I used to write radio news for a living.  Before that, I was a disk jockey who in the evening hours had to do his own newscasts.  When you’re doing a 50-minute radio show plus your own five-minute newscast, and have only five minutes of network news to stretch your legs, pee, log transmitter readings, grab a Pepsi for 20 cents from the Pepsi machine with real glass bottles in it, AND prepare a five-minute newscast, you don’t always follow the AP Style guide for punctuation.  You don’t have the time and no one is going to see it anyway.  So you punctuate for the spoken word using commas as breath marks and hope the AP copy you just ripped off the teletype isn’t garbled.  Hopefully it and your newscast are intelligible.

Old habits die hard.

So goes this blog.

This little write-up will have to suffice as a comprehensive disclaimer for every misplaced comma, and; semicolon, dangling participle, lousy sentence structure and anything but typos. And I never use a preposition to end a sentence with. Nor use incomplete sentences. Ever. I tend to write as I speak and those who know me well know that I’m most often incoherent.

Meh.  At least I’m consistent.

But I PROMISE, cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, liar-liar, pants on fire and all that sort of thing that I DO know the AP Style Guide exists and how to use it.  I am fully able to write correctly when I try.

Know what I mean, Jellybean?

Bottom line:  Please don’t judge.  Don’t hold me to that standard here, please, unless you’re willing to pay me.

Imagonna post this now.