Friday, April 10, 2020

spot the errors

Seen in this article:

Falconburg conveyed an apology, however, Mr. Mooney has declined the offer for an in person meeting.

I see at least two errors. Do you see only two errors as well, or do you see more?



2 comments:

Charles said...

"Falconburg conveyed an apology, but Mr. Mooney has declined the offer for an in-person meeting."

The tense issues kind of rub me the wrong way, too, although I don't know if that counts as an error. I think it should all be simple past, though, especially given the previous sentence.

Also, what the hell is wrong with the police?

Kevin Kim said...

There's a lively discussion in the comments to that post about what really happened. There's a video associated with the arrest, but the video apparently doesn't tell the whole story. The police supposedly came to break up a gathering of 12-15 people, and Mooney might not have been part of that group, but the police may have thought he had been.

Now that I look at the sentence a second time, I think that there may indeed be a tense-control issue. Your suggestion to make it all simple-past tense works for me, although it's possible to defend the present-perfect if we think of Mooney's declining the offer of a personal apology as having ripples that go up to the present moment. But that may be a bit of a stretch, and ultimately, I agree with you.

Anyway, the two errors I saw were fairly easy to catch:

1. conjunctive adverb: there ought to be a semicolon after "apology."
2. punctuation: it should be "an in-person meeting." (hyphenate phrasal adj.)

The "too" you wrote—in the phrase "rubs me the wrong way, too"—seems to imply that you wrote a comment before this one. Did you? If so, I didn't see it. Or were you saying "too" in the sense of "in addition to the two easily visible errors"?