Gamer Girl here, I'm Minion Pokerty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

This week we'll talk about using the word drop to mean release, how to pronounce the

word often, or is it often, and I have the winning poem from the Aces National Grammar

Day poetry contest.

But first I have a correction to last week's episode about parallelism.

I said you can use a single article before a list of nouns like this.

We gave Ashley an iPhone, Ringlight, and Instagram account.

But you actually shouldn't use just a single article in a sentence like that because

some of the items take A and others take An.

It's An iPhone and An Instagram account, but A Ringlight.

You can only have one article applied to the whole list when they would all take the

same article.

You could write about a phone, Ringlight, and TikTok account because all the nouns take

A or you could write about An iPhone, external monitor, and Instagram account because all

the nouns take An.

But if you're mixing and matching, you have to put the article in front of each noun.

So it would be, we gave Ashley an iPhone, a Ringlight, and An Instagram account.

I'm updating the audio in the original episode too, and thanks to Dorothy for calling this

to my attention.

I appreciate it.

...