You and I won’t be on the field this Tuesday night in Cincinnati for the 86th Major League All-Star Game, but here’s your chance to sock some tricky curveballs out of the park. You get four times at bat to make two improvements in each sentence.
1. Brad said he’ll try and get you box seats to the game, let me know if you wind up with an extra.
2. I hope you can manage in the office next week with Betsy and I both going to Cincinnati at the same time.
3. I’m guessing dominant pitching will probably lead to less hits and less scoring.
4. Taking a long lead off of first base, the coach screamed at Baxter to get back.
Compute your batting average
1. Brad said he’ll try and get you box seats to the game, let me know if you wind up with an extra.
A) We often say or write “try and” when we mean “try to” (try to get you box seats).
B) The two sections of #1, separated by a comma, are each independent sentences. Therefore, a comma is insufficient punctuation. Instead, we can use a period and start a new sentence, add a conjunction like “so,” or replace the comma with a semicolon – which I’ll do here because many writers are not confident with that option.
Brad said he’ll try to get you box seats to the game; let me know if you wind up with an extra.
2. I hope you can manage in the office next week with Betsy and I both going to Cincinnati at the same time.
A) Yes, it would be “Betsy and I” in “Betsy and I are going,” but here we want “Betsy and me.” “With” is setting up a prepositional phrase, and “me” is an object of the preposition. (You don’t need to be a grammar whiz to get this right; just decide which sounds better: “with I” or “with me.” Bingo.)
B) Watch out for the redundancy of using “both” and “same” together, as in “We both went to the same high school.” Then just work out which one you want to remove.
I hope you can manage in the office next week with Betsy and me both going to Cincinnati.
3. I’m guessing dominant pitching will probably lead to less hits and less scoring.
A) Expressing uncertainty can be refreshingly conversational in our writing, but we don’t want to come across as too tentative. Either “guessing” or “probably” should be eliminated.
B) “Less scoring” is correct English, but we don’t want “less” in front of a plural word like “hits.” Hits can be counted, so the right word is “fewer.”
Dominant pitching will probably lead to fewer hits and less scoring.
4. Taking a long lead off of first base, the coach screamed at Baxter to get back.
A) We’ve discussed this before (http://www.normfriedman.com/blog/eliminating-those-pesky-ofs/). We almost always want to delete “of” after another preposition, as in “off of” or “inside of” (except when “inside of” is a figure of speech meaning “less than”).
B) We’ve spent time on this too (http://www.normfriedman.com/blog/making-sentence-parts-fit/). Who was taking a long lead? It wasn’t the coach, but that’s what the sentence says. We need to reconstruct.
Seeing Baxter taking a long lead off first base, the coach screamed at him to get back.
If you batted 1.000, you win a free trip to Cooperstown.
In addition to presenting workshops on writing in the workplace, Norm Friedman is a writer, editor, and writing coach. His 100+ Instant Writing Tips is a brief “non-textbook” to help individuals overcome common writing errors and write with more finesse and impact. Learn more at http://www.normfriedman.com/index.shtml.