The Student Theme

by Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.

"The Student Theme" by Ronald Wallace, from The Uses of Adversity. © The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Via: The Writer's Almanac

Everday v. Every day

I see this on TV all the time:

Take XXX everyday.

I know that the one word everyday is an adjective. It means ordinary, typical or usual.

But if you mean or describe the whole period that something lasted and show something that is repeated regularly, then you use the two words every day.

Examples:
Every day counts.
Jogging is an everyday exercise for me.

So that line above should have read: Take XXX every day.