Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Center for Eating Disorders & Psychotherapy website:

"An eating disorders is an illness 'Research tells us that anorexia nervosa is a brain disease with severe metabolic effects on the entire body.'" (T R Insel, MD Director NIMH)

What's wrong: an extra "s" and a missing period.

But wait, there's more!

"How much a person surrounds themselves with images and friends or family or work environments that focus on body size and shape can aggravate and intensify this illness."

What's wrong: A person surrounds himself or herself. People surround themselves.

There are also a disturbing number of conjunctions that make this sentence cumbersome to read (and comprehend).


Contributed by Susan
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousMarch 16, 2010 at 9:13 AM

    How fussy are we going to be? Do we need to repeat the "to" in infinitives?

    "to read and to comprehend?"

    ReplyDelete
  2. LauraMarch 16, 2010 at 11:02 AM

    The short answer? Not that fussy!

    The long one:

    My purpose is to call attention to mistakes in professional writing. I make no claim to write perfect, grammatically correct sentences all the time. If I cared to be truly finicky, then practically every piece of writing out there could be dissected and critiqued in some way! Blatant errors, I believe, are different.

    By the way, "to read and comprehend" is grammatically correct, as is "to read and to comprehend."

    Check out what the experts have to say.

    Purdue Online Writing Lab: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/623/01/

    Grammar Girl: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/split-infinitives.aspx

    ReplyDelete

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