Sentence of the Week #10

[From Michelle Yeoman:]

Editing Solution: Last Week’s Sentence

Welcome to the tenth installment in this series. As a reminder, below is Sentence of the Week #9:

Our final conclusions will depend of the results of this experiment.

As some of you noted, the problem in this sentence is the preposition of, which should be on. Thus, the corrected sentence reads as follows:

Our final conclusions will depend on the results of this experiment.

The English language contains many prepositional idioms (combinations of particular prepositions and other words). Often there’s no obvious reason for the choice of preposition. In those cases, the proper preposition to use with the other word must be memorized or looked up.

The proper combination to use in the sentence above is depend on. Similar combinations are based on and rely on.

Special thanks to those of you who commented on last week’s post. The success of this series depends on your participation!

Sentence of the Week #10:

The sentence below has 1 definite error:

The response to our survey was greatest than expected.

Please correct the error, and submit the corrected sentence and any remarks as a comment on this post. I plan to post and discuss the solution next week.

Do you have a sentence that you would like us to consider using as the Sentence of the Week? Please e-mail submissions to Michelle at msyeoman@gmail.com with the subject line “Sentence of the Week”. Submissions should be your own work—don’t nominate a colleague’s writing :). 

Please also feel free to e-mail suggestions relating to this series.