Election Results!! (see the December Scoop)
Page 1, December 2023 Scoop.
Election Results!!
"Congratulations to Brenda Bryant for being re-elected, and to Danny Trapp and Linda Potter to have been elected to serve a two-year term on our Board of Directors."
Okay, all you English majors. Grab your red pencils and start grading.
How do you like that one sentence? How many errors can you find?
I was reminded of Helen Gould (1868-1938), a former editor for the New Yorker. She had a reputation for having once found four errors in a three-word sentence.
I'm lucky. I attended a high school where English was important. We studied about adjectives and adverbs and punctuation and writing sentences that made sense. Sentences needed subjects, verbs, and objects. We learned to diagram sentences. Is any of that taught today?
I got myself in trouble at a major chamber of commerce in the Midwest, where I ran the membership department. I made the terrible mistake of trying to coach the girl who wrote the monthly newsletter that went out to 1,300 business owners. Every month she mixed up "it's" and "its".
When I tried to explain the difference to her, she said that she knew the difference, but she just did it wrong every time. In my kindest voice, I suggested that, when she was all done with the newsletter, she should just go back and change every place where she had written one or the other.
I was soon told, in no uncertain terms, that I was never again to give her any instructions! I'm still laughing over that one. What should have been a good job for 3-4 years turned out to be a lousy job for ten months.
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