Thursday, April 4, 2013

PREVIOUS GRAMMAR QUESTION



There were to much peoples at the mall so I was hurried up shopping, I was too hurried that the shirt’s I bought's not big enough and I'm having to return them.
1.  Word confusion: Don’t confuse “to” a preposition with “too”  a modifier.
2. Count/non-count nouns: “people” is a non-count noun; with a non-count noun use “many” not “much”.
3.  Word form: Because “people” is usually a non-count noun, it does not normally have a plural form (the plural “peoples” is uncommon).
4. Active vs. passive: The subject of the verb “hurry” is “I”, so the verb needs to be in the active voice.
5. Word usage: Instead of “too” the word “so” is needed.
6. Apostrophe usage: Apostrophes indicate either possession or a missing letter. The word should be “shirts” because the pronoun “them” refers to them (plural not possessive); also, because this noun is plural, the plural verb “are” is needed after “bought” .
7.  Verb form: For a statement indicating intention, use the simple present tense not the present progressive.
8. Punctuation:  “So” introduces an independent clause and follows an independent—use a semicolon. Either use a period or another semicolon to separate the next 2 clauses. Before the final independent clause introduced by the coordinating conjunction “and”, use a comma.
Possible Answer:  There were too many people at the mall; so I hurried up shopping. I was so hurried that the shirts I bought are not big enough, and I have to return them.

3 comments:

vivien said...

Please explain this to me

why is it the shirts are too small instead of the shirts were too small
thanks

Veronica Baig said...

VIVIEN: I give you a possible answer--both "are" and "were' would be correct in this sentence.

Vivien said...

Oh, I see. Thank you.