Never mind. ====================== One thing I have noticed often is the high level of writing on the Mudcat Cafe. My husband's career was in an engineering firm (although he was not an engineer.) Most of the time when an engineer had to write a report, he or she did so with trepidation, and the result was awkward and verbose. As a Taiwanese client wailed one day, "It doesn't make any sense!" Mudcatters may try to sound like hillbillies or like the Great Panjandrum, but in either case their sentences flow smoothly, their modifiers do not dangle, their subjects and predicates agree, and you don't have to go back and reread sentences to figure out what is modifying what. Having said that, I will say that if a person submits a paragraph that is more than six lines long, then I refuse to read it. It's just too hard to keep my place. (Yet I can read very long paragraphs in a book.) Here's something you won't read in a usage guide. Most Mudcatters use rhythm and melody in their writing. It's subtle, but their sentences are not a collection of dense lumps strung together with prepositions and conjunctions. Not, in other words, like a necklace strung by an amateur.
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