Be Picky About Prepositions!

My favorite produce market sent out an e-mail this morning about its holiday weekend schedule. The e-mail contained the following sentence:

We will be open normal business hours now until Friday the 3rd but will be closed Saturday July 4th and re-open Monday July 6th at 8am.

The preposition "until" means "up to a certain point in time." As used in this sentence, it suggests that normal business hours are only in effect UNTIL Friday, but I suspect the market plans to conduct normal business hours on Friday and then close on Saturday.

Therefore, the better choice would be to say:

We will be open normal business hours now through Friday, July 3, but will be closed Saturday, July 4, and reopen Monday, July 6 at 8 a.m.

If you look closely, you will see that I tweaked a couple other things in this sentence:

1) It is not necessary to write "rd" or "th" after a day, even though you say the ending out loud.

2) "a.m." should be written with periods so it does not look like the word "am."

3) The word "reopen" is usually written without the hyphen.

Now I'm being picky!

Once you've smoothed out your grammar, I do hope you will get outdoors and take advantage of the wonderful farmers' markets and produce stands available this time of year. Around here, it's time for Chilton County peaches as well as local blueberries and other summer goodies.

I'd like to welcome any new blog followers from the ALDOT office in Mobile. I did a workshop there last week and thoroughly enjoyed working with them.