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Proofreading DOES help

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  • #46
    Quoth MoonCat View Post
    He is missing articles like "the" where they should be ("Estate has"), and using them where they shouldn't be ("finished the breakfast"). And "boys managed to beg their mother" is a clunky, awkward phrase, and also missing "the" before boys. "A sightseeing of the house", eh, I suppose you could argue that it's a "creative" use of the word "sightseeing", but it would sound much better as "tour of the house."
    Actually, depending on where he learned English, some of that is quite correct. The phrase "finished the breakfast", in particular, reminds me of Hiberno-English (Irish English), and "boys managed to beg their mother" makes some sense in that syntactical context. Irish, which has no "a" but has "the", creates a dialect of English where "the" is used much more often as a distinguishing article, in places it feels wrong in other dialects. Granted, my experience is limited to two semesters of taking Irish, so I only have half an idea of what I'm talking about.

    Of course, analyzing two phrases of it doesn't change that it's bad writing overall.
    It's little things that make the difference between 'enjoyable', 'tolerable', and 'gimme a spoon, I'm digging an escape tunnel'.

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