What It Is Is ...

 

What it is is a travesty.

That’s a bad sentence. No question. Most editors would recast it as simply “It is a travesty” and not give it another thought. But what if it was in a quotation? Or what if, for some reason, the editor wasn’t at liberty to revise with such a heavy hand?

How would you deal with “is is”?

It’s a real conundrum: “Sentences with this ungainly construction seem much on the rise, although samples can be found in older sources,” notes Garner’s Modern American Usage.

Here's everything you need to know about when "is is" is grammatical and how to punctuate it.

Tags: COMMA IN IS IS, GRAMMAR, IS IS, REDUPLICATIVE COPULA

This entry was posted on Monday, April 8th, 2019 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.