Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Username

BevRowe

Member Since

July 2, 2015

Total number of comments

5

Total number of votes received

4

Bio

Latest Comments

Is “leverage” a verb?

  • July 2, 2015, 9:26am

Forget elegance - and I have no actual example to quote - but I can imagine 'information' being used as a verb: supplying with information may not be the same as informing. So I would understand someone who asked 'Has that satellite been informationed yet'.
I suspect there are better counterexamples than this but cannot immediately think of one.

Opposition to “pretty”

  • July 2, 2015, 8:32am

The Google ngram for "pretty good" is worth looking at. It seems to be on the increase curtrently

Obviously beginners need guidance but it would be sad if punctuation was taught as a series of unbreakable rules. It is so much a question of taste and function.

The only rule I would instinctively follow is that one should not have two colons in the same sentence. Is that generally felt to be the case?

Let’s you and me/I

  • July 2, 2015, 5:37am

It's a bit late to join this thread but I've only just seen it.
There is clearly an ambiguity in the rules . Grammar is partly about the gut reaction of native speakers and the T S Eliot quote has never struck me a wrong.
The trouble partly arises from the fact that writing is not a very exact representation of speech. Let's refer to the I or me element as M. So if we say "Let's-you-and- M go to town" with the hyphenated words all bunched together, they act like a single phrase and I would suggest that M should be me. But if we say something like "Let's, you and M, ..." the "you and M" is more like an independent phrase (in apposition as someone above pointed out), standing outside the syntax of the "Let's" phrase. Here I seems perfectly all right and may even be correct. And by the time the you-and M is separated from the Let's by as much as it is in the Eliot, the fact that you and I are the performers of the verb (go), even if not the grammatical subjects, influences one's choice.