question on grammar

Beth Young byoung at MAIL.UCF.EDU
Fri Oct 2 12:50:44 UTC 2009


Can you reword the sentence altogether?  For example, "Any report(s)
should be . . . "  or "All reports are . . . "  It's hard to know
specifically what to recommend without seeing more of the passage.  If
you cannot revise the sentence, I prefer "report(s) are," but that's
preference, not rule, and my preference would be influenced by the rest
of the document and the overall rhetorical situation.

Beth

> In a manual the author originally wrote "The report is...". ┬ Then it
turned out that there might be more than one report, so it was changed
to "The report(s) are..."
>
> Question: ┬ should that be "report(s) is" or "report(s) are"?

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