One thing about business writing today: It’s easy to find mistakes to share with you!!
Here’s your Monday’s Mistake for this week below. Try to figure it out before you look at the answer.
What is wrong with this sentence?
“An example would be a supplier who is able to make forms, stampings, tubing, sharps, build assemblies and create new processes under one roof.”
Well, it doesn’t make sense, does it? And that’s because it’s not parallel in construction. The writer says “is able to make” but then switches to “build” and “create.” This would work if they didn’t have a long line of nouns after the verb “make.”
There are three ways to fix this sentence, if you can believe it.
For example, the sentence is correct if you take out all those nouns and write it as:
“An example would be a supplier who is able to make forms, build assemblies and create new processes under one roof.”
Or they could have used a semicolon for clarity, like this:
“An example would be a supplier who is able to make forms, stampings, tubing, and sharps; build assemblies and create new processes under one roof.”
Or we can add a word to make it correct:
“An example would be a supplier who is able to make forms, stampings, tubing, and sharps, plus build assemblies and create new processes under one roof.”
We can also go beyond the mistake to write a tighter sentence:
“An example
would beis a supplier who is able to can make forms, stampings, tubing, and sharps, plus build assemblies and create new processes all under one roof.”
No, I didn’t need to add the word “all,” but I thought it added a necessary emphasis, because I think the writer is trying to say find a supplier who can do it all in one place.
How did you do? Did you find the mistake? And did you rewrite it one of the three ways I suggested or did you take a different approach? Let me know in the comments!
P.S. A note on the comma before the word “sharps”: That is a style guide issue. You can use it or not as long as your usage is consistent. I am not a huge proponent of the Oxford (or serial) comma, but others are adamant that it be used, as this meme humorously says. 🙂
Sharon Ernst
Sharon Ernst is a freelance editor and writer at www.weknowwords.com. To share what she's learned in her 20+ years in the business, she started www.betterfasterwriter.com to offer ebooks, classes, a newsletter and this blog to help improve the business and marketing writing skills of today’s workforce.