The following may be of interest to some list members - it's a recent Language Log post by Pullum, "Would a linguist always grade your writing A+".  The title's a bit unfortunate, since P. really only discusses mechanics, and thus might give the impression that that's the only thing a linguist would evaluate in an essay, but I'd chalk that down simply to a desire for a catchy title. The first three items discussed, by the way, are punctuation issues.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3084


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