The Dot On The Left

"The Commandant showed the demographics of the Prepster class by SAT scores . . . All I could do was lower my head in shame as the curve was ruined by one dot on the lower left side." We all have dreams. Too often, those dreams seem out of reach to us for so long that we lose hope that we will ever achieve them. Fortunately, there are three key steps that anybody can take to making their dreams a reality. In this book, Dave Swanson details how he used these simple principles (who wrestles goats anyway?) to overcome staggering odds and graduate from the United States Military Academy Preparatory School. Despite being an academic laughing stock and having a rudimentary understanding of math, Dave beat the odds and earned an appointment to West Point. Through Dave's inspiring story, you will stop and consider all those dreams that you have long put on the shelf and then make a plan to go after them as if your life depends on it. BECAUSE IT DOES.

Vashti believes that she cannot draw, but her art teacher's encouragement leads her to change her mind and she goes on to encourage another student who feels the same as she had.

It's Little Frog's birthday, and Mama Frog gets a big surprise when the guests show up for his party -- all the animals are the wrong color! Little Frog tells her she's not looking long enough, and he's right.

Despite the humble origins of its name (Anglo Saxon for "the speck at the head of a boil"), the dot has been one of the most versatile players in the history of written communication, to the point that it has become virtually indispensable. Now, in On the Dot, Alexander and Nicholas Humez offer a wide ranging, entertaining account of this much overlooked and minuscule linguistic sign. The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms. As a mark of punctuation, they show, it plays many roles--as sentence stopper, a constituent of the colon (a clause stopper), and the ellipsis (dot dot dot). In musical notation, it denotes "and a half." In computerese, it has several different functions (as in dot com, the marker between a file name and its extension, and in some slightly more arcane uses in programming languages). The dot also plays a number of roles in mathematics, including the notation of world currency (such as dollars dot cents), in Morse code (dots and dashes), and in the raised dots of Braille. And as the authors connect all these dots, they take readers on an engaging tour of the highways and byways of language, ranging from the history of the question mark and its lesser known offshoots the point d'ironie and the interrobang, to acronyms and backronyms, power point bullets and asterisks, emoticons and the "at-sign." Playful, wide-ranging, and delightfully informative, On the Dot reveals how thoroughly the dot is embedded in our everyday world of words and ideas, acquiring a power inversely proportional to its diminutive size.