Ode to Literacy, 90s Style: Splice Splice Crazy

If you get this, you must have been a teen in the 90s, and you're probably a bit of a nerd now. :)

This is what I do when I want to write, but I can't focus on my current WIP.

I wrote this one when I was teaching high school. I taught a lesson on comma splices that day, and apparently I just wasn't ready to let it go. They really are distracting, comma splices. Can you blame me?

For all of my students who were BORN in the 90s, here's the video that inspired this song.

 

To the tune of Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby:

Splice Splice Crazy 

No Harmony? Let’s ditch it!

Splice Splice Crazy

Splice Splice Crazy

All right stop concentrate and listen

Splice is back and this calls for convention

Something like this splice is unsightly

Disrupts like a buffoon—foolish and spritely

Will it ever stop? Yo I don't know

Before you rewrite, let it flow

To the extreme that comma splice is a vandal

Mucks up your prose, makes your ideas hard to handle

Words broken up by the comma that looms

It’s killing your grade like a poisonous mushroom

Deadly when it lands where a stop should be

Anything less than that stop is a felony

Love it or leave it you better not hate

You better hit that sentence stop as convention dictates

If there is a problem, you know how I solve it?

Check out Strunk & White, they’ll easily resolve it

Splice Splice Crazy

Splice Splice Crazy

Splice Splice Crazy

Splice Splice Crazy

Now that the prose is jumping

With the splices kicked out the ideas are pumpin’

Quick to the point to the point no mistaking

I write with concision nothing worth retaking

Spurning words I can easily dispel

I go crazy when I see a retell

Or redundancy, with a souped up pen, yo

I’m on a roll, time to write in my folio

Writin’ till I reach that plateau

All my ideas down my prose can no longer flow

The notions on standby waiting for the pen to fly

Did I just stop? Yes, it’s all gone awry

Keep on pursing to the next stop

I hit a wall and I’m facing mad writer’s block

The block I dread

Yo so I continued to move that pen til I pass right on through

Inspiration was hot like a pile of linguine

Ideas flying off me like speeding Lamborghinis

Jealous ‘cause I’m here writing mine

Lines to engage all my readers in short time

Reading all the letters that I scrawl

The fans acting ill cuz my words surprise like curve balls

Loud shouts ring out like a bell

I grab my prose and all I hear are yells

Falling over my sentences real fast

Jump in my world and slam on the gas

Bumper to bumper the chapters are packed

Try to get away but my words just attack

You’re stuck in the scene you know what I mean

Can’t pass it up confronted by the prose machine

If there is a problem, you know how I solve it?

Check out Strunk & White, they’ll easily resolve it

Splice Splice Crazy

Splice Splice Crazy

Splice Splice Crazy

Splice Splice Crazy

- Lori Oster AKA Guerrilla Splice 

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• Big Books Got Back
• Blame It On Big Jane
• It's the End of Good Prose as We Know It