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August 30, 2004
Punctuation Makes All the Difference
(Filed under: Writing & Editing)While editing announcements for my youth group's newsletter I came across this line in a blurb about fall Sunday school classes:
Parents’ sex will be discussed with the junior high Sunday school, if there are any concerns or questions please feel free to talk to the Youth Coordinator.
A colon instead of an apostrophe can make all the difference:
Parents: sex will be discussed with the junior high Sunday school, if there are any concerns or questions please feel free to talk to the Youth Coordinator.
Editing and proofreading is a vital part of any marketing project, especially if you want to avoid an awkward junior high Sunday school class. But it's not always easy. Speed and laziness conspire against us. Last week I posted some updates to this site and was quickly e-mailed about mistakes I should have caught.
All you have to do is be patient and diligent. That means grabbing a dictionary for the word you're unsure about (like I just did with "diligent"). Sometimes it helps to read your copy outloud. You'll be forced to read it slower and will be more likely to catch mistakes. It also helps to have another set of eyes proofread your copy. But whatever you do, don't trust a computer's spell or grammar check. Grammatically, there's nothing wrong with either of the above sentences.
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at August 30, 2004 8:01 AM
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Comments
how in the world is possible that someone trying to help the church has chosen to put such s lang word as 'suck'in its logo!Do you at all know when the suck is coming from, and what many think using this word!
This is terrible.I would not use your website, and will not advice anyone to use it, or will advice not to use it, if it ever come us in any way. You are shaming the name 'Christian.'I have no doubt, you are a few very frustrated people there, who don't know what a 'suck' is!
Posted by: Sucker at April 26, 2007 2:51 AM
Actually, both of those sentences are comma splices. ;-) The corrected one should read as follows:
"Parents: sex will be discussed with the junior high Sunday school. If there are any concerns or questions, please feel free to talk to the Youth Coordinator."
If you were feeling really crazy, you could throw in a semicolon instead of starting a new sentence, but I've found semicolons kind of freak people out.
Anyway, I appreciate what you're trying to do with your site here. Kudos!
Posted by: Sarah Hurst at July 4, 2007 11:54 AM
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