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Stop the Presses
It's deadline night at the Gazette, and Nelson has the editor's chair. Every blank wants a different kind of noun: a group word, a named place, an idea you can't photograph, a plural that breaks the rule. Fill them all and the front page runs.
Nelson's reading your front page. Save it, and the platypus will recycle every weak noun you cut.
Your story is ready. Here is what Nelson read.
Tap or hover over any blue word to see what kind of word you chose.
The Grammaropolis Gazette needed a guest editor for one night, and Nelson took the chair like he had built it.
A reporter rushed in. "Huge story. A gathered downtown." Nelson frowned at her draft. "You wrote 'a large group of angry people.' Four words doing one noun's job. You already had the word."
"Where downtown?" he asked. She checked her notes. "." Nelson wrote it with a capital letter and circled it twice. "Name the place. Readers live there."
"And the mood?" Nelson asked. She gave him one word for it: . Nelson nodded. "Nobody can photograph that one, so the noun has to carry it."
The photo desk sent up a shot of a . "Two words welded into one," Nelson said. "That is a whole picture in a single noun."
Down the hall, the platypus chewed through a stack of and a half-eaten . Nelson didn't look.
"How many showed up?" "One at first," said the reporter, "then two ." Nelson circled the second one. "That plural breaks the rule. Print it anyway."
"Whose statement leads?" She flipped a page. "The ." Nelson tapped the apostrophe. "It belongs to somebody. Say so."
By deadline he had cut every weak and stamped a strong in its place. "A strong noun needs no bodyguard."
The byline went to , who had filed the whole thing from a phone.
The front page ran a single word over a photo of a : . It said everything.
Nelson capped his pen, filed the , and killed the . "Print it. Next!"
This story has been filled in before.