18 February 2016

PREVIOUS GRAMMAR QUESTION

As the matter of fact, she was a person who hard being convinced for instant, she certainly would likes to thinks that his opinion are the corrected then any one else view.

1. Article use:

Use the definite article (“the”) only when referring to specific items; for singular, non-specific items use the indefinite article (“a”).

2. Word confusion:

These words sound similar, but try not to confuse “instant” with “instance”. The meanings are quite different.

3. Passive form:

While “hard being convinced” seems to be a passive construction, the form is incorrect. The word “hard” needs to be introduced by “was” and followed by an infinitive (“was hard to convince”).

4. Verb form:

After a modal verb, use the base form of the verb (“like” not “likes”).

5. Infinitive:

The infinitive is formed from “to” + the base form of the verb. There is no “s” or any other verb ending on an infinitive, so use “to think” not “to thinks”.

6. Pronoun agreement:

It makes more sense if you change “his” to “her”. “His” is possible here, but it doesn't make as much sense.

7. Word form:

The word “corrected” is a past participial adjective. Here, however, a comparison is needed (i.e., something like “more correct”). A good solution would be to change this expression to “better”.

8. Word confusion:

The words “then” and “than” sound very similar, but they are quite different. Here, we need “than” because there is an implicit comparison.

9. Possessive:

In this case, the “view” belongs to someone (i.e., “anyone else”), so it needs to be possessive (“anyone else’s”).

10. Punctuation:

The first independent clause ends with “convince”, so a semicolon is needed here.

11. Wordiness:

It is clear that the pronoun “she” refers to a person, so restating the fact is unnecessary. Instead of “she is a person who is”, we can simply say “she is”.

Suggested solution:

As a matter of fact, she is hard to convince; for instance, she certainly likes to think that her opinion is better than anyone else’s.

3 comments:

Leah said...

As you had posted that the next blog was to be posted on february 19th, I was surprised to see that it was up today, february 18th, a day early. I am hoping that my grammar answer will still be taken for marks. Also there was no vocabulary question posted for this round.
Leah Eng 140

Michael said...

Hi Leah,

I often post the new edition of the blog on Thursday afternoons, so it's best not to wait until the last day to submit your comments. But I'll be sure to calculate your marks for them anyways. I also noticed that I neglected to post the vocabulary question this week, so I'll give you a bonus mark for that one.

Leah said...

Awesome, thanks for the heads up!