Last time, I wrote about common misuses of commas. Not long after that, I found this error on an AC Transit bus:
Here’s the message I got from this sign: “Federal law requires that these seats be made available to persons with disabilities. Seniors.”
While the comma after “disabilities” is assumed to separate “persons with disabilities” and “seniors” to prevent the sentence from reading that the “law requires that these seats be made available to persons with disabilities and seniors,” it is still used incorrectly.
Rather, the sentence should read like this: “Federal law requires that these seats be made available to persons with disabilities and to seniors.”
The conjunction following the comma implies that a new independent clause will follow, so discarding the comma and simply adding the word “to” would help the commuters make sense of the sign.
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Is the sign large enough to have the word “to” added in the fourth line?
That is the great thing about signs. Instead of sacrificing understanding, you can shrink the font size or increase the size of the sign, so that “to” will fit.