Here the editor of The Vocabula Review reprints letters that he has sent to others.

To Bessemer Trust   Read the advertisement.

This is gobbledygook and scarcely understandable. You need two sentences, a semicolon, or a colon; the two dashes make the sentence unintelligible.

To The New York Times   Read the article.

Liberal though I am, I, too, enjoyed listening to Buckley, but I know that "recrudescence" refers to something evil or unpleasant returning. I might, indeed, write about "conservatism's recrudescence," but the editor of The Weekly Standard ought not to have.

To U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey   Listen to the interview.

I heard your March 14 reply to reporter Paula Newton's question about Eliot Spitzer. According to the CNN video, you spoke on this matter for 1 minute and 28 seconds, and according to my count, you used the expression um fourteen times — on average, every 6.2 seconds, you said um. Surely the U.S. Attorney General, however brief his time in office, can do better. We expect an adolescent to sprinkle his or her speech with um and the like, not an Attorney General.

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Certainly, two of the best collections of essays about the English language

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