Expert: Dan Smith - 7/9/2004

Question
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Followup To
Question -
Mr. Smith,
Please look at the following sentences and tell me if they are grammatically correct:
1. Other means of communication are available.
2. Rochester, NY; this facility lost telephone service, due to a failed Promina trunk.
3. An entry (item) of a form:
Impact: Critical, loss of telephone service
         or
       Critical; loss of telephone service
Answer -
1. Correct
Follow-up question (FQ): If I had said communications instead of communication, would the sentence be still correct?
Why 'are' is more appropriate than 'is' after communication?

2. This facility in Rochester, New York, lost telephone service due to a failed Promina trunk. (I don't understand why you would have put the city at the beginning instead of just in the sentence. If you do that, a colon would be more correct. Neither is great. The sentence is preferred. The comma before "due" just confuses the sentence.)
FQ: the reason for starting out with city name is simply the convention in the office (it is adding variables to the preformatted constants)! Would you rather use colon after New York? You said, "the sentence is preferred." I am not sure what you meant by that.

3. I take it the last is an answer to a question. Use the first alternative with the comma. A semicolon is not needed.

Hope this helps.
Yes, your answers certainly help. Also, I can prevent unnecessary squabbles (trivial)in the office. Once again, thanks a bunch.

Answer
1. the subject of the sentence is "means," not "communication." "Means" is plural, and that is the noun with which the verb must agree. Grammatically, both "communications" and "communications" are correct. But "communication" usually refers to the act of communicating something, whereas traditionally "communications" refers either to several acts of communicating or to the technology use to communicate. Sometimes that distinction can seem a bit blurry, so don't worry about it too much. In this sentence you wanted "communication" because you are talking about the act of communicating, and "means" refers to the technology used to accomplish it. Another way to think of this is that a degree in "communication" usually refers to someone who studies how people interact with each other through communication. Someone with a degree in "communications" usually refers to someone who has a degree in the technology of communication. Most universities have Colleges of Communication rather than Colleges of Communications.

2. I assume from what you are saying that this is an internal report of recent events in a company and you have a list of such events by city or facility name. In that case, you can use this construction.

Rochester, NY: Lost telephone service due to a failed Promina trunk.

This is not how you would write it in an explanatory paragraph, but in such a list it's OK. There is no circumstance in which a semicolon would be correct in this context. Nor should you use a comma to separate connecting or qualifying phrases that begin with "because," "due to," or similar operators.