A Nice example of Less and Few

There was far less interrupting, angry cross-talk and fewer personal attacks than in the presidential debate.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/08/921323806/4-takeaways-from-the-mike-pence-kamala-harris-vice-presidential-debate

From an NPR summary of the vice presidential debate.

• Note that “cross-talk,” the word that goes with “less” is singular.
• And the word that “fewer” refers to, “attacks,” is plural.

That’s how you do it, folks.

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The document is also called a curriculum vitae.

“Resume” means to re-start something, to pick up where you left off. “Résumé” means something like a summary of your work history and skills.

To get that accented e, hold down the Alt key while you type 0233 on the numeric keypad, then release the Alt key. It’ll class up your cover letter if you spell it “résumé.”

Sorry, I don’t happen to know how to make an e with an acute accent on a Mac, but you can look it up.

Some things can be both singular and plural. My brain is singular, but my brains are inside my skull. Except for number, the terms are pretty much interchangeable.

Here’s an unrelated of something being plural, but we treat it as singular.

From the ages and sizes of animals, archaeologists can deduce the populations of herds in terms of age and sex ratios, all of which reveals how herding differed from hunting.

https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene

Okay, we have lots of plurals here: ages and sizes, archaeologists, populations, herds, age and sex ratios. But we have a singular verb, reveals! Why? Because they got combined into a single group, all.

American English does this a lot. “Team” is singular, and other collective nouns. The British don’t. (Hmm. Here I have an apparently singular word, “British,” but it’s a plural.) I feel sorry for people who have to learn English.

Sorry, I don’t have a good picture to go with this lesson. How do you picture something that’s simultaneously singular and plural?

All that said, I found a goof in the same article:

The increasingly sophisticated use and analysis of ancient DNA now allows researchers to track the development and distribution of domesticated animals and crops in great detail.

In this case we have a compound subject, which counts as a plural, even if the elements of the compound are singular. So they should have a plural verb, “allow,” not “allows.” Harrumpf.

Being concise is one of my five gold rules about good tech writing. (You can request an essay about those five rules over on the right.) Redundancy, needless repetition, is the opposite of conciseness. Here’s a comic about it. I’d hire her!

The only place for redundancy is poetry.

I mentioned this once before, a good while back. You can use “you” as a generic term for people in general. Here’s an example:

Just so you know…