Friday Follies #169 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time

Greetings and salutations, FFers! The Grammar Cop welcomes you to another round of Spot the Snafu. 😃

  1. “This incident just reminds everyone to take care of loved ones and there may be elderly people in their community, having extreme weather now in much of the country, it reminds to all of us as Canadians, to watch for one another.”
  2. “…The least we must do as citizens is be aware of what rights we can protect and how his province has once again attempted to thumb it’s nose at Ottawa.”
  3. “While Wolff’s book was more like a ‘fly-on-the-wall” approach to what is going on behind the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the first year of the Tump administration, Woodward, using his Pulitzer Prize-winning skills as an investigative reporter and best selling author (by conducting hundreds of hours of interviews and doing diligent research through plenty of official and secret documentation), gives a chilling, frustrating portrait of how this apathetic train wreck is running things from his perch of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.”

 

The corrections:

  1. There are many yucky mistakes here! First the grammar: “Having extreme weather now in much of the country” should be since there is now extreme weather in much of the country. “It reminds to all of us as Canadians” should be It reminds us all as Canadians. “To watch for one another” should be to watch out for one another. Lastly, let’s fix the poor punctuation as follows: This incident just reminds everyone to take care of loved ones. There may be elderly people in their community; since there is now extreme weather in much of the country, it reminds us all as Canadians to watch out for one another.
  2. ITS = POSSESSIVE. IT’S = IT IS. If you write “it’s nose,” you are actually saying IT IS NOSE. And that makes nose sense! 😃
  3. Okay. Life is too short to read that whole sentence in one swoop! It must be shortened. How? See my tighter version, here. Also, notice the other corrections made. Wolff’s book was more like a ‘fly-on-the-wall” approach to the craziness behind the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the first year of the Trump administration. But Woodward used his Pulitzer Prize-winning skills as an investigative reporter and best-selling author: he conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and diligently researched official and secret documentation, resulting in a chilling, frustrating portrait of this apathetic train wreck running things from his perch of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. [“craziness” = my poetic license! 😅]

By the way, I looked up “Resolute desk” since I hadn’t heard of it before. As a Canadian, somehow this bit of American lore escaped me. Apparently it refers to the desks presidents use in the Oval Office; it was created from timbers of the British exploratory ship, the Resolute. Live and learn!

 

 

5 thoughts on “Friday Follies #169 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time

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