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Team USA is the exception
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The 2024 Olympics start next week, and we’re continuing our series on Olympic-themed writing tips. Last week we covered capitalization, and this week we’re discussing another subject that can be confusing and inconsistent: subject-verb agreement. We’ve told you before about how to decide whether collective nouns, such as team, take singular or plural verbs. If the group is acting as a unit, use singular verbs: The team is working to improve its penalty rate. Team names, however, take plural verbs, even when the team being named is acting as a unit: The Dallas Cowboys are going to win the game. But what would an English language rule be without exceptions? Don’t apply this rule about team names to Team USA, which takes singular verbs: Team USA is leading in the medal count. And you might have already noticed that we’ve implicitly answered another Olympic-themed question about subject-verb agreement throughout this series when we use plural verbs with “Olympics” (glance above to the first sentence of this newsletter to see what we mean). What other questions about subject-verb agreement can we help you with? Hit reply and let us know. ❤ Team Stylebot
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Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebot’s newsletter.
One fun thing about writing is that it's both rule-based and flexible. So sometimes, there are no wrong answers. Such is the case with last week's quiz, when we asked you about the plural of octopus. Your choices were octopi (the plural that assumes a Latin origin of the word), octopodes (the proper plural for a word of Greek origin) and octopuses (the English way to pluralize it). Most of you picked "octopi," and exactly zero people chose "octopodes": No one got it wrong, and even if someone...
Today is the longest day of the year, and we can't write much more about it without revealing the answer to last week's quiz, so let's get right to it. The quiz was part vocabulary, part capitalization. We asked you to fill in the blank in this sentence: "They’re planning a party on the _______ to mark the longest day of the year." First, you had to recognize that the event marking the start of both summer and winter is a solstice, not an equinox, which marks the start of spring and fall....
Happy Friday...the 13th. Most of you got the right answer on last week's quiz. Just as you spell out one through nine and use numerals for 10 and higher, you do the same for ordinals. So this month we have Friday the 13th, and next month we'll have July Fourth. You got a peek at our Google Docs extension last week, and this week we're excited to share another great review: "Style Guide Checker is a great product that provides a second set of eyes to catch things that often go overlooked. Not...