Sentence of the Week #9

[From Michelle Yeoman:]

Editing Solution: Last Week’s Sentence    

Special thanks to those of you who commented on last week’s post. As a reminder, below is Sentence of the Week #8:

            Before writing the proposal, they reviewed the literatures.

The error in this sentence is the word literatures, which should be literature. Thus, the corrected sentence reads as follows:

            Before writing the proposal, they reviewed the literature.

Similar to last week’s example (the word following), the word literature is singular in form but can be plural in meaning. Other examples of such words include water, rice, milk, and money.    

Please note that fish can also be singular in form but plural in meaning. (Example: “They caught many fish at the lake.”). However, fishes should be used when indicating multiple species. (Example: “Popular aquarium fishes include cichlid, goldfish, and tetra.”).

Similarly, literatures is used to indicate multiple sets of literature. (Example: “They studied the literatures of several countries.”)

And now, onward to this week’s sentence.

Sentence of the Week #9:

The sentence below has 1 definite error:

            Our final conclusions will depend of the results of this experiment.

Please correct the error, and submit the corrected sentence and any remarks as a comment on this post. I plan to post and discuss the solution next week.

Do you have a sentence that you would like us to consider using as the Sentence of the Week? Please e-mail submissions to Michelle at msyeoman@gmail.com with the subject line “Sentence of the Week”. Submissions should be your own work—don’t nominate a colleague’s writing :). 

Please also feel free to e-mail suggestions relating to this series.