Reason 178

Good grammar. My mother is completely to blame for my grammar Nazi tendencies. She taught the ins and outs of spelling, punctuation and sentence structure to apathetic high schoolers for years, making it fairly impossible for me to not become passionate about apostrophes and dangling participles. Every Saturday morning while growing up I also fervently watched "Schoolhouse Rocks!" clips, which only solidified my love for conjunctions, interjections and deliciously descriptive adverbs. Jason, as a writer you are probably hyper-aware of every comma you delicately place on the page, but if you ever question your subject-verb tense agreement or wonder if the i-before-e rule applies to a particular tricky word, I will be more than happy to answer your grammar call. I won't pass judgement if you accidentally turn a plural into a possessive (well, not to your face anyway) and I will gently remind you that periods should be placed inside the second set of quotation marks, no matter how odd it may look. And if, for some disturbing reason, I can't answer your grammatical conundrum, my mother is always available to mark things up with a red pen. If you play your cards right I may even pass along some motherly wisdom, like there is "a rat" in "separate" but not in the word "desperate" and the kind of stationery you write on is spelled with an e because you put it inside envelopes (which start with an e). I bet I just blew your mind. Next time I'll school you on the wonderful world of homophones (which are not gay phones, as some of my students sadly believe).