Friday Follies #142 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time

~ Ellie

FF followers, the Grammar Cop has been SO busy this past while! Here’s a little sampling of the infractions she found.

  1. “…machines are not as powerful as their gas-powered counterparts and therefore it takes them longer to do their work and they do not do as good of a job.”
  2. “As promised, the city will be keeping 100 parking spaces open to help businesses effected by the work.”
  3. “As a blogger, people often ask Amaris of @lvlyblondcloset where she shops for her kids’ clothes.”

 

And the corrections:

  1. The Grammar Cop hates “as good of a job.” It’s almost as painful as hearing chalk on a blackboard. That “of” is completely unnecessary, and makes the writer sound uneducated. Don’t do that. Just say: they do not do as good a job. (P.S. – Also to be avoided: the two instances of and. Replace one with a semicolon!) (P.P.S. – This is ugly: “do not do.” Ugh… At least say don’t do. The Grammar Cop hates repetition.)
  2. If you got Number 4 right in last week’s quiz, you shouldn’t have a problem here. The word “effected” is wrong in this sentence. It should say to help businesses affected by the work.
  3. Here we have a case of a dangling modifier – actually, a dangling modifying phrase. Mystified? The phrase “As a blogger” modifies what? It should modify the person named Amaris. At least, that was the writer’s intention, since Amaris is the blogger. Instead, because of the placement of the word “blogger,” it looks as if it modifies the closest noun, “people.” The sentence could be changed to: People often ask the blogger, Amaris, of @lvlyblondcloset, where she shops for her kids’ clothes. (Personally, if I had little kids now, I’d shop at Walmart. But I digress. 😁)

Fix this: The Grammar Cop’s uniform did not do as good of a job and effected her mood. Unhappy, Walmart will be the cop’s first destination on her shopping trip.

See you next Friday!

20 thoughts on “Friday Follies #142 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time”

  1. 1-At least they didn’t say the machines should of done a better job. (I cringe and run screaming from the computer when I see “should of”.)
    2-The effect of bad grammar had people moving away from the city in droves.
    3-As a reader, the sentences sounds rather confusing. 🙂

    The Grammar Cop’s uniform did not do a good job and affected her mood. Walmart will be the unhappy Cop’s first destination on her shopping trip. She should of went there in the first place. 😀

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

        2. It is 12-13 miles to the office. We e-mail through the day and he usually calls me on his way home from work, so we do stay in touch, but I’ve not seen him face-to-face since the Fall of 2012 and the only reason I saw him then was there was a huge spider in back of my mailbox and he was dropping off a tape and I said “when you drop off the tape in the mailbox, bring a baseball bat or at least a roll of paper towels to kill the monster spider please.” So he did … but it started to rain – spider went into a hidey hole and he didn’t kill it.

          Liked by 1 person

        3. Oh, kind of far. Thinking like a writer, I have to say that this spider story sounds like something written by Stephen King. Mind you, maybe that’s cuz I recently saw “It”! 😬😜

          Liked by 1 person

        4. Or that old “Twilight Zone” episode about arachnophobia. Finally the centipede has died. I went into the bathroom one morning and it was silent in his plastic dome. Now I have to deal with the body and the dish/dome. Right now they are still shooting off fireworks and the dog on the corner is barking – I lost my train of thought during this comment and the last one and was having trouble proofing my blog post.

          Liked by 1 person

  4. More people should read their own writing out loud before hitting the Enter key. Oh wait… that probably wouldn’t help because they probably speak like that as well. 😦

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Most mistakes found by rereading our own writing are typos. Things like grammar and spelling errors are things the perpetrator wouldn’t recognize. 😞

      Like

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