Quite a few times at work when checking questionnaires I've come across something like this:

Thinking about the crisps you eat. How often do you buy each of the following brands?

Now, quite often they will say in another question:

Now please think about the crisps you eat. How often do you buy each of the following brands?

That first sentence: Thinking about the crisps you eat. sounds to me as if it isn't a sentence. But Word doesn't flag it up in its grammar checker, so that and the other example I gave is probably why people do it quite a bit.

My question is, why isn't it a sentence? Or why is it a sentence and doesn't sounds like one. I don't know enough english to know the answer to that one. Ultimately, it doesn't matter because your eyes tend to skim over it if you're an interviewer reading it out, or a respondent filling in a questionnaire. But it's annoying me.

There is a long story connected with this but I'll cut off all the reasons why and go straight to the question. We need a publicity stunt we can do in the town (it's only a little market town I live in) that will get new members for Rotaract (so we're trying to attract 18-30 year olds) and be quite silly.

There have been various ideas and tales of what we used to do back in the good old days but my dad pointed out that at uni RAG tended to do that sort of thing. Be ridiculous, I mean (and raise money for charity, which is also good). So, does anyone reading this have any RAG stunts they remember that could be modified for our use?

I know we used to do gnoming (it took me a while to remember what it was called), which I think involved cling film, flour, water and water pistols. Which probably wouldn't go down too well with the town council. There were also deliveries (flowers, beer) which I can't see a way of using.

And now I'm off to watch last night's Bill. Which I'm only really watching for Gina Gold these days.

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