Answer to todays Grammar Challenge on the sentence, Swinging open the door, Jack discovered an enormous amount of neatly stacked cans of soup, beans, and miscellaneous vegetables. ***** This was another tricky one, I guess. I expected it to be more obvious. The only problem here is the questionable use of the word AMOUNT in referring to a countable number of cans. Generally, AMOUNT is reserved for non-count nouns: an amount of gasoline, the amount of poverty, the amount of taxation. NUMBER is used for count nouns: number of cars, number of poor people, number of new taxes. No hyphen is needed between NEATLY and STACKED. It is not a compound adjective, but an adverb modifying a discreet adjective. I plan to write a blog post in the near future to explain this concept. It seems to be an area of confusion. The serial comma (a.k.a., Oxford comma) after BEANS is in no sense incorrect. It is optional.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 21:11:21 +0000