The title of this post is definitely a question. But today, as I was reading about the so-called royal across the pond and her cancer diagnosis, I came across a misplaced question mark. And this happens all the time. I find it maddening.
This is a really good article, though, despite its terrible grammar mistake.
Anyway, here is the horror in question:
The question of what happened to Catherine, Princess of Wales turned out to be, in the end, a question of what you think you are owed by the British royals?
Let’s leave aside the lack of a necessary comma after the clause “Princess of Wales” and the repetition of the word “question” and look at the question mark at the end. This is not a question. It’s a statement about a question. Just because you’re talking about a question doesn’t mean you put a question mark at the end.
So, an otherwise lovely article defending the privacy of a public figure has turned into a nightmare. In my opinion, anyway. And seeing this mistake made me pay more attention to the rest of the article, in a bad way.
The author continued to refuse to put a comma after Catherine’s title, “Princess of Wales,” which was unnerving. And as for major goofs, the article didn’t disappoint. The final paragraph contained this monstrosity:
And anyway, when I watched Catherine, Princess of Wales — a woman who had to interrupt her cancer treatments and her family tending to get her hair done and put on makeup and prove to the world that she was not dead, not a body double, not leaving her husband, not growing out a bad haircut, just sick — when I watched her give us her bad news, what I thought wasn’t that she should have told us sooner.
Family-tending should have been hyphenated there, of course, for clarity. But that’s not the only problem.
When you use two dashes to insert a clause, what comes before and after those dashes has to be a complete and sensical sentence. In this case, the sentence interrupted by the clause is this:
And anyway, when I watched Catherine, Princess of Wales when I watched her give us her bad news, what I thought wasn’t that she should have told us sooner.
And look! Still no comma after “Princess of Wales!”
I wish the “royal” well, of course.