Some Blog Site

This page intentionally left blank.

That statement bothers me. The page was blank, before you put that statement on it. But now it is no longer blank, so you can’t have left it blank, because you printed words on it, so it’s not blank anymore, etc.

Here are my suggestions – things you could print on the page – for improving this fiasco:

• This is the only sentence on this page.
• This page was supposed to be blank, but we had to print this line.
• There is no meaningful content on this page.
• We felt like wasting paper, and this page is a result of that.
• Federal regulations require that there be no blank pages in any document.
• Nothing to see here; please turn to the next page.

To really improve it, how about this:

The following page is intentionally left blank.

And then you can have a truly blank page on the next page. Perfect!

Also, the statement really should have an “is” in there.

This page is intentionally blank.

That makes it a complete sentence.

“This page intentionally left blank” implies that the page was with blank, but then it left…on purpose too. They were together for such a long time. Now blank is lonely. Without the verb “is”, the only other word that could be a verb is “left”. If it is written as a sentence, then “left” must be the verb.

Or maybe blank is really a location. The page was there, at blank, but then it left, so it is no longer there. Got out of blank…left there in a hurry. I would expect that “blank” would then be a proper noun – the name of the place – so it should be “Blank”.

Last thought on this conundrum, this one regarding if you have both “is” and “left” together: maybe left is a direction.

This page is intentionally left blank.

All you need to do is find the page that is intentionally right blank and then you’ll have a matching pair.