Do you like delicious, large, fresh, round, red apples? Or do you prefer crunchy, long, orange, locally grown carrots?
Whatever your produce preferences, I bet you don’t like red, large, delicious, fresh, round apples or locally grown, orange, long, crunchy carrots.
If you’re confused about this, you’re not alone. J. R. R. Tolkien ran into this little-known quirk of English grammar when he first began writing.
Today on the blog, we’ve decided to have a little fun. We created a quiz that will determine which punctuation mark you are!
Punctuation marks can completely change a sentence, a paragraph, and an entire novel. Every writer uses them differently and we often have favorites that accompany our writing.
So we decided to create a quiz to help you determine which punctuation mark you might be most like.
I’m pretty confident most of you know how to write a decent sentence: subject–predicate, noun–verb. However, when it comes to getting fancy, ambiguity can happen. And you can confuse your readers to boot.
Let’s take “only,” “both . . . and,” and “either . . . or,” for example. Where do you put them? And why does it matter?
Let’s say you’re living the dream and writing a chapter of word problems for a grade school math textbook. You’ve got a girl named Mandy who has sixteen apples. You’ve got a guy named Frank who has four fewer apples than Mandy.
Wait. Is it four fewer or four less?
Let’s discuss, shall we?
Sometimes we need to revisit the basics. We should never assume that we’re above them; there’s a reason that the saying “pride comes before a fall” is still common.
And there is little that brings a writer’s soaring and magnificent prose crashing back to earth faster than using the wrong form of there/their/they’re.
Today, let’s look at these three very different words.
Sometimes you have to get back to basics. All writers are guilty of making mistakes at some point, and they kick themselves for months after an astute reader notices that they added one too many o’s to their “to.” Once that’s in print, you can’t take it back.
So today, I’d like to draw attention to one common mistake so that you will hopefully never have to take it back: the then-vs.-than debacle.
