Dare I Try Their Services?

In my composition classes, I talk with my students about professional presentation: how they present themselves on the page will cause the reader to perceive them in a certain way. If their essays don't follow the conventional format or are chock full of sentence-level errors, the writers lose credibility with the reader.

I wish someone would talk with advertisers about this issue. I can't recall where I saw this advertisement recently--it may have been in Facebook. Read carefully and guess what went wrong:

Over Thirty Singles: It's not hard to meet people, it's hard to meet the right type. Our screening process will works. Let us find you someone special.

Ads like this one make me cringe. I don't even have to be reading them; the errors act like magnets, drawing my eyes to the text despite my best efforts to avoid the ads. Were you able to spot the errors?

First, the reader must struggle to decide whether Over Thirty Singles is a boast that more than 30 single people are available for dating through this service or whether the ad is attempting to gain the attention of an audience whose age is higher than 30. Since having more than 30 people available for dating isn't much of a boast, I'm going to guess that the company means the latter, in which case a hyphen is needed to show that Over-Thirty is a compound adjective that describes Singles. Adding the hyphen--Over-Thirty Singles--reduces the confusion.

Second, the comma splice in the first sentence is troubling. I know that advertisers often play hard-and-fast with punctuation rules since space is money in the industry, but honestly, what would it have hurt to convert the improper comma to a proper semicolon? A comma splice occurs when a comma is improperly used to join two complete ideas that could stand alone as sentences. In this case, the ideas on each side of the comma could stand alone: "It's not hard to meet people" and "It's hard to meet the right type." But commas don't complete ideas. To fix the comma splice, a period could be used to make two complete sentences, a comma with a conjunction could be used ("It's not hard to meet people, but it's hard to meet the right type"), or a semi-colon could be used ("It's not hard to meet people; it's hard to meet the right type"). I advocate for a semi-colon in this instance, since semi-colons are used to join two complete ideas that are related--and these two sentences are related. So people, why can't the advertiser just replace the comma with a semi-colon?

Finally, the penultimate sentence states "Our screening process will works," clearly adding an s unnecessarily to work. Which leads the reader to wonder whether the screening process truly will work, given the fact that the advertiser's error-screening process apparently doesn't.

Have you come across any ads recently that make you cringe? Please share them!