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From: alexander koryagin <koryagin@erec.ru>

Hi, Paul Quinn!
I read your message from 22.08.2013 20:43

 ak>> Yesterday, at 9pm, without declaring a war, my neighbors bought a
 ak>> piano.

 PQ> The sentence would still make sense if you drop the first comma. I.
 PQ> e. to read, "Yesterday at 9pm, without...".

   In one punctuation manual I read on this account the following rule:
if a part of the sentence can be removed and the sentence meaning to be
the same, you should separate such a part with commas. Let's check it
and throw out "at 9 pm":

   [Yesterday, without declaring a war, my neighbors bought a piano.] No
damage for the humor.

   Should we put a comma after yesterday? Let's try to remove it.

   [Without declaring a war, my neighbors bought a piano.]

   There is still a humorous point. "Yesterday" is not essential and
should be separated by a comma.

   Now we check the comma after "without declaring a war". Actually my
error is here! I put a comma after that words but I can't remove them!

   [Yesterday, at 9 pm, my neighbors bought a piano.]

   The sentence has lost its sense of humor! The comma was put wrongly.
So the final version (IMHO of course) is:

   [Yesterday, at 9pm, without declaring a war my neighbors bought a
piano.]

   Well, let's wait for Ardith's comment. 

   PS: But the final rule in that manual was the following: "if you feel
that in your sentence there are too many commas, throw out some of them.
Abundance of commas cause more harm than help and hamper reading." ;-)

 PQ> By the way, we spell our neighbours with the extra "u" here.
 PQ> 'Neighbors' is a North American, and possibly Canadian, variation
 PQ> from the normal.

   I know it - my choice was deliberate. In school I studied British
English, but when I and Everette checked my translation he was very
unhappy with my British spelling. And I decided to write as an American.
;-) Actually I can't please everyone on this account.

 ak>> Daddy, I've got two question for you. Can I have more pocket money
 ak>> and why not?
 PQ> That's two _questions_. 

   I am a poor corrector. And I still pretend that I can manage without
glasses. ;-)

 ak>> A snowwoman which is made by a boy acquires more and more details
 ak>> with every year passing.
 PQ> What's a "snowwoman"? ;-) We nearly had ice on the ground here this
 PQ> morning, when the temperature dropped to about 1deg Celsius.

   Well, it is like a snowman, but female.  She is made of snow, you
are right. But it demands a lot of snow and a carrot (for the nose). 

 PQ> Isn't this normal for any snow figure? The number of acquisitions
 PQ> would naturally increase if the debris from each spring's melt
 PQ> isn't removed for other uses, prior to the following
 PQ> autumn(fall)/winter rebuild.

   That acquisitions in the snowwoman's body were not made from debris
that accumulated every year. With every year passing the boy paid more
and more attention to those details he didn't notice when he was
younger.

   PS: In short, his last version was with breasts. ;=)

Bye, Paul!
Alexander Koryagin
fido7.english-tutor 2013
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