Mistakes in Newspapers

No matter how busy you are, you must write properly.




The staggering waves of investors and business owners investing in the project confirms its massive potential for success.

The above sentence is taken from a print advertisement (in a national English daily) featuring a property development project.

The word 'waves' is in plural and 'owners', another plural noun. Both these nouns are joined by the conjunction 'and', and then they (plus enlargements which are those words in bold enlarging the meanings of the two nouns there) have become the subjects of the verb in the sentence.

Everybody knows that a plural verb should be used, but a singular one has instead been used in the advertisement.

Given hereunder is another example taken from a different national English daily.

If one is to choose books that were written with friendship as its main topic, there are probably a million of them. But below are the five easy reads that were written on friends and how their friendships, very often, happen accidentally and lasts a long time, if not a lifetime.

Is there anything wrong with the second example? Yes, there is. In fact, there are two mistakes.

Plural noun 'books' is accompanied by a singular pronoun 'its'; and another plural noun 'friendships' has two verbs following it with the first one 'happen' being a plural verb and a correct one but not the second 'lasts' which is a singular verb.

The above mistakes have been touched upon in my earlier posts, Subject-Verb Agreement Error and Double Superlative? , Concord failures/noun-pronoun disagreements?‏, Extra Verb and Asymetrical sentence.