When “as well as” is used in a negative context, the first “as” should be changed to “so.” …I did as well as expected. …I did not do so well as expected. …He reads as well as John. …He does not read so well as John. This is also true when the second “as” is missing. …He did not do …
Last Thoughts on “…serious bodily injury accident…”
When this question was first posted on FB, there was a lot of adjective/adverb conversation about the word “bodily.” An adjective answers “Which one?” or “What?” about the noun or pronoun it modifies; an adverb answers “When?” “Where?” “Why?” or “How?” — and a few extensions of these questions — about the verb, adjective, or other adverb it modifies. In …
“Serious bodily injury accident” — Part 1
The punctuation of these words occasioned a rather heated discussion on FB that contained a number of misconceptions about the language in general. First, a note about the “-ly” issue. Adverbs that end in “-ly” are formed from an adjective: …recent, recently… …new, newly… …charming, charmingly… …heavy, heavily… …steady, steadily… When one of these “-ly” words combines with another word …
“Who” or “Whom”?
We continue with this dilemma, sometimes stretching to “look good.” Here is a sentence from an article about the golf tournament over the weekend: …The fact that so many cheered was confirmation of whom the people thought was the bad guy. Prior to this sentence in the article, there were a couple of mistakes: a verb left out of a …
A Fine Point of Grammar — “Is” or “Are”?
This sentence is from an English exam: “Kay is one of the women who (is/are) (inferring/implying) that from what she read. So let’s first say that speakers and writers “imply” and readers and listeners “infer.” So that answer is INFER. The verb form you are looking for is in a dependent clause here; it is not the subject and verb …