loopy3505
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Scopist and Proofreader
Posts: 17
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Post by loopy3505 on May 18, 2014 23:30:48 GMT
I posted this on another forum and got a wealth of answers, so I thought I'd check here as well.
He's talking about eight working hours. Here's the sentence:
They're always eight hours on the nose, not 8:01 or 7:59, but eight hours exactly.
The colon isn't right because it suggests time: 8 o'clock.
A decimal point isn't correct either because it's not a percentage but one minute over eight hours or one minute less than eight hours.
Any suggestions?
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Post by Debi A on May 19, 2014 4:12:31 GMT
I think the colon is perfectly correct. If you set a stopwatch to alarm in 90 minutes, it will start at 1:30 and count down to 0. If a runner runs a race in 2:32, it doesn't mean he finished at 2:32 in the afternoon or morning, it means he finished in 2 hours and 32 minutes. All the colon does is separate the hours from the minutes (or the seconds -- the clock on my computer reads 00:12:16 right now because I have it set to show seconds as well as minutes).
The only thing I'd do differently in your sentence is change "eight hours exactly" to "8 hours exactly," just to match with the other numbers.
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loopy3505
Just Joined
Scopist and Proofreader
Posts: 17
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Post by loopy3505 on May 19, 2014 15:19:20 GMT
Debi, thank you for your logical explanation.
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