When CA3799 read this she laughed at me out loud and wanted to know what they taught me in High School, she said this was the worst Punctuation that she’d ever seen and I just don’t see what’s so wrong with it so grade me:
My Neon experience:
In August of 1995 I bought my first new car, a 1995 Dodge Neon, 42 days later it was destroyed in a horrific accident so I can’t offer any reliabilty experience but. That thing was built like a freakin’ Tank!, I fell asleep behind the wheel and crossed the Centerline of the Highway hitting a 1979 GMC Pickup head-on, I was doing 60 MPH with the Cruise Control on and he was coming the other way at 55 MPH and he was on the brakes when we hit, I put the Passengers side of the dashboard against the back of the Passengers seat and against the bottom of the Passengers seat, the Engine was coming out through the Drivers side wheel well taking the wheel and suspension with it, my Neon experience was great!, I should have been dead but I (only) had an open Fracture of the Right Tib and Fib, broken 3rd Rib on the Right side and a broken Left Clavicle with major soft tissue damage, 34 days in the Hospital, 7 months out of work, 6 operations. After the accident I bought another Mopar product but it was a bigger one this time.
Correctly punctuated. I did not correct the use of digits instead of spelled-out numbers.
In August of 1995 I bought my first new car, a 1995 Dodge Neon. 42 days later it was destroyed in a horrific accident, so I can’t offer any reliabilty experience. But that thing was built like a freakin’ tank! I fell asleep behind the wheel and crossed the centerline of the highway, hitting a 1979 GMC Pickup head-on. I was doing 60 MPH with the cruise control on, and he was coming the other way at 55 MPH and he was on the brakes when we hit. I put the passenger side of the dashboard against the back of the passenger’s seat and against the bottom of the Passengers seat. The engine was coming out through the drivers’ side wheel well, taking the wheel and suspension with it. My Neon experience was great! I should have been dead, but I only had an open fracture of the right tib and fib, a broken third rib on the right side, and a broken left clavicle with major soft tissue damage. I spent 34 days in the hospital, was out of work 7 months, and had 6 operations. After the accident I bought another Mopar product, but it was a bigger one this time.
This sentence is akward because
(A) it has two independent clauses that really should be two seperate sentances
clause = subject-verb-object. Try something like
My suggestions: You need to learn what a period is and how to use it, because you’re coming up with some major run-on sentences. You also need to learn how to recognize clauses, and to seperate them with commas.
*…I fell asleep behind the wheel… *- that sentence comes out of nowhere. Couldn’t you start a new paragraph and say, “one night while driving from, etc…” ?
…and he was coming the other way at 55 MPH… - Who? You mean the driver of the 1979 pickup correct? This is worded very badly.
I put the passenger side of the dashboard against the back of the passenger’s seat - You mean the accident caused this don’t you? Of course I might have misunderstood your story. Maybe you meant that after your horrific accident you decided for some strange reason to rearrange the car’s interior and put part of the dashboard behind the passenger’s seat.
The poor wording continues beyond that part but I’ll leave the corrections for other Doper’s.
unclviny, is English your first language? You have a tendency to capitilize nouns, and that went out of style about 100 years ago. Unless you are writing in German, which IIRC is one of the only languages that still has this habit.
I’m currently reading the book Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss (highly recommended), and I just got to the chapter about commas. I’m pretty sure the author could have used your paragraph as one of her many humorous examples of how not to use commas.
In particular, putting a comma after an exclamation point is some kind of abomination against the gods of punctuation.
Starting a sentence with the word “but” is awkward but acceptable. Ending a sentence with the word “but” is a grammar felony.
This is where I stopped reading because my head hurt. Here’s a better way to phrase the above:
In August of 1995 I bought my first new car, a 1995 Dodge Neon. Six weeks later it was destroyed in a horrific accident, so I can’t offer any information regarding its reliabilty, but I can tell you that car was built like a tank! Here is what happened.
The errors are mainly from run-on sentences and miscapitalization of words. Subject-verb agreements are good, and there are no shifting verb tenses. These latter errors are much harder to correct, IMO, than miscaps and run-on sentences. So what I’m saying, unclviny, is that, if you work on your grammar a bit, you can raise that F to an A.
I would give a D+. I grade on a curve in my class, and my class contains the entire English-as-first-language population of the United States, and, seriously, I’ve seen much, much worse*
As another one of the fine Doper’s obsessed with grammar; I’d like to point out: that the punctuation only distracts from, the awkward wording of the sentences. And we should start, from scratch, with an outline. If we want to show the author how its done.
