Happy National Grammar Day!

I'd like to propose a toast to National Grammar Day. One day a year when it's acceptable, even encouraged, for me to correct others' poor usage and mechanics. (We'll celebrate spelling on September 30.)

As you can see, I use fragments and parentheticals at whim. Splitting your infinitives or ending with prepositions are kosher, too: sometimes necessary tricks to simply* get your point across.

Oh, and yes, I care a lot about the Oxford comma. The serial, series, or Harvard comma; call it what you will. The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, strongly recommends it in published books. Have a merry time with your AP-style newspapers; trade books don't lie and die by word (and character) count. It always helps clarity, never hurts, and usually looks better.

She went to lunch with her parents, the president and the vice-president.

Not so clear, is it? An Oxford comma would negate the chance Barack Obama and Joe Biden are her fathers. (Which is best; they'd have some explaining to do.)

Other commas I'd like to stand up for: the two surrounding an appositive. If I tell you that my first memoir, The Life and Times of America's Next Superhero, hits stores the first day of summer, which comes in June, there better be commas everywhere. So many people forget to close the appositive off; the technical term for this practice is apathy. You can't argue appositives.**

May I say a few more words?

• Therefore and thus are not conjunctions. Semicolons before, commas after, please.
• Sorry, Strunk and White, but hopefully can mean I hope. Hopefully you can live with that.
• "It's I." Technically, yes. But when you're not lighting gas lamps in Victorian England, go ahead; say "it's me" with confidence.
• If I were a Spanish teacher, I wouldn't tell my students there's no subjunctive in English. If that were true, it would require that this sentence vanish before your eyes.
  

*If we moved simply to the end of the sentence, it would mean with ease rather than merely, as I intended. Placing it before to get gives it unnecessary emphasis, I feel.
**Though I will concede it seems silly to set off The Life and Times... above. If I took out the word first, there would be no commas, hence no appositive. The phrase memoir would be nonrestrictive, and the title a clarification that identifies rather than just additional information.