PREVIOUS GRAMMAR QUESTION

Driving to the mall last week my car was near disappearing in a pothole: deciding to call the cities administration reporting the problem, I was hoping the problem was to be fixed quickly however its still their and its to be avoided.

1. Dangling modifier: There is no subject for “driving to the mall”—currently the only one available is the car”. Therefore it needs a subject such as “ When I was driving …” That is now an adverb clause of time—it needs to be followed by a comma.

2.  Wording: “was near disappearing” is bad grammar and non-idiomatic—reword to something such as “nearly disappeared.”

3. Gerund or infinitive? The gerund “reporting” doesn’t work here; use the infinitive ‘to report.”

4. Possessive: “Cities” is a plural form; the singular possessive is needed—city’s (no capital).

5. Verb form: instead of “was to be” use the modal passive “would be.”

6. Word confusion: When “its’ means “it is”, use an apostrophe (it’s); when “their” refers to a place and is not a possessive pronoun, use “there.”

7. Awkward wording: “to be avoided” is awkward in this sentence—it would be more usual to use “should be avoided.”

8. Punctuation: replace the colon with a semicolon. The comma after “problem” is insufficient—more of a break is needed. Use either a semicolon or a period. The word “however” separates 2 independent clauses—either make them separate sentences or separate them with a semicolon. After an introductory “however”, use a comma. In the last sentence, “and” separated 2 independent clause; use a comma after “there.”

Possible Answer: When I was driving to the mall last week, my car nearly disappeared in a pothole. I decided to call the city’s administration to report the problem.  I was hoping the problem would be fixed quickly; however, it’s still there, and it should be avoided.