 This sign at the entrance to a construction site caught my attention a little while ago. For a simple message of 13 words, it managed to pack in an awful lot of errors! How many can you identify? Compare your list with the seven that I point out below.
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I’ve recently noticed a lot of cases where Hong Kong writers are unsure about — or just wrong about — a particular structure. It can be illustrated by these two sentences:
1) Money invested in the fund attracts interest of 6%. 2) People investing in the fund have access to our expert financial advisors. In both sentences, the underlined portion is the noun phrase subject of the sentence. What we are interested in is that part of the noun phrase subject that comes after the head noun (i.e. after money & people, respectively). In each case, we have a form of the same verb, ‘invest’, but in (1) we use the -ed form ‘invested’, and in (2) the -ing form ‘investing'. Why? |
About this blogThis blog arises from keeping an eye on English in Hong Kong. I often use signs, notices and advertisements that I see as starting points to write about English issues that commonly challenge Hong Kong writers. Archives
October 2017
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