Thursday, 26 September 2013

Sorts of information...are

The Straits Times (Candy Crushed in SundayLife!) - 15 September 2013
The highlighted verb is wrong. The culprit that likely caused the error is the mass noun information. Being right next to the verb, it was probably mistaken as the subject of the sentence.

The correct verb is are:

(1) With technology, all sorts of information are available at my fingertips.

The subject of the sentence is the phrase all sorts of information. The head noun sorts is plural, so a plural verb is needed.

Mistakes like this are so common that if you google the string "sorts of information is", you will get a good many pages of results with exact matches. The two listings below were taken from the first results page:

Google search of "sorts of information is"