Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version

It's no secret that I love grammar and I'm certainly not a stranger to editing in neither my vocational nor personal life, so you can imagine how excited I was to find this amazing piece by Vanity Fair.  Too bad Sarah Palin can't see grammar from her house - that gosh darn, gotcha media elite will get you every time!

If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, , together with representatives from the  and  departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result.

Comments

[Grammar Police]

You have a double negative here:

"It's no secret that I love grammar and I'm certainly not a stranger to editing in neither my vocational nor personal life, so you can imagine ..." should read: "I'm certainly not a stranger to editing in EITHER my vocational OR personal life..."

Unless you meant to write that you *are* a stranger to editing personally and professionally, in which case what you originally wrote is fine.

[Jeremy]

That's actually wrong, too. You use "either" to express one noun/pronoun doing one thing while the other noun/pronoun is doing another. It has to be one or the other, but not both, so I cannot use the word "either" in that sentence.

It should read, "I'm a stranger to editing in neither my vocational nor personal life..." or more simply, "In neither my vocational nor my personal life am I a stranger to editing."

Thanks for the catch and the input!
I appreciate it.

[Grammar Police]

It's good you acknowledge your original sentence was incorrect (we all make mistakes, especially in the stream-of-consciousness, slap-dash realm of the blogosphere), but I sincerely hope you don't hold forth that the following sentence is "wrong" based on your understanding of the usage of "either/or":

"It's no secret that I love grammar, and I'm certainly not a stranger to editing in either my vocational or personal life, so you can imagine how excited I was to find this amazing piece in Vanity Fair..."

There's nothing at all incorrect about this previous sentence. It reads clearly and logically (although I placed a comma after the first clause for clarity, and in further editing might include an additional modifying pronoun "my" before "personal life" for the sake of parallel structure...).

Your revisions above utilizing "neither/nor" also function quite clearly, correcting the previous double negative construct.

I don't point this out to antagonize, merely to enlighten another grammar-sensitive soul!

Thanks for proselytizing such a (rare) sensitivity!