Hi FF fans! Surprise! My surgery was postponed for a couple of weeks, so here I am with another fresh-off-the-press (WordPress!) Friday Follies post! 😀

1. & 2. & 3. “While the archive will provide scholars with a detailed historical archive for generations, the late Dr. Hurtubise was also an avid amateur photographer who left over 300 glass plate negatives that will eventually provide historians with a detailed visual record that depicts Montreal’s 19th century.”

The corrections:

Never have so few words been written with so many instances of awful offensiveness! Let’s take ’em one at a time:

1. This sentence is way too long. There’s a good way to prevent such poor writing: when you finish writing a sentence, read it out loud. If you get woozy or run out of breath before the end, that tells you to put a period in there somewhere! The ideal place here would be after “photographer.” Then you would need to start the next sentence with He left over… Another punctuation option would be to insert a colon instead of the period, so you’d have: …photographer: He left over 300…
2. Repetition: boring and bad! We have two instances of repeated words here: archive, and that. Please don’t make me show you where they are. (whine) 😀 Read the sentence aloud and they’ll be more noticeable. The point is, try to use a thesaurus for synonyms, to avoid subjecting the reader to lazy repetition. By the way there’s a third one there: with. But it doesn’t bother me as much, somehow.
3. Hyphen-o-phobia. “…300 glass plate negatives…” should be 300 glass-plate negatives. They aren’t “plate negatives” made of glass. They are negatives on glass plates. There’s a difference. The hyphenated term glass-plate works here as a compound adjective describing the noun, negatives.

I leave you with this thought:
Good: a thesaurus
Bad: repetition
Good: hyphens

Have a great weekend! 😀