Quest #1 passage with mistakes marked:
Nash paused next to his 72 El Camino and dug in
his pocket for his keys.
“What are you doing?” Vivian screeched
from an open second floor
window. “Oh, heck no. Your
not going anywhere.” She ducked back in.
Nash cursed and scrambled into
the driver’s seat. He had less than a minute to make his escape. Vivian
Shacklebolt was a vengeful winch,
she’d tear him apart if she got her claws near him.
He revved the motor and burned
rubber out of the drive. His backend fishtailed when it hit the road. He floored
the gas as soon as he’d gained control. “Bye.”
Vivian’s livid, stomping form
appeared in his rearview as the smoke cleared. “I hate you!”
Errors:
1. The abbreviated
year of the car make should have an apostrophe before it, in place of the first
two numerals of the year. Be careful not to confuse a single opening quotation
mark for an apostrophe. They curve opposite ways. (CMoS 16th
edition, 9.31, pg. 475)
2. The words ‘second
floor’ should be hyphenated because they come before the noun they modify, and
ordinal numbers follow the hyphenate-before, open-after rule. (CMoS hyphenation
chart)
3. In the line “Your
not going anywhere,” your is a usage
error. It should be the contraction you’re,
which means you are. Your is a possessive pronoun.
4. & 5. The last
highlighted portion contains two errors. The first is the word winch. This is another usage error. A winch is a device for lifting or pulling
heavy items. A wench is a young woman.
Nash meant wench.
The second error
is a comma splice. The comma after winch
joins two independent clauses. Since there is no coordinating conjunction after
the comma, this is incorrect. There is more than one fix for this. The writer
can add the word and after the comma,
trade the comma for a semicolon, put an em dash in place of the comma, or put a
period after winch and start a new
sentence with she’d. Because these sentences
are so closely connected and the pacing of the scene is fast, I chose an em
dash.
Grammar Police posts for further study:
(commonly confused words, including possessive pronouns)
(a lesson on hyphens)
(atypical marks of punctuation)
(comma rules)
Corrected version of the passage:
Nash paused next to his ’72 El
Camino and dug in his pocket for his keys.
“What are you doing?” Vivian screeched
from an open second-floor window. “Oh, heck no. You’re not going anywhere.” She
ducked back in.
Nash cursed and scrambled into
the driver’s seat. He had less than a minute to make his escape. Vivian
Shacklebolt was a vengeful wench—she’d tear him apart if she got her claws near
him.
He revved the motor and burned
rubber out of the drive. His backend fishtailed when it hit the road. He floored
the gas as soon as he’d gained control. “Bye.”
Vivian’s livid, stomping form
appeared in his rearview as the smoke cleared. “I hate you!”
###
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