Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Why Even Fortune Cookies Need Proofreaders

Everything written should be proofread, even in fortune cookies. Can you spot the error?

"There are 356 days in a year, may all 365 of your dreams come true."

That's right, the comma should be a semicolon. In an ideal world, I'd have secretaries, research assistants, and fact-checkers helping me with the day's blogging chores, not to mention a few proofreaders. As things stand, no one has ever pointed out to me even a single spelling error, a grammatical faux pas, or a missing Oxford comma, leaving the entire proofreading burden on me. I did once have a reader question my slightly errant use of the word bucolic, but his criticism was aimed more at the non-Wodehousian tenor of my Wodehouse book review than at my failure to consult the thesaurus.

Note:   Anyway, should you note a dangling participle here or some similar crime against the English language, by all means let me know. For that matter, I'm interested in any correction that will make the blog better. Or more bucolic.

Then, once you've corrected my grammar, please take a look at other fortune cookies that have come my way and ask yourself, is there anything this blogger won't write a post about? Alas, there I go ending a sentence with a preposition.

01225

2 comments: