Category Archives: legal proofreading

In honor of the Super Bowl this weekend, here’s a recent football-related Grammar Giggle. I’m not a big fan myself, but it took me a few minutes to figure this one out. I know Perry High School is a local school and I thought it was a bit unusual that they mentioned Brock Perry while the people in the photo were wearing jerseys that said “Purdy.” I finally figured out his last name is Purdy and he went to Perry High School. The first line is just very poorly written. It would have been better to say “If the former two-time All-Arizona quarterback Brock Purdy leads the 49ers . . ..”

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After a long hiatus where life and work keep getting in the way, I’m back with more Grammar Giggles and proofreading information.

The latest example of someone not paying attention was when a flight that we had booked last July for a cruise out of Athens, Greece, was changed by the airline. See the errors below:

For reference, our original flight was to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and then on to Athens. And I’m not sure how they expected us to get from Athens, GREECE, to Athens, Illinois, on the return trip. This is a major airline and I will have a hard time having them near the top of my list for future flights. As I always say–slow down and pay attention. It will help get the details right.

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This Grammar Giggle is notice that sometimes I screw things up too. One of the Proof That Blog readers commented that there was an error in my last Grammar Giggle–Can We Bring Our Tobacco/E-Cigs and Pets or Not?–because I made a mistake in this comment:

The reader was correct. It should have been “none of those things ARE allowed.” I had even done a blog post on that very topic here and should know better, but it simply proves that I am human and do make mistakes. If you haven’t read that article, please click on the link because it goes into more detail. In a nutshell, because we were talking about a list of things, you could replace it with “not any of those things is allowed,” so it should be “none of those things are allowed.” If it was just talking about one thing, for instance, if it had said just “no purses allowed” and you could say “not one purse is allowed,” it would be “none is allowed.” This is confusing and can be difficult to figure out.

So thank you, Proof That Blog readers, for actually reading this blog and for letting me know when I’ve made a mistake so I can correct it.

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This was in our local newspaper for our Hometown 4th of July Celebration. This is a great example of how important proofreading for content is. It isn’t always misspellings or misplaced commas that draw the wrong kind of attention to your writing, but unclear writing will do it too. In this example, they use the word “no” twice with things not to bring, but they don’t use it for the last two things. Does that mean that we CAN bring tobacco/e-cigs or pets? I’m pretty sure they meant to say that none of those things are allowed, but that’s not the way it came out. It would have been more clear to remove the second “no” and have the first one apply to everything on that line but it would have been even better to use the word “no” in front of each of those.

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