Alabama Petition Edit

I should be grading my own students' papers, but it's been a long couple of weeks and I could use a diversion. So I graded someone I didn't teach instead. Perhaps you've seen the petition posted by an angry Alabama fan, pseudonymously referring to himself as "TC,"  asking the NCAA to make Alabama and Auburn play an overtime period (or an "overtime play," if you prefer) because Chris Davis was clearly out of bounds.

The petition, as it turns out, has a few errors. Because I assume that the writer must have gone to the University of Alabama based on his level of interest in the outcome of this amateur matchup between student athletes, and because I am, after all, a college teacher myself, I decided to make a few corrections. I'm just trying to be helpful.

I realize that this is not a piece of formal writing, but an online petition, so I've overlooked certain things in keeping with the looser genre conventions of informal online writing (I am a great believer that grammar is situated in context). For this reason, I have not "corrected" capitalized letters where I know they are being used for effect, sentences that begin with conjunctions (since I also do this when stylistically appropriate), or omitted commas where these omissions have become more-or-less common practice.

Anyway, here are my corrections. Hope this helps, TC: