TPS News

Corrected sentence:
“Something in the way the instructor stared at the rostrum told the class that he was bringing bad news; the testing obviously hadn’t gone well.”

These two sentences contain three punctuation errors. Placing a comma after “rostrum” is a case of a writer feeling a pause in his thinking and his writing, which usually indicates a change of direction or a parenthetical phrase (such as this one). In fact, there was no change of direction and no need for the comma. The period after “news” is incorrect, because the second sentence is closely related to the first one. A semicolon is the correct punctuation mark. The obvious clue to this error was the uncapitalized “the” at the beginning of the second sentence. Finally, the second declarative sentence is missing a period at the end. Reading the sentences is much easier when they are correctly punctuated.
這兩個句子包含三個標點符號錯誤。在 “rostrum” 後加逗號是因為作者覺得思慮或寫作產生停頓，通常表示句子方向改變，或接了在括號內的片語（就像這句）。但實際上，句子方向並沒有改變，也不需要逗號。“News” 後也不需要句號，因為第二句和第一句密切相關；分號才是正確的標點，第二句句首沒有大寫的 “the” 是很明顯的線索。最後，第二個陳述句結尾顯然少了句號。句子的標點正確，讀起來就容易多了。