TPS News

Corrected sentence:
The librarians’ policy—they established it two years ago in ’10—forbids removal of the 16th-century Dutch manuscript; the academic researcher was red-faced mad about it.

These two sentences contain three punctuation errors. The first occurs in the second word—librarians’. The apostrophe—to show possession—should come after the final letter, s, because more than one librarian helped set the policy. (Note the plural pronoun “they” in the subsequent phrase.) The second error is the lack of a comma before 10. When a year is shortened to two digits—in this case, ’10 from 2010—a comma is required to indicate the missing numbers. (Otherwise there is nothing to indicate it is a year; the policy could have been created in Room 10.) The third error is the absence of a hyphen in the compound modifier “red-faced.” These little punctuation marks dispel confusion and add to the readability of the text.
這兩個句子共有三處標點符號錯誤。第一個錯誤出現在第二個字「librarians’」，所有格符號應該加在最後一個 s 後面，因為訂立規範的管理員不只一個人（可從接下來複數代名詞「they」看出）。第二個錯誤是數字「10」前面少了一撇，以縮寫代表年代時，就必須用一撇代表省略的數字，例如本句以「’10」代表 2010 年，否則會讓人看不出指的是年分，或許會誤以為這份規範是在「10」號室制定的。第三個錯誤則是複合修飾詞「red-faced」少了連字號。這幾個小小的標點符號有助釐清語意，讓句子更容易閱讀。