ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the first fully automated fortune cookie machine.

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In Terminator 6, it allies with Skynet to eliminate all life on Earth.

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

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Called the Fortune III, Yong Lee in 1980 created the first fully automated fortune cookie machine.

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And here are the potential answers...

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The underlined portion is having a tough time connecting its modifiers with the things

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they’re trying to describe.

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The phrase “Called the Fortune III” is placed directly before the noun Yong Lee.

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This makes it sound like Mr. Lee was also called the Fortune III, when this was actually

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the name of his amazing fortune cookie machine.

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Choice (D) doesn’t make the cut either. Here, the phrase “in 1980” separates the

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cookie machine from the phrase that’s trying to tell us its name.

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To avoid confusion, the modifier has to be as close as possible to the item it’s trying to modify.

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Option (B) does succeed in making some of its modifiers clear.

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Ultimately, though, (B) can be eliminated because the sentence is a comma splice.

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The clauses...

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“Yong Lee, in 1980, created the first fully automated fortune cookie machine”...

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and...

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“it was called the Fortune III”...

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are both independent.

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They each have a subject and verb, and can stand on their own as a complete sentence.

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If we wanted to squish them together into one sentence, we’d have to connect them with a semicolon.

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Choice (C) does it all right. The phrase "called the Fortune III" is placed directly after

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"fortune cookie machine," and there’s no comma splice to be seen.

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(C) is the correct answer.

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