Sentence of the Week #6

[From Michelle Yeoman:]

Editing Solution: Last Week’s Sentence

Welcome to the sixth installment in this series. As a reminder, below is Sentence of the Week #5:

Recent observations suggest that some birds were migrateing earlier.

As some of you noted, migrateing is misspelled in this sentence. When -ing is added to “migrate,” the -e should be dropped. Thus, the corrected sentence reads as follows:

Recent observations suggest that some birds were migrating earlier.

However, one does not always drop the -e from a verb when adding -ing. The rules for adding -ing depend on the last two letters of the verb and are as follows:

• If a verb ends in a consonant followed by an -e (as in migrate), remove the -e when adding -ing. For example, hope becomes hoping.
• If a verb ends with -ie, replace the -ie with -y and add -ing. Thus, lie becomes lying.
• If a verb ends with -ee, do not remove the -e when adding -ing. See then becomes seeing.

I’m hoping you found this post useful, and I look forward to seeing you next week!

Sentence of the Week #6

The sentence below has 1 definite error:

The annual meeting will be at Friday, January 21.

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.