This slide show are????

Like most of you, I have friends who send me lots and lots of slide shows and YouTube videos through e-mail. Some I enjoy, and some I just delete. The other day I received one with beautiful photos of our treasured National Parks.

As I told the sender, I loved the photos, but I was not impressed with the first sentence the original sender had affixed to the e-mail:

This slide show of National Parks are in alphabetic order.

This person forgot to mentally remove the prepositional phrase (of National Parks) while deciding what the verb should be. The subject of this sentence is SLIDE SHOW, which is singular. Therefore, the verb should be IS, which is singular.

One more comment: Although "alphabetic" is a word, the preferred form for use when describing the order of words is "alphabetical."

I'd suggest this sentence should read as follows:

This slide show of National Parks is in alphabetical order.

I hope all of you get to visit at least some of these beautiful parks in your lifetime. If you'd like to receive an e-mail with the slide show attached, please leave me a comment. (I promise to correct the sentence before forwarding it!)

That Clauses Confusion

Be careful when using "that clauses" in your writing. It is easy to confuse the meaning. Here is a good example from a letter to "Miss Manners" in a recent column:

My biggest concern is that I don't want her to think that she was an afterthought and that we really did send her an invitation.

This bride was worried about insulting someone whose invitation to her wedding was returned because of a postage issue. What she meant was that she did not want the person to think that she HADN'T sent her an invitation in the first place. The first "that clause" works, but the second one is confusing.

Here is a better rewrite:

My biggest concern is that I don't want her to think she was an afterthought and that we sent her invitation later than all the others.

I hope you agree that this is much clearer. One less "that" helps a lot, too!

Have You Turned Your Pet Into Shelter Yet?

The June 8 and 15, 2009 edition of The New Yorker magazine has a great example of something I pointed out several weeks ago--the difference between "into" and "in to." The New Yorker quotes a headline from the Great Falls (Montana) Tribune:

"ECONOMIC SLUMP HAS MORE OWNERS TURNING PETS INTO SHELTER"

This headline conjures up some weird images--a dog being used as a tent? A cat sitting on its owner's head to keep it out of the rain? Maybe a pet elephant letting its owner string a hammock between its thick legs?

When you turn something INTO something else, it becomes that thing, as in turning a wild rabbit INTO a household pet.

When you turn something IN TO something else, you give it to that something else, as in turning your pet IN TO the animal shelter because you can no longer care for it.

I hope your pets are still with you and definitely NOT being turned INTO something else!

Proofread to Avoid Wordy Phrasing

Let's face it--all of us write wordy, illogical sentences when we are in a hurry. The trick is to take the time, once you've written a complete draft, to read back through and clean things up.



Here is a good example from that investment newsletter I've mentioned before:



"Bernanke patiently explained to the member of Congress making this accusation that what she was calling money was actually not really money at all, but rather temporary reserves loaned to banks to stop fears of a crash and depression."



In my workshops, I like to call this "bopping it twice when once will do." A quick proofread would have led the writer to conclude that one or the other of the words in red needed to go. Then he could have made a quick decision about what to keep and what to get rid of. I liked keeping "really" after the "not."



I also made a second little punctuation adjustment to clarify the wording. I moved the comma between "rather" and "temporary" so that "but rather" clearly goes together. Otherwise, it sounds as if he is talking about "rather temporary reserves" (whatever those would be).



The sentence should read as follows:



"Bernanke patiently explained to the member of Congress making this accusation that what she was calling money was not really money at all, but rather, temporary reserves loaned to banks to stop fears of a crash and depression."



For those of you who are about to send me a comment stating that I don't understand how busy you are--that you don't have time for writing, then proofreading, then fixing--I disagree. Every one of us procrastinates while we think in our heads about what we are going to put on paper. My suggestion is to put it on paper as quickly as you can and THEN use your time wisely to proofread and polish.

Confusing Semicolon with Comma

I read an interesting article this week about how churches are using Twitter and other social media networks to appeal to young people. Good idea, perhaps.

The following sentence in the article had a problem--it used a semicolon where a comma should have been:

At Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens; the Rev. Adam Durso and his brother Chris, the youth director, keep in contact with their flock, sometimes hourly, on a half-dozen social media sites.

A semicolon should only be used to separate one clause from another (or items in a series from each other). In this sentence, the first six words are an introductory PHRASE, so they should be set off from the main sentence with a COMMA, not a SEMICOLON.

At Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens, the Rev. Adam Durso and his brother Chris, the youth director, keep in contact with their flock, sometimes hourly, on a half-dozen social media sites.

Even if you Twitter, keep those semicolons for special occasions!

Who is the Felon? Who is the Judge? Verb Confusion!

Corruption in local government runs rampant these days, and the City of Birmingham is no exception. John Katapodis was convicted here last week of using a charity designed to donate computers to needy children as his own personal cookie jar.

Unfortunately, the reporter who wrote about the guilty verdict got his noun and verb relationships confused and wrote a sentence that suggested the JUDGE rather than the convicted FELON was led away after the verdict was read:

"He (Katapodis) showed no reaction after Bowdre announced the verdict and was led away by marshals as a convicted felon."

In order to fix this sentence, the reporter needed to put the TWO actions involving Katapodis next to each other. Judge Bowdre needed to be somewhere other than in the middle between the two. The two Katapodis actions were these:

1) He showed no reaction.
2) He was led away by marshals.

I should also note that the judge (Judge Karen Bowdre) is a woman.

This sentence would be much clearer and more effective written this way:

After Bowdre announced the verdict, he (Katapodis) showed no reaction and was led away by marshals as a convicted felon.

Subject Verb Agreement Problem Hinders Good Columnist

I enjoy reading a certain column about investment trends and strategies, but I am bothered by the fact that this columnist does not proofread for good grammar. Here is an example of a problem sentence from an entry last week:

"By implication he was saying that the White House offer of huge regulatory powers were not appealing and had not won him over to allow Treasury control of money."

Whoops! The subject of this sentence is "the White House offer," and there is only ONE offer in the sentence. The prepositional phrase "of huge regulatory powers" does NOT determine whether the verb is singular or plural. Therefore, this sentence should read as follows:

"By implication he was saying that the White House offer of huge regulatory powers was not appealing and had not won him over to allow Treasury control of money."

Please proofread your own writing to make sure you are not using plural verbs with singular subjects.

Have a great day!

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.