On March 29th The Times published a weekend pull-out entitled “How to improve your Grammar and punctuation.” This refers the reader to timestutorials.co.uk. One page contains the question:
“Decide whether the following sentence uses the word effect correctly or not.”
How can a sentence use a word, whether correctly or not?
How can a slovenly written sentence such as this one help anyone?
Would it have been difficult to write something along the lines of:
Decide whether the word effect is used correctly in the following sentence.
Shouldn’t people who set out to help others with their English set a better example?