Dear English Plus:

Acting on behalf of my father’s law firm ([firm named here]), I was looking for some grammar authorities on adjectives modifying nouns in a series. Opposing counsel has tried to argue that only the first noun is understood to be modified by the adjective, a position which I, as a writer and sometime tutor and teacher, found absurd when my father asked me about it.

I found this page on a Google search:

https://englishplus.com/news/news1201.htm

and quoted the following passage to my Dad in an e-mail:

“In a series of nouns in English, if there is an article or adjective before the first item only, the article or adjective is understood to be modifying all the nouns in the series.”

He wants to cite your website in his legal brief (or whatever the document’s proper name is…I’m no lawyer) responding to the opposing counsel, and he’s wondering how to do that. I know of some rules for citing websites in research, but before I looked into those I thought I’d try to contact you: specifically, to see if you’re willing to have your work cited in this fashion, and to give your name(s) for proper recognition, etc.

Thanks for your grammatical help — even if you don’t want to be cited, I can tell you you’re in good company with Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, Svartvik, and the American Heritage Book of English Usage — and for running such an informative site. Cheers.

Dear Mr. B___:

You are welcome to cite the page if you need to.

May all your anguish be vaquished.