Grammar

[fanf]

In early drafts of this announcement I had written "there is a significant number of unofficial Hermes webmail login forms", which a couple of my colleagues corrected to "there are", so I checked. I had thought that my version was pedantic but correct, but I may have got that impression from an over-simplified version of the rule. It turns out (according to the Economist style guide and other sources) that the rule is "the number is" but "a number are". Subtle.

The best guideline is to rephrase away from controversial matters of style, which is what I did :-)

Comments

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

The mnemonic I use is to replace the phrase 'a number' with a number.

For example, 'there is a significant number of forms'

becomes

'there is 122 forms'

which clearly isn't right.

[liadnan]

Hah. Have just emerged victorious from an argument about formal legal drafting regarding whether "each" is singular or plural.

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

Again, the question is how many people 'each' refers to. If it is one person, then it is singular.

[covertmusic.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to work out where I'd use "each" in a plural sense; all the examples I can think of (okay, in the last thirty seconds) are "each <one> from <set>", essentially...

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

I can think of contrived examples such as 'Each five people'...

[king-of-wrong.livejournal.com]

Surely that's "every five people" or "each group of five people"?