Here’s this week’s mistake, although it is admittedly subjective: What’s right: The writer used the written out version of 34 to start the sentence, and that’s correct. We don’t start sentences with numbers. Writing “34 percent of…” is wrong. Writing “Thirty-four percent of…” is right. What’s wrong: The other number should be a number, not a word, meaning it should say 18, not eighteen. Why? For two reasons: The number is not at the beginning of a sentence as 34...
Here’s this week’s pop quiz! What’s wrong with this sentence? “2020 has been like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, ripping us all up from our familiar lives and depositing us in a strange new world.” The answer? You can’t start a sentence with a number. If the writer had said… “The year 2020 has been like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, ripping us all up from our familiar lives and depositing us in a strange new world” …it would be correctly written. If you find you’ve started a sentence with a number, it...
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