Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Grammar/Haiku For You


A friend sent me the following and I found it to be most interesting and amusing so wanted to share it with you. I checked the links about National Grammar Day, Mark Allen, and Allen's blog. He is a journalist and former editor who has an interest in promoting grammar and word usage--something we, as writers, should pay attention to so you might want to check out his blog.

I found it interesting that the contest was done through twitter. I resisted having a twitter account for a long time, but a writer friend encouraged me to try it. I don't use it several times a day like some people do, but I do post the blog topics and it's brought more traffic.

The results of the grammar.haiku  contest are posted below. Some are very clever. The one that made me laugh is the second place winner. You might try writing one of these yourself. If you do, post it in the comments section.




March 4th was National Grammar Day, and one of the events held to celebrate the occasion was a Grammar Haiku Contest, overseen by editor Mark Allen. Language lovers were asked to post grammar- or usage-based haikus on Twitter, and nearly 200 entries were submitted. Herewith, from Allen's blog, the winning haiku and the runners-up, as determined by a distinguished panel of judges.
First place:
Being a dangler,
Jane knew it would have to come
out of the sentence
— Larry Kunz, @larry_kunz
Second place:
Tiny hyphen mark
marries words, charms editor.
Turns out to be lint.
@APvsChicago
Third place:
Tree in full word bloom
falling across the blackboard
sentence diagram
Bob Schroeder, @BobSchroeder5
Fourth place:
If I were to say
I missed you, oh subjunctive,
would that set the mood?
Michelle Baker, @corpwritingpro
Fifth place:
My word, your syntax
stirs the imperative mood:
Let's coordinate
Stan Carey, @StanCarey (Visual Thesaurus contributor!)
Honorable mentions:
After a sentence
be like Obi-Wan and just
hit the space bar once.
— Holly Ashworth, @ActuallyHolly
First person: I love.
Second person: You love me.
Third person: Uh, oh.
— Rachel Cooper, @RachelCooper_NS
Dangling oddly
I conjured absurdities
With modifiers.
— Tom Freeman, @SnoozeInBrief
Loose rhymes with moose and
lose with booze, which I want to
drink when they're confused
— @shaunarum
Judge me not grammar
I have memorized your rules
they shatter like glass
— Gerri Berendzen, @gerrrib
Wanted: one pronoun,
To take the place of he/she
"They" need not apply
— Charlie MacFadyen, @csmacf
People shouldn't say
"I could care less" when they mean
"I could care fewer"
— Tom Freeman, @SnoozeInBrief

1 comment:

  1. I couldn't help but laugh at a few of these. Great post!

    ReplyDelete

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