Gluten Allergy
Spotted: 10/19/2016
Creator: Tank.Sinatra
I thought this meme was a sad (but funny) commentary on bubble-wrap parenting. But true to form, it has several problems.
I’m seeing a lot of people mix up whose and who’s lately. I don’t know whether this is a relatively new thing, or if I’m just paying more attention. Whose is a pronoun/determiner, while who’s is a contraction of who and is. If you’re ever not sure which form to use, try using who is in the sentence and see whether it works or not:
Guess who is son has a made-up gluten allergy?
Nope. That doesn’t work. It’s got to be whose.
Naturally, there are other problems here as well. The way this meme is written, made-up is a compound adjective that comes before a noun, so it needs to be hyphenated. Check out this resource if you’re not sure what that means. Note the hyphen is only required before a noun, so you need it for a made-up allergy but not if you say she made up a gluten allergy. (In the second example, made up is a phrasal verb.)
The last issue here is the use of a question mark and exclamation mark together. While this is often done in informal writing, it’s not appropriate for more formal prose. The rule is that you should never close a sentence with more than one sentence-ending punctuation mark.
Some might suggest that this isn’t a hard and fast rule….
(See what I did there? While it might appear as if I ended a sentence with four periods, which are sentence-ending punctuation marks, what I really did was put in an ellipses and then a single period. So the rule still stands.)
There’s actually a punctuation mark that combines the question mark and the exclamation point. It’s called the interrobang. Isn’t it awesome‽ Not a lot of people have ever heard of this mark, but feel free to use it in this context if you have a hankering.
Here’s a corrected version of this meme:
