With the Insider asking all and sundry to find its mistakes, the Grammarnator feels that he had better be thorough this week so that he can claim top honors. Here goes.
1. Let's start with a simple proofreading error. Surely “his first memories are the quarry are from when he was a small boy” was supposed to be “his first memories of the quarry.”
2. Agreement, in This Week in Concord History: “The publishers requests one shilling cash and the rest in country produce.” Make that “publishers request.”
3. Spelling. “Mike Miller leaps from the edge of a quarry and plummetes into the water below.” As soon as I finished typing it, “plummetes” became underlined in red on this document. Take out that final e.
4. Punctuation. “When we saw Cimo's South End Market's booth and its exotic reuben soup, we were intrigued to say the least.” Put a comma after “intrigued.”
5. Verb tense. “He found himself drawn back to the family business where his great grandfather made a national name in the granite industry. You start with the past tense here (“found”), and that makes me want to use the past perfect late in the sentence: “his great grandfather had made a national name.” I also favor “great-grandfather,” unless, of course, you are referring to his grandfather, who happened to be great.
6. Baffling inconsistency. In the same sentence, you referred to “an Orson Welles film” and “Welle's restored film.” Or is there a new Dutch director named Welle?
7. My favorite, and the only error requiring extended treatment. “Lamp-posts, benches, custom orders, fireplace materials, landscaping stones, cobblestones: They have it all.” One of the uses of a colon is to introduce a list. Your sentence should be reversed. “They have it all: lamp-posts, benches, custom, orders, fireplace materials, landscaping stones, cobblestones.” If you want your original order, replace the colon with a dash. Also, “lamppost” does not need a hyphen any more than “bookcase” does, and (this error, regrettably, is becoming universal) you don't capitalize the first word after a colon.
