Grammar Guide

Redundancy

Q. She liked to go to the annual festival every year.
A. She liked to go to the annual festival.

Why? Annual festival inherently means every year, so it is redundant to put the two together in the same sentence. It is the same as saying “She liked to go to the every year festival every year”, which wouldn’t quite make a lot of sense. You can check out the ‘Redundancy’ link below for more examples and possible pitfalls. 

Of course, sometimes you do want to emphasize something or achieve a specific effect, so repeating the same word or words of similar meaning may be alright in that case.

Commas and Em Dashes

Q. You are the one–the only one, that I can count on right now.
A. You are the one–the only one–that I can count on right now.

In this case, I am trying to insert an interjection and not connect two independent clauses with a dash. What I want to focus on is the use of commas and em dashes to separate these types of interjections. 

A common rule of thumb to remember is that whatever you open with, you must end with. For example, if I open with a dash, then I must close the dash somewhere within the same sentence: “And yet, when the car was finally delivered⁠—nearly three months after it was ordered⁠—she decided she no longer wanted it.” Similarly, if I used commas in the sentence instead: “And yet, when the car was finally delivered⁠, nearly three months after it was ordered⁠, she decided she no longer wanted it.” I would have to close the phrase with a comma. 

Some people get confused when they see a dash. In the sentence above, if everything was separated with commas, it is a bit hard to read. Imagine reading an even longer sentence with over seven commas, that would be straining and it would be hard to distinguish the breaks in the sentence. Thus, the em dash is a helpful tool to take the place of a comma. However, you must remember to close the phrase as you would with commas. 

, phrase, 
–phrase–
–phrase, phrase–

You can add as many commas as you want inside the em dash, but it must be closed with another em dash.

Subject-Verb Agreement

Q. The nickels is on the desk.
A. The nickels are on the desk.

This may seem obvious to some, but a good trick to figure out whether a verb should be singular or plural is to use the “One dog -verb-, two dogs -verb” method. 

One dog does…
Two dogs do…

One dog was…
Two dogs were…

Or another example.

One dog barks.
Two dogs bark.

English is confusing in that adding an ‘s’ to the end of a word makes it plural (sound -> sounds), but for verbs, it’s the opposite. Typically, a verb with an ‘s’ at the end refers to the action of a single entity while a verb without an ‘s’ at the end refers to multiple entities. There are some exceptions to this rule, so don’t completely base every verb off of whether it has an ‘s’ or not and try to say it aloud using the trick above.

A point of confusion may be when a subject becomes a collective group. A group is considered a single entity, or one. A common group subject would be ‘crowd’. A ‘crowd’ is a singular entity and would be considered as part of one. Basically, ‘crowd’ would use the same verb tense as “one dog barks”. 

This problem isn’t as prominent when writing in past tense though.