“I revised the verb to maintain the past tense,” Brad explained.
All data was verified by fact checkers.
Note that “data,” from the Latin datum, can be treated as either
singular or plural. However, in the usage above, as in most scientific and
research usage, the word data is used as a collective noun referring to a
body of work, and as such is properly treated as singular.
2. Here are answers to three key questions.
Brad said, “I should have caught this earlier, but I didn’t. This sentence
should be a separate paragraph.”
3. I collected over five hundred separate facts from various data sources.
“I decided to remove the reference to myself from the sentence,” Brad
said. “The sentence became passive in construction, but I decided that it
was more important to highlight the impressive number of facts rather
than the fact that it was I who collected them.”
Over five hundred separate facts from various data sources were
collected.
4. Georgia is a better choice because of my overall analysis; specifically,
the very low exposure in areas including weather, transport and available
labor make it more attractive.
“It occurred to me that this sentence was unclear. I decided to simplify
it. I also decided that I needed to rework it in order to clarify what
kinds of exposure I was talking about. I replaced the words very and areas
because they’re weak. I corrected the punctuation by adding a comma
before the word and, and changed transport to transportation. I ended
up reworking the entire sentence. The amazing part to me was that I
didn’t catch these errors until I focused on the grammar, punctuation,
and word usage.”