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).

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Criminal Sentence 629: Number Nonsense

A story in today's paper has the headline "Obama, Romney make a few factual missteps." But then the last line of this article is this:

"In 2012, that favorability figure had fallen to 80 percent to 14 percent."

Huh?

The sentence before read "In 2008, 84 percent of the world had a positive view of the United States and 14 percent negative."

Based on this sentence, I guess they meant to say

"In 2012, that favorability figure had fallen to 80 percent."

2 comments:

Westley said...

Knowing how politians count, I think they were trying to say that the postive to negative response was 80 to 14, leaving 6 percent unclear as to how they felt.

Susan Weiner, CFA said...

Bonnie,

I just found you through Grammar Girl when I was searching for some wisdom about how to write about sums of money.

I look forward to reading more of your posts!

Best wishes,
Susan