Ask Me a Question

If you have a writing, grammar, style or punctuation question, send an e-mail message to curiouscase at sign hotmail dot com.

Add Your Own Criminal Sentence!

If you find a particularly terrible sentence somewhere, post it for all to see (go here and put it in the Comments section).

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Criminal Sentence 143: The KGB Will Get You for This

The beginning of a very long sentence in a book about Russia:

"Besides spying on other countries. conducting sabotage and assassinations, the KGB ..."
Just like the KGB, this sentence isn't very nice. The writer is stating that three activities the KGB participates in include spying, conducting sabotage and assassinations. Lovely. Well, let's be good Communists for a minute and make everything equal (parallel):
spying on other countries, conducting sabotage and carrying out assassinations. Three -ing words make the sentence parallel.

No comments: