Find the Error 30
(Extract adapted from a best-selling travel book)
What kind of mistake do you see? (Choose one:)
- apostrophes
- articles
- doesn't make sense
- punctuation
- singular / plural
- spelling
Answer: punctuation
As well as helping us to separate items in a list, the comma is used to
separate clauses in sentences. This is so that the sentences are easier to
read and the author's intended meaning is clearer. In general, punctuation
helps us to organise our words and make what we want to express easier to
understand. The mistake in this example comes in the last sentence. The
words 'it seemed' are a separate clause within this sentence, and as such
should be separated from the rest of the sentence by two commas. The
author has added one comma, but forgot to add the second, after 'seemed'.
The sentence should read: 'Sydney, it seemed, was a city of striking
contrasts'. Here is a similar use of commas to separate clauses within a
sentence: 'The bus, which was late, came bouncing down the road at
breakneck speed'. The clause 'which was late' gives us useful information
about the context of the arrival of the bus. We need to separate this clause from
the rest of the sentence to make it easier to read – the action becomes
clearer. If we didn’t use commas at all it would read like this: 'The bus which
was late came bouncing down the road at breakneck speed', which isn’t very
clear, and is certainly harder to read.
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