real world grammer examples

Advertising is a curious thing. Things are not always as they seem. The people that create ads and such, know what sells and know how to get the attention of their target audience. However, now-a-days grammer skills are becomming less and less prevelent, so some mistakes might be purposeful, others might, unfourtunately, be a result of grammatical ignorance. I cannot presume to know to which cause we owe these examples, however, I shall give it my best shot.

The Jack and Coke ad is using as it's tag line, the reliability of the product due to its longevity. By placing a comma instead of the correct semicolon after "Wiskey" the author can imply (without actually lying) that the Jack and Coke has been brewed since 1866, instead of the wiskey being the brewed liquid for ages. Thereby the advertisement is able to mislead the audience into trusting a product that may be reletively new in itself.

The Cabella's advertisement contains, I think, too many commas in the sentence about the prices being good only at the Lehi, Utah location. The author might have felt that the comma was needed after "Utah" because he wanted to separate the location from the description "retail" store. However, a semicolon would have been better or nothing at all.

In the training table example, the author places a comma between the adjectives crisp and hot, while both of them are discribing the bacon. I think this probably stems from the rule that a comma should be placed between words in a list, however the list in this case, is the ingredients of the sandwich and not the way the bacon is cooked.

I think in the next example the author uses a semicolon after "Make Money from Home" because she feels that "trading foreign currancy" further explains the first part. This would be correct except that when using a semicolon, it should separate two parts of a sentence that could otherwise stand alone. This is not the case in this example, seeing as how on both sides of the semicolon the statements are fragments.

The Marie Calandars advertisement is missing the last comma that should be placed after delicious. This also probably stems from the rule that in a list there is not always a comma between the next to last word and the "and" before the last word. However in this list, the adjectives are describing their success as delicious as well as sweet and creamy, but the way it is written it is describing their delicious success as only sweet and creamy.

Most of these advertisement errors would go unnoticed unless pointed out. I think that is because most people don't know all the rules for grammer, and most importantly they don't know all the exeptions to the rules. I think that the authors were trying to write correctly and were using rules that they learned in school, however, in this wonderful language we call English, there are always exceptions to the rules and those are as important to remember as the rule itself.