Thursday, October 29, 2009

How many mistakes can you make in one article?

Going back in the grab bag, this one comes from CAD (Ctrl+Alt+Del), from about 2 months ago. Reading back through the article (a discussion of rumors about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion), there are quite a few things to mention.

First, the serial comma. There are a couple of times when Tim makes lists that aren't completely comma-separated. Example: Zones, quests and instances revamped. Standard grammar rules would require a comma before the 'and.' Additionally, Tim has the following list-within-a-list, also not fully comma-separated:

Orgrimmar split in half, Thousand Needles flooded, death damage and destruction everywhere you turn.

I may be wrong here, but I think semicolons are needed here in addition to commas. That is, the list-within-a-list would be comma-separated, while the outer list would be separated by semicolons ("Orgrimmar split in half; Thousand Needles flooded; death, damage, and destruction everywhere you turn.")

This assumes, though that death and damage are actually 2 separate list items and not an adjective describing the kind of damage (in which case, only a terminal comma would be needed, not the semicolons). Given the different kinds of damage in fantasy/role-playing games, this may actually be the case, though I don't believe so.

Further reading shows more errors. Here's an unpaired/unclosed quotation mark:
(not some "alternate reality zone, caverns of time horseshit)

Finally, what grammar gripe would be complete without the old standby of its/it's confusion:
Especially if it wants to stand it's ground against The Old Republic and all the hawtness that game is offering.

One might ask about the numerous sentence fragments, of which the examples above are but a few. However, Tim takes a conversational tone in his posting, not intending to be formal, so I'll leave them be.

Source: http://cad-comic.com/news.php?i=1918#1918

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