
Originally Posted by
Viridiana
If you're going to claim to look educated in your posts, I have no qualms tearing them apart.
1) "Strong suit" should not be hyphenated.
Agreed, that was a mistake.
2) Your first sentence is a run-on sentence.
I disagree here, it does not need to be needlessly broken up into two sentences. What grammatical indication is there that it's not a complete sentence with a subject and a predicate?
3) It's is the contraction for it is. What you want here is its.
I agree.
4) Encyclopedia Britannica, as a title of an encyclopedia, should be italicized.
If I was writing a College doctorate maybe, usage outside of professional writings doesn't mean I need to be using Bold or other font styles.
5) You should avoid starting noun clauses with because. Even if you want to argue that it's grammatically correct, you'll meet a lot of opposition. Of course, opposition to your ideas should be nothing new to you at this point.
"Because" can qualify in either manner, some will say it can work. Some won't. The fact there though is that most will say it should be avoided just to be safe, half-point to you.
6) Your second sentence is a fragment.
Agreed.
7) Each of those words has its own connotations. While each may be somewhat similar to great, to say that they are completely interchangeable is dishonest.
Dishonest? I'm not sure that's actually a valid reasoning for how something can be wrong when it's just going to be used in any old sentence. Maybe if I was writing something akin to the Declaration of Independence or Geneva Convention, then maybe.
8) The first sentence of your dialogue is missing two commas.
If you mean: "Oh, hey, did you go see that new movie?" then no, there does not necessarily have to be a comma there, either usage is fine. Simply saying it's wrong does not mean it is unless you're going to provide guidelines that say so.
9) The second one is missing another comma.
Also a matter of opinion, there is no absolute that says there needs to be a second comma present, that's redundant.
10) Your first sentence after the dialogue is a run-on. In addition, it's missing a comma.
You just earlier said a sentence like that would be a fragment, if there is not a subject and predicate to each sentence, it cannot be split into two. Validation for this?
11) In the same sentence, you capitalize one word you're talking about, but you don't capitalize the other. There's no reason to capitalize either word. Besides which, this sentence shows a lack of consistency.
I have an honest tendency to do that, if I'm making a point to illustrate on a word, I'll often capitalize it even if it's not a person, place, or thing. Oops.
12) The next sentence is missing a comma.
Where would the comma go? After "because"? I don't see any other area for one to go if that's not it. That one is up to debate.
Well, that's a dozen mistakes over three short paragraphs from someone who claims he looks educated in his posts. I wonder what would happen if I scrutinized all of your posts in this thread.
It's also a lot of "mistakes" that most Colleges or readers would not frown upon because none of them heavily detract from the point the writing was still making, it's nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking.