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Trying to write a report for my work, I know that if I reconstructed this sentence it would be "were", but with the way it is written now, which way would be right?

  1. There was a total of 652 responses in the box.

OR

  1. There were a total of 652 responses in the box.
F.E.
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Hannah Keziah Mills
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    Why do you think only one of those would be “right”? – tchrist Mar 23 '15 at 18:30
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    Possible duplicate of http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5588/is-a-total-of-10-payments-singular-or-plural or http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5378/a-number-of-questions-has-been-or-have-been-asked – Othya Mar 23 '15 at 18:37

1 Answers1

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There was a total of 652 responses in the box.

This is correct, because a "total" is a singular entity, not a plural one. Your second example would be correct as so:

There were 652 responses in the box (in total).

aaa90210
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