Editorial Inspirations

Several organizations have teamed up to create “N,” a series of made-for-mobile phone video episodes adapted from a story in Stephen King’s forthcoming story collection Just After Sunset.

Drawn by a team from Marvel, adapted by TV show creator Marc Guggenheim with King, and featuring a full cast of voice actors, the two-minute episodes were released one per weekday between July 28 and August 29. The episodes will be available to mobile phone users at no extra charge through CBS Mobile, on the Web through CBS Audience Network and its partners, and at www.nishere.com. Episodes will also be available for paid download at $.99 for five, or $3.99 for all 25.

A limited printed collectors’ edition of the book, packaged with a DVD of all 25 episodes, will be available when the regular edition of Just After Sunset goes on sale in November.

Adjectives are words that describe nouns or pronouns. They may come before (The cute kitten is sitting on the chair.) or they may come after the word (The kitten is cute.) they describe.

Adverbs are words that describe everything but nouns and pronouns. They describe adjectives, verbs, and other adverbs. Adverbs answer the questions how, when, or where.

The adverbs that cause grammatical confusion are the ones that answer how. Below are some guidelines to help distinguish between adverbs and adjectives.

Guideline 1: If a word answers the question how, it is usually an adverb.

Guideline 2: When describing taste, smell, look or feel, instead of asking if these senses answer the question how, ask if the sense verb is being used actively.

Examples

Flowers smell sweet/sweetly.
Do the flowers actively smell with noses? Since they do not, “sweet” is the correct word.

Try It!

Select which word is appropriate for each sentence.

1. She thinks slow/slowly.

2. We performed bad/badly.

3. The woman looked angry/angrily.

4. The boy jumped quick/quickly.

5. The hamburger tasted disgusting/disgustingly.

After returning from work, you walk into your house and notice an item that wasn’t there when you left in the morning. What room were you in, what was the item and how did it get there?

Be sure to share your responses!

When I was young, my entire family would go camping on holiday weekends. In the evening, the adults would build a huge fire in order to get coals on which they would cook dinner. Then, late into the night, they would sit around the fire and talk about the good ol’ days.

My cousins and I loved to poke the fire and throw in trash. The sight of the trash burning was amazing. We eventually decided to build a small fire of our own. We surrounded a few twigs with rocks and tried to start our fire by rubbing two sticks together. We gained smoke, but never any fire so we finally used matches. Then, once again, we poked the fire, but this time it was our fire that we poked.

As the years have passed, my cousins and I no longer build our own fire. We have replacements. The younger cousins, who are the age we once were, are now amazed with what fire can do, poke the fire, and build one to call their own.

Borders announced on June 3 “a corporate payroll reduction that includes the elimination of 156 corporate positions spread across virtually all departments of its Ann Arbor headquarters.  Employees at the company’s headquarters were informed of the job eliminations this morning. In addition, Borders Group has eliminated 118 corporate posts that are based outside its headquarters, impacting primarily corporate employees in distribution centers, the field marketing organization, and the corporate sales division. These employees were informed yesterday.”

The employee cuts were almost entirely corporate employees, reducing corporate staff by 20 percent. The company called the reductions part of “an aggressive plan to reduce annual expenses by $120 million” and added they “expect to save half of that amount yet this fiscal year.”

Later that week, it was announced that Borders has reached an agreement to sell its Australian, New Zealand, and Singapore storesto A&R Whitcoulls in a deal that could be worth as much as $104 million. Earlier this year, talks between the two companies broke off at the last minute over what is believed to have been the terms of the deal. Under the new agreement, Borders will receive $90 million upon the closing of the transaction and another $14 million if certain performance targets are met.