We've had our wrists slapped by a reader from New Zealand for sloppy sentence construction in a news story (23 November 2007, page 4). She sends her critique by hand-written airmail ('my computer is defunct, as is – almost – its eighty-nine-year-old Quaker owner'). Eye looked at the offending passage and sees our reader's point. It was a story on a UN call to halt executions. The heading was fine, but the first paragraph began: 'The call last week for a global moratorium on executions by the UN General Assembly's Third Committee...'

Labels: syntax, UN