People were happy with that one drive, but everyone was aware of how poor the offense looked overall. There was some hope that it would get better (with better playcalling and line play), but no one was saying we had anything decent going on.

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Maybe Ray Ratto or some other moron was happy with the offense, but most intelligent fans weren’t.

Even then, it’s not like McCovey Chronicles is some mad haven of strict journalistic style, never deviating from the fine parameters set forth in the CMoS, and furthermore, it’s not like McCovey Chronicles is painstakingly free of front page typos – as much as Grant might personally obsess over every individual comma.

This is nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking. You’re not an editor by trade and you don’t, nor should you be expected to, employ an editor for the sake of catching those moments when MS Word doesn’t notice that you didn’t hit the r key hard enough when you were writing the word “your.”

As far as “How’s about,” the only two conceivable points of contention are that 1) the structure is colloquial and thus not supported on a technical level by your stylebook of choice, which is asinine, because even high-end journalism (whatever that means anymore) liberally employs colloquialisms as a point of style, or 2) the structure mirrors a possessive or a contraction, thus suggesting either that “about” is the property of “How” or that it should be implicitly read as “How is.” This also bothers me because the wiggle room on apostrophe use is pretty exceptional depending again on both your context and your stylebook. In AP style, for example, the plural of an acronym, say SUV, would be sans apostrophe (SUVs) by RULE, but take a team like the A’s, and that rule gets thrown out the window for no other reason than that a case in which a plural acronym ACTUALLY spells a word wasn’t considered when the rule was created. Other stylebooks include the apostrophe (thus, SUV’s), which is visually convenient, but leaves you in the same position of either reading this as a dangling, nonsensical possessive or as an acronymical contraction for “Sports Utility Vehicle Is.” So, when dealing with non-standard structures, which include colloquialisms, apostrophe use is NOTORIOUSLY fluid depending on stylebook, philosophy, visual preference, etc.

Which leads me to believe that taking offense to “How’s about” is, in both senses, asinine, and completely unworth the effort outside of satisfying some personal need to either be critical or to justify being critical.

And since he brings up McCovey Chronicles as a counterpoint to this site, which differs from this site primarily because, stylistically, it employs humor much more directly as a tool than you ever do, and because the quality of the writing and the analysis here are neither unintelligent nor grammatically or stylistically deficient, I have to think that he just plain likes Grant’s writing style and is disappointed that you’re not Grant, and is trying to latch onto something that ends up being non-existent and non-applicable to be a jerk about it.

For God’s sake, typos happen. It’s the internet and you’re barely getting paid for it anyway. Quite frankly, the amount of time and quality control that you do, in fact put in for the meager return that you get back should be more than enough to satisfy anybody.

So no reason to make stuff up. If he doesn’t dig your style, he should just be capable of saying that. That’s a valid reason in and of itself that doesn’t bear justification.

Rant over.

SENTENCE FRAGMENT IS A SENTENCE FRAGMENT!

Yeah, if this was McCovey Chronicles, I’d be making more jokes.