Bon Journal

Eight new issues of Le Bon Journal newsletters

Finally - they are here! Hot off the press!

Thanks to my father's critical eye, I'm able to edit these quickly.

Here are his invaluable insights into grammar:

Sentence 2: have been organizing soirees since I was a kid. Your are using your predicate verb phrase in the present perfect progressive tense, such as The chef has been preparing his dishes for 2 hours. and: By the time the reporters arrived there, our army had been having a hard fight against the enemy for l4 hours already. So you can see this predicate verb phrase in this present perfect progresive (my second example is past perfect progressive tense) tense implies and emphasizes "the action organize soirees continuously" since you were a kid. I think it would be safe and prbably better to say: have organized soirees since I was a kid. This tense is used to show experience.

What is the difference between "I like to ask him a favor" and "I would like to ask him a favor"? And when to use will and when to use would? Modern American Usage and Modern English Usage, classics in English writing, tell about the use of should and would in great length. In short, would denotes habit, courtesy. I doubt you have time to read about 22 pages in Modern American Usage: Confusion and Conflict in Usage.

The usual or emphatic way to express should be: The more you travel, the easier travelling gets. By the way, don't belittle the two "the" in the above sentence. They are both adverbs, but since the sentence consists of two clauses, where is the conjunction? Well, the first "the" is also a conjunction, so the clause can modify the second the.

12 February 2004 Thursday

Related Bon Journal entry:

Compiling Le Bon Journal newsletters

Eight new issues have been added to the Le Bon Journal newsletter archives, volume 2, issues 5 to 12.