(a cliché is not to be despised: its automatic comfort is the happy exteriority of a shared language which knows itself perfectly well to be a contentless but sociable turning outward toward the world)
[Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion]

(found somewhere on the Internet)

“The single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete," says novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's a long speech, but it's worth watching in full.

I have already covered all the cases where the use of comma in English differs from that in Portuguese. Well, there are some cases where everything is different, like the way you English speakers write dates. It's so different that there's no way to compare or mix up ( Read more... )

3. Use a comma when two independent clauses are joined by a coordinating conjunction: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so ( Read more... )

The plot thickens... This post may be polemical.

I told you I was going to comment on a few differences between the English and the Portuguese punctuation rules, but the following rule is the same for both languages:

2. Use commas after introductory clauses, phrases, or words that come before the main clause.

( cut for length )

I’m Brazilian, and my native language is Portuguese. I’m trying to learn more about English punctuation, especially American English punctuation. So I’m going to talk about some differences between the English and the Portuguese punctuation. (If I make any mistakes, please let me know. I’m not trying to teach anyone; I’m trying to learn1) Serial ( Read more... )

This is the first of a series of posts I plan to write on the subject "Punctuation ( Read more... )

Bestselling gay author Mel Keegan has masterminded a web-based cohesive organization combining the skills of writers, publishers, editors, agents, reviewers and artists in the GLBT community to provide an unprecedented public access portal to independent- and small-publisher titles. GLBT Bookshelf is an online resource designed to counter the ( Read more... )

I'm still fighting against the blepharoconjunctivitis, so excuse my absence. Anyway, here's something that I found interesting ( Read more... )

The polyphonic novel is defined by Bakhtin as the one in which the character's voice is never ultimately submerged by that of the narrator. Bakhtin describes Dostoevsky's novels as “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices ( Read more... )