Answers to last week’s quiz
I know you have been waiting on the edge of your chair all week to find out how you did on the quiz. Let’s take a look at the answers.
- completely revised report (no hyphen because completely is an adverb)
- high-income individuals (high and income cannot separately describe the individuals, so they must be connected by a hyphen to become a unit modifier that can describe the individuals)
- scarcely noticeable difference (no hyphen because scarcely is an adverb, modifying noticeable)
- long-term loan (unit modifier)
- late, poorly written report (late is not part of the official order of adjectives, so we need a comma)
- early-bird special (unit modifier)
- critical care initiative (no hyphen, assuming an audience familiar with the compound noun critical care)
- two long interim reports (no hyphens or commas needed because the adjectives are in the official order of adjectives)
- two long-range plans (unit modifier)
- completely revised proofs (no hyphen because completely is an adverb)
- complete income record (no hyphens or commas because both words can describe the record separately, and the order is correct)
- the baseball player’s home run record (baseball player and home run are compound nouns that do not need to be hyphenated for the readers to recognize them as units-like high school dance)
- long-range budget projections (unit modifier followed by a noun identifying what kind of projections these are)
- utterly ridiculous claim (utterly is an adverb modifying the adjective ridiculous, and therefore cannot be hyphenated)
- three-year-old children (Two hyphens, if we mean the children were three years old. However, if there were three children, each a year old, it would be three year-old children.)
- high earning potential (open, because earning potential is a compound noun, and high is modifying that compound)
- false-positive result (It is not a false result, and it is not a positive result. Because these two adjectives cannot describe the result separately, they must be joined into-you guessed it! A unit modifier.)
- one-inch margin (unit modifier)
- fully armed artillery recovery service vehicle (Most military terms are not hyphenated. And before long, descriptions like this one grow up to become acronyms.)
How’d you do? I hope with the help of last week’s article you breezed through this with at least 90% correct-and a lot less stress than so many of us had with those pop quizzes in high school. Any questions, please write in. I love to hear from my supremely intelligent, highly motivated, adoring readers.
About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Essentials of Access 2000" and "Editing with MS Word 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing. You can reach Jennie at Jenruby@aol.com