurance with a pre-existing condition and they ever looked at my browsing history, I'd probably be in trouble. But anyway, Wi-Fi, right now, the rule about Wi-Fi is capital W, i, lowercase i, hyphen, capital F, lowercase i. That is the way Wi-Fi is expressed with this moment in time. 18. I saw this on a WordPress site. WordPress. Capital W. O-R-D. Capital P. R-E-S-S. That to me is a mistake. And WordPress is very plain about how it wants to, corporately, be expressed in writing. 19. These, in 19 and 20 are stupid, stupid mistakes that somebody would just look at their material before they print or publish, these mistakes would have been found. If you don't see any times that works for you, so obviously works should be work. That's a big mistake. We are actively seeking those interesting in being a high level, not just a paniel volunteer, a high level volunteer at WordCamp. You notice I put ABC. I'm actually applying to speak at that WordCamp, and I don't want to irritate anybody. But yes, that is right on the internet right now that sets with the identifying of WordCamp on it. All right. So now we're going to add a 20. I promised you that I would help believe, not only educate your eye for mistakes, but also help you think like an editor. So let's think like an editor. This was advertised as a 21 sentence quiz. But gee, I only see 20 sentences. Where is the 21st sentence? Who knows? On page two. Thank you. That was good. That's a good one. No, it's the instructions. Nobody read the instructions. Let's all read the instructions together. Put check mark. Oops. One of the toughest things to spot when your editing content is the dreaded missing word. Oh my gosh. So put a check mark next to all correct sentences. That is the 21st sentence in this 21 sentence quiz. None of these sentences are correct. But there's more. But wait. If you are looking at this carefully and looking at this as a piece, as a piece of more product, there are two types of fonts in this quiz. We have Book with Old Style, which is my favorite font. And then we have some other font, a number four, I can't remember the name of that. But anyway, it's different. So I would ding somebody if this was a piece of work product by what looks like to me a mistake in using two kinds of fonts. It doesn't look deliberate to me. It looks like a mistake. But there's one more thing. Now I'm a hazard to guess that if you'd like to say anything but the formatting. The formatting is my mistake. Now don't look at the formatting. We've got space after 10, through 20, that's my fault. There's something else in this quiz wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Anybody want to hazard a guess about what it is? Oh, no, no. It's not about the writing, because remember, these are real sentences. So we're not hacking out these sentences here because this is about punctuation of grammar. All right. Now the indent, as we know, that's my fault. We're going to give you a pass on that. It's about punctuation of grammar. It's about, yes. What kind of guess? No, no, you're not. You're not at all. This is what I mean by, this is the kind of thing I look at. This is what you need to look at when you're an editor. Yes, I'm going to take one more. If you say put a check mark, wouldn't that be a singular check mark versus each? If you added a word, each correct sentence. Well, that's not it. So we can talk afterwards. Okay. Yes, one more. I'm going to have to give it to you. I'm going to have to give it to you because I'm talking about this as a major mistake. Major, major, major, like major mistake. There are two kinds. They're directional and non-directional quotation marks. Take a look at 12 and 13. See that? That's a major mistake, everybody. You've got to use the same kind of quotation marks throughout your content. It must be. It must be. That's pretty easy. It absolutely does. But once you see these things, once you really see them and you know it and you know it, you can't unsee it. You just can't. So everyone has a pink sheet, which is the second quiz. And I think because of time constraints, I'm going to suggest that you take that and if you'd like to do it after the session, I would suggest it because some have shown that people who actually reinforce new learning immediately upon the new learning process retain the new learning 87% longer when New York quiz begins. So that pink sheet has nothing that we didn't cover on this green sheet, except I did mix it up. I tried to clump stuff together in the green sheet to make it easier to explain. And there might be a sentence or two on the pink sheet that has more than one mistake in it. But everything on the pink sheet we just covered this morning. I promised I would tell you how to make $250 a second. So, imagine me in Sarasota, Florida in a couple weeks time, right around Thanksgiving, I am having my Honda Fit wrapped. So I'm going to be buzzing around Sarasota and everybody needs an editor. Everybody needs an editor. And I'm going to help people find me. So I'm going to have my car wrapped. This is an early draft of what it might look like. Things have changed enormously since then. But I took three bits. Because we all know that we are not the only game in town. I took three bits. So I looked at these. I went, oh, that's really nice. I'm really psyched. I can just imagine myself driving to church, parking in my car, having lots of business as I walk out. But you know, this is a problem. One of my taglines reads, because everyone needs an editor. So how impressed do you think I am with this company's work product when they wobble my tagline? They misspell need. And I looked at that and thought, oh, this is a joke. It's got to be a joke. It's got to be something I'm supposed to laugh at. And then I thought, well, maybe I could take the joke a little bit further and cross out need and say needs. And I entertained that notion for maybe about two seconds. Because I thought to myself, you know something was, at some point, the buck has to stop. And it's going to stop with me. So I don't want anybody to have any kind of inkling and the editor might need an editor. Now these people did front and both sides. How long would you think it would take one person, two eyeballs, to look over this work product before shipping it to me? It's a $2,000 job. I calculate about eight seconds. So this company did make $2,000 because the representative did not spend eight seconds reviewing the work that they were sending to me. And because of that, they lost my business. We are in a huge competitive market. I don't know how many web developers and designers that are just in Metro Sierra Soda, but I bet the woods are full of them. So we have competition. And it really makes sense for us to take those eight seconds, look over our work before it is sent to our clients. And even after it's published, take a look at your work. Here are so many people who are telling us to hurry up, get things done, push it out. But I tell you that in this space, in this writing space, in this editing space, you can achieve perfection. Because perfection is the standard. There is no excuse for typos and mistakes on internet content. No excuse at all. So I want you all to drag your heels, drag your eyeballs across your content and make sure that whatever you are putting out as a professional work product is perfect. Because this is a space where you can be perfect, and I guarantee you that perfect is a good place to be. Now, how much time do we have for Q&A? Do we have any time? Ten minutes? Ten minutes? No way. Kira, I'm just going to talk really fast. There's no way we have enough time to do that. I can tell you right now. Yes, ma'am. Okay, I have a very significant opinion, which I will share, about directional quotation marks versus non-directional, which is what I call them. So curly versus straight, so directional, non-directional. A curly quote in a novel, I think it is attractive to the eye. I like non-directional in internet content because I'll tell you what, I did a lot of novels, and it is so... It just makes you feel like slittier risk if you have an author who's gone through different times and done directional and non-directional because they all have to be the same. It's just that a search will not reveal all these quotes because the search engine in your one processor is reading them the same. So you will have to go through physically quotation mark after quotation mark, and I'll tell you what, in a 400-page novel, holy moly, I'm not charging enough to do that. So I like a non-directional in internet content, but there's something so charming about directional quotation marks in novels. So that's my opinion about that. Who needs to talk? Because I don't have that kind of program. My program doesn't do that. It makes me do it by myself. So I'd love to chat and we'll figure out some technology that I need to know about. Thank you. If you take that content, drop it in your notebook tab, read my ghost, and take it back out on that wall street post. And a lot of times that will work... You're working with a novel, though, and most of the time, a lot of times, my people have come to me with both kinds, and it is a, you know what, to try to go through and figure it out. But this lady's going to help me, so I'm hoping that I may have a problem after visiting Seattle. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Yes, in the house. Just back to number three. Oh, my gosh. You noticed it because of the errors, but is it still a rule too with sell out every number on your quantities? Yeah, I like that rule. And actually, I actually do spelling out of every little library number to ten. I do ten, that's my cutoff. So I really, you know, it didn't really bother me, so not bother me enough to even talk about it. There was so much else in this content that bothered me that I couldn't even see this. You know, I had to hire a car. I had to put them in a hierarchy. There we go. Yes, hi. When do we use IE versus EG? Okay, IE and EG are completely different. So EG, this is how I remember the two. EG is the first letter of for example, example. So EG means for example. IE, starting with I, means in other words. So you have, for example, in other words, completely different. But that's how I have to, you know, you have to look these tricks to remember all this stuff. Does that make sense to everybody? Okay, yeah, that's how I do it. Who else has a question? Yes, in the back. Is there like maybe a rule of thumb or two that you can share real quickly about commas that we get through? Oh my gosh. There's really not so many. And you're just going like, commas, ah, commas, comma comma sense. But the problem with the book is that they cannot be condensed in just a short answer. Is there like one thing that will fix like 60% of the problem? Okay, well, all right. This is going to kind of deep dive and I'm going to try to, I do this, I do this. Okay, here's the deal. A lot of times commas introduce what's called parenthetical information, which is information that's interesting but not necessary to the sentence. And the parenthetical information can be, if it's introduced, let's say, let's take the case of, the parenthetical information being introduced inside the sentence. I'm going to give you an example. Look at that, it's Susan Huntsville. Okay, Susan Huntsville, she has a husband. Oh, she did have a husband. I took that out. I have to strip these sentences down so that we know. Okay. Susan's have been in, oh wait. Where's that, who has a pink sheet that they can give me really quick? But I think there's a good example. Thank you so much, Susan. All right, let's take a look at what I have. Oh, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin. Well, if you know something, it's on the Portland name stuff. Oh, by the way, if anybody gets super geeky, I have some extra handouts in my Portland name board camp. Totally different sentences if you want to try to handle them. So let me see if I can very quickly bend over. Oh my God, it's so long. Okay, here we go. Here it is. Okay. A wine enthusiast surely lives in Baltimore, Maryland. So this was the sentence about the comma after Maryland. Surely lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her husband and two dogs. Now originally, this sentence said her husband Kyle and two dogs. So I want you to imagine this. I know it's hard. It's really hard. But let's focus on her husband Kyle and two dogs. She has a husband. His name is Kyle. She has a husband. We don't really care about his name. So imagine that Kyle has to be in commas because you can take out and still have a verbal sentence. So the rule is if you have a sentence and you have extraneous... You've got to be able to pull it all out and still have a verbal sentence. It has to work. So most of the time if you have extraneous information in the middle of a sentence you're going to need to have it enclosed in commas that can be removed and still have a verbal sentence. So I took Kyle out of the sentence and I still have a verbal sentence because she has a husband. His name is Kyle. Now, it doesn't really work the other way because if he said she has a... She lives with Kyle, her husband, and two dogs. So her husband actually his parent had more information. So it was Kyle. But you really can't make it so that she lives with Kyle and two dogs. What's that? Who's Kyle? Why is he in the sentence at all? So sometimes you have to use a judgment about the fact that Kyle is actually the extraneous information that can yank out a sentence and nobody cares. So I'm sorry about that. I told you commas two hours you're going to be invited. He's like, who else has a question? I love this stuff. One minute. We have one minute. Yes. There are three times you use a semi-colon. First of all, semi-colons are equal to a comma and a conjunction. So you can pull the comma and conjunction out of the sentence, stick a semi-colon in there, and you have to have two complete sentences on either side of the semi-colon. So think of a teeter-totter. Do they still have teeter-totters? The teeter-totter is completely masked. The second time you use a semi-colon is in a list when one thing has a comma in it. Okay, so I'm going to tell you my favorite books are Gone with the Wind, Alas, Babylon, and the Bronze Bug. How many books did I just tell you are my favorite books? Is it three? Is it four? Because there's one book title in that list. If you don't know it, it could be two books. Alas, comma, Babylon. It could be a book called Alas and a book called Babylon. You have read it. It's a really good story. But Gone with the Wind, we know it's one book. Alas, Babylon is one book. The Bronze Bug is one book. But my readers don't know this. So to separate those, I need a semi-colon. So that when I'm communicating with my readers, this is the start. This is the stop. By the way, I'm a big fan of serial commas for this very reason. There's no reason why your reader should hesitate one second and know when things start and when things stop, especially when the sentence goes into a second line. You're very confusing for the four-reader. Make it simple. Make it simple. So now I'm going to talk about semi-colons. Third thing. Oh, third thing. Oh, gosh. Third thing with like 10 seconds to go. There's the third thing. I'm going to have to say that I can't take a bit under this pressure. Sorry, sorry. Didn't mean to tease you. Didn't mean to tease you. And I'll think about it as soon as I walk out the door. So if anybody has a question, you're not going to be able to sleep about that third thing about semi-colons. Come on up and ask me because I'll know it right away. Which of your books would have that? All of them, sir. All of them. Thank you so much. This was so much fun. I really appreciate it.