Self-appointed grammar cop

I have a hard time with typos, bad punctuation, and misspellings. Or long paragraphs set in all caps. It's all fingernails on a chalkboard for me, hence my irritating habit of pointing out every bad sign or TV graphic gone wrong.

One thing I'm trying to cut down on is exclamation points. Lately, I've been working on lots of verbiage for the shop (website stuff, email newsletters, pr announcements) and find that I have to go back through it and get rid of the screamers. It's just so easy to use one for emphasis!

Can't bring this up without remembering my old-school journalism professor. He was a true crusty curmudgeon, and in that cocky way students can have, I disliked him at first. It only took a few classes (and a few humbling experiences) to start to love him.

We sat at old wooden desks and used old manual typewriters. Manual! You had to punch so hard on those keys your fingers would ache by the end of class. He would give us an assignment and 20 minutes or so to write a story. When the deadline came, he'd walk around and literally rip the paper out of our typewriters. No mercy. If we were mid-sentence, we failed. The presses wait for almost no one.

Some of his words of wisdom:

• There are three dang "E"s in "cemetery." (Assuming that if we ever did make it as reporters, our first job would probably be in obits.)
• Drop the screamers (exclamation points).
• Before you start inserting apostrophes after "it," think of the San Francisco ice cream bar: It's It. [Do they still make those? Ed.]
• Listen to "Ed." He/she is your friend. My husband is my best editor. He especially loves it at 11pm when he's drifting off to sleep and I make him come into the office to read something I'm about to send off. Eh, it's only ten steps away.

Yep, I'm from the ditto machine generation. Too bad I'm starting to sound like an old grump myself, railing against ALL CAPS, lousy grammar, text message abbreviations and the general decline of the English language. IMHO, it's a FUBAR CONVO.

This is fun: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/