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Monday, November 17, 2008

Criminal Sentence 127: Hurry and add punctuation!

From one of those mailed cards that advertise something:

"Hurry time is Limited!"

What is limited? Hurry time? Well, no

Before we go on, I'd like to complain about that capital L. No capital is Needed unless all of The words are capped or unless It's a proper Name. See how dumb random capitalization Looks? Caps do not equal emphasis.

Now, what to do about the hurry time?

Just add a comma!

Hurry, time is limited!

Or you could make it two sentences:

Hurry! Time is limited. (just one exclamation point needed)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Hurry, time is limited!" seems like a totally legitimate way to write that, but then I'm wondering if there is some rule that allows an imperative sentence like that to be used with a comma instead of a semi-colon?

"Hurry; time is limited!" would certainly seem very staid, so probably there's a rule I just don't know about. :)

The Sentence Sleuth said...

I agree that a semicolon would be a bit stuffy there, though you could put one there. It's perfectly fine to put a comma after a short command at the beginning of a sentence. If you don't like the comma, you can make it two sentences:
Hurry! Time is limited.