The Turner Ink blog contains rants, bloopers, observations and opinions. It also has handy tips on grammar and punctuation such as colons: semicolons; and full stops. As well as some very useful ‘how tos’. Feel free to leave comments. Be nice though.

Turner Ink

Copywriting Services London

Posts tagged 'commas'

Turner Ink Christmas card bloopers – the answers

23rd
Dec
by Sarah Turner

Old Typewriter smallSo for those of you that received a Turner Ink Xmas card this year, these are the bloopers. How many did you get?

 

A Christmas tail [A classic homonym. It should be tale.]

Santa was having a bad day. 4 [up to number 10, spell out the number. So Four] of his elfs [elves] were throwing a sickie and the work experience elves werent [don't forget the apostrophe, weren't] producing toys fast enough. Santa was beginning to feel the pressure.

His blog needed updating. He hadn’t checked twitter [brand name, so Twitter] for at least 20 minites [minutes]. And people were giving him greif [grief] on Facebook.

Than [then], as he began to load his slay [another homonym, sleigh] one of the boards broke. And several large bags from Amazon fell to the ground: [a comma here not a colon] scattering their contents all over the place. Needless to say, santa [Cap S, Santa] was not in the best of moods.

Suddenly, the doorbell rang and he went to the door expecting another problem. But when he opened it; [comma here not a semicolon] there was just a little angle [like 18 degrees? Geddit? Yes, it should be angel of course] with a great big christmas [Christmas] tree.

The angel greeted him very cheerfully: [So lots of newspapers and mags have a colon to introduce speech. It's not needed though. A comma would suffice.]  “Merry Christmas Santa claus [cap C, Claus]. Isn’t it just a wonderful day [question mark needed]. I have a beautiful tree for you. See, isn’t its [it] just the loveliest Christmas Tree [lower case t, tree] you’ve ever seen? Where would you like me to put it?’ [You started with double speech marks, you need to end with double speech marks.]

And that’s how the angel on top of the Christmas tree tradition began.

Hands up who circled the And and But at the beginning of a sentence as an error? Back of the class!

Happy Christmas anyway.


Tags: capital letters, colons, commas, homonyms, semicolons
Posted in Bloopers, Word stuff | comments icon 1 Comment »

What’s the difference between ‘which’ and ‘that’? Is there a difference?

30th
Oct
by Sarah Turner

When to use which and when to use that is pretty darn confusing for most people. Many of us use the ‘does it sound right?’ rule. Or we use that when we’re being informal and which when we’re being formal. Or sometimes we don’t give a hoot and use that or which interchangeably.

It’s pretty subtle but the rule is as follows:

We use which when we’re adding information.

The books, which have green covers, are new.

So all the books are new. And we’re just letting you know they have green covers as an extra bit of information.

On the other hand, we use that when we are restricting information.

The books that have green covers are new.

We’re being very specific. Only the books that have green covers are new.

Clauses containing which are set off by bracketing commas. Which means they can be removed from the sentence and still make sense.

The books, which have green covers, are new.

The books are new. 

So to recap. If you’re adding a bit of extra information, just for the heck of it, use which. Otherwise use that. Simples.


Tags: commas, that, which
Posted in Grammar tips | comments icon 6 Comments »

 

Definition of a blog: A blog or web blog is a website usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. (Wikipedia.com)