Grammar Catastrophes

A blog about catastrophic failures to deploy English grammar effectively.

We have a winner!

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Phil

That's right, Mr. ——— won the spot-the-error prize (can you believe it took him that long?) I guess that means I'll have to give him something like, oh, admin privileges. Maybe he'll use them, along with his cutting sense of style, to make the blog look prettier.

Now I'll actually post something about grammar. While perusing the USDA's new nutritional guidelines, I found this on page 15: "Eating fewer calories while increasing physical activity are the keys to controlling body weight." The "while" construction makes eating fewer calories and increasing physical activity a single key to controlling body weight. If they are, separately, the keys to doing so, the sentence should read: "Eating fewer calories and increasing physical activity are the keys..." Since it appears that you must do both (hence "while), the sentence should read "...is the key to controlling body weight." Indeed, as both of my parents have said for years, to lose weight you should eat less and exercise more.

1 comments. Post a Comment

Comment

Blogger Ian Ward Comfort

5:52 PM

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

 

About Us...

Site Feed

Related Sites