Commentary about complex sentences

Complex sentences with one or more subordinate clauses are sometimes confusing  and often, the best approach is to simplify the sentence.  This is according to a July 23, 2013 post from The New York Times at the following link:
http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/favorite-grammar-gaffes-danglers/

Lengthy sentences distract the reader from understanding the content.
The following is an example of a complex sentence which I believe would be more effective if it were simplified:

Whatever you think becomes plausible,  like swimming across the ocean, like inventing another appliance, like helping all special needs people, like writing a book, like creating a new recipe, like thanking the teacher and like "having a nice day," even though everybody says that so it does not mean much. 

My comment about having a nice day should be a separate sentence.

A superstition and a folf belief

Rules Project

I don't understand why  one of my daughter's teachers mentioned to her to use  whose  only to refer to people.    I thought  whose  refers to people as well as animals and things.  So I researched this.   According to     http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog
whose is the possessive of who and which.   Whose can mean of whom or of which.   Also according to the aforementioned website, Fowler's Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd  ed.) by R. W.  Birchfield,   Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage and the Oxford English Dictionary all concur that limiting the usage of whose to refer to people is "superstition" and a  "folk belief."

Plan Ahead

     In the  USA Weekend insert of the Schenectady Daily Gazette, July 21st, 2013 page four, there was a headline entitled "Plan Ahead."   Although "plan ahead" is technically grammatical, it is an expression that bothers me because it is redundant.  I believe redundancy leads to lower quality writing.  How else do you plan if you do not plan ahead?   This is just my little pet peeve that I forgot to mention at the beginning of this course.  Oh well.

A Trip

 The following was posted on an Internet message board by  EnglishTeacher702:  "I am looking forward  to my husband and I's first trip."  So June Casagrande,  a journalist, said that  even though it is difficult  to verify whether EnglishTeacher702 is truly an English teacher,  she most likely is.  "Most English teachers know very little about grammar"  Casagrande wrote in her July 14th 2012 Albany Times Union article entitled "World Wide Web of Grammar Errors."   Casagrande said she could not find a grammar rule about  when two or more people possess something jointly and a pronoun substitutes one of the names.  However, I found information at the following website:
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/PossessivesandAttributives.html?old=PossessivesandAttributives01.html

According to the aforementioned website,  EnglishTeacher702 should have written "I am looking forward to my husband's and my first trip."

I could not remember

Rules Project

I could not remember the rule about whether to place the period inside or outside the parenthesis, so I found the answer at the following website:
     http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/parens.asp  

According to this website, the period goes outside the parenthesis when the information within parenthesis is adding detail.  The example from the website was "I expect five hundred dollars ($500).

Periods are supposed to be inside parenthesis only if the entire sentence is inside parenthesis. An example would be the following:   (Eat lots of fruit and you will have nice skin.)

The Colorectal Surgeon

"We praise the colorectal surgeon slaving  away in the heart of darkness, working where the sun don't shine." That was the lyric that caught my attention in the following you tube video:
http://biggeekdad.com/2013/06/the-colorectal-surgeon-song/#.Uc8-2GggSF8.email

However, if "don't" were replaced with "doesn't" then the song probably wouldn't flow as well.  No pun intended when I say "flow."

Jessica Simpson

Rules Project



According to     http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/between-you-and-me.aspx
Jessica Simpson's song title "Between You and I"  is grammatically incorrect.   The title should be "Between You and Me"  because  between is a preposition. Pronouns following prepositions in a prepositional phrase are always object pronouns according to grammar girl.  Grammar girl says that Jessica Simpson might have done a service to the world  if people remember that her song title is grammatically incorrect.

The grammatical yoga teacher

My sister  Anne  instructs  aspiring yoga teachers and she told me that one of her students corrected her grammar.     The student advised  her not to tell the class to "lay down" because lay is only used for things and lie is  used for people.    I told my sister to inform her student that the technical reason to select lie when telling the class to lie on their mats is that  lie is an intransitive verb and lay is a transitive verb.  Transitive verbs always need a direct object.   Intransitive verbs do not. .

Affect and Effect

I love reading June Casagrande's newspaper column and  I thought her explanation about affect and effect was terrific.    Effect is almost always a noun and affect is almost always a verb, Casagrande wrote in her article entitled  "A kinda corny trick for remembering affect vs.  effect."    The  expression  "side effect"   is a noun, according to Casagrande and the e in side prompts her to write effect which begins with an e. 
This "corny trick" definitely works for me!

Curb appeal baby

I  quickly identified   "curb appeal, baby" as a  fragment because of the fragments exercise from the last unit.    This fragment came from an article entitled "Some Things on Her Mind" by Kristi Barlette in the June 30th 2013  Albany Times Union  Unwind section page two.  The sentence was : "If your house is for sale, mow the lawn (or hire someone to do it).  Curb appeal, baby."     

Also according to Barlette, your and you're are the most incorrectly used words on Facebook.

Advantages of Parallelism

I just read about advantages of parallelism in the book   The New Oxford Guide to Writing by Thomas S. Kane  and so I wanted to share the information especially because our class recently completed an assignment about parallelism.  According to Kane, parallel sentences are "rhythmic ."   When several verbs refer to one subject the focus is on the  action of the subject.   An  example written by Ralph Roeder, an American historian would be, "As the danger grew near, they would wheel about, toss their heads into the air and dive."  Additionally, according to Kane, parallelism facilitates understanding and reinforces meaning by presenting relationships between words.   For example  Bernard Shaw wrote,  "Joan of Arc, a village girl from Vosges, was born about 1412, burnt for heresy, witchcraft and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in  1456, designated venerable in 1904; declared Blessed n 1908; and finally canonized in 1920." 

Conundrum

Rules Project
"None of us is wealthy" is the sentence that I read in the "Annie's Mailbox" column of the June 25th  2013 issue of the Schenectady Daily  Gazette  page D2.  "None of us are wealthy" is what  I would have  preferred to read.  Contrary to popular belief, none may precede a singular or a plural verb.  The following are  two websites   that provide an explanation regarding  the singular and plural of none.

According to     http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Which_is_correct_none_of_us_is_or_none_of_us_are
if none refers to a "singular entity"   it should  be followed by a singular verb.   An example would be "None of the air is polluted.."   According to   http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/none-is-or-none-are.aspx
sometimes the context is plural.  An example would be "None of them are coming home."
 Furthermore Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage supports using a singular or a plural verb after none depending on the corresponding noun.  The explanation from the website
 http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/singular-vs-plural/none-were-vs-none-was/
 is that the noun  or the object of the preposition determines whether the verb is singular of plural.
Examples from the aforementioned  grammar book website are "None of the pie was eaten." and  "None of the children were hungry." So it is a  conundrum that SAT testing service considers none to be strictly  a singular word..

Interesting facts

Following are some interesting facts from the book Do You Speak American  by Robert MacNeil and William Cran.

1- Southern speech is the largest accent group in the United States.
2-Black Americans and white Americans speak less like each other today than they did two and three        generations ago.
3-Spanglish, Chicano English, and Chicano Spanish are three distinct and thriving American dialects. 
4-Women adopt new pronunciations and speech styles more quickly than men.
5-People react to synthetic computerized voices in the same way they react to real human voices.

Language evolution and grammarians

"What grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize; usage evolves itself little disturbed by their likes and dislikes."  I share this most interesting quote of H.W. Fowler from his book entitled Modern English Usage because  it reminded me of the  paper I most recently wrote. 

Rules project

Rules Project
My father is arriving from Arizona to visit me today and his pet peeve is  when somebody ends a sentence in a preposition.  However according to grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ending-prepositions.aspx‎
that is not a rule and it is OK to end a sentence in a preposition.   So I will try not to do it to please him but at least now I know it is not a grammar rule.

This post is not written wrong!!

Rules Project
     The sentence in June Casagrande's  June 16th 2013  Albany Times Union article that caught my eye was "Grammar snobs are great big meanies."   In her article entitled "Some claims of error are just wrong"  Casagrande addresses  the complaint of two readers who accused her of making a grammatical error.   One reader wrote that only adverbs modify verbs and the other  reader wrote "Wrong can only be used as   a noun or adjective, but never an adverb."    An example of a sentence would be "I did it wrong."  However, Casagrande explained that both readers are wrong because according to the dictionary wrong is an adverb as well as an adjective.   Wrong and wrongly are both adverbs.  Goodly would be a word if all adverbs were to  be formed by adding "ly"  Casagrande said.

 According to  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wrong    wrong is a noun, an adjective and an adverb.    According to http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/wrongly   wrongly is an adverb  too.  

For free

Rules project
     Today I heard a radio advertisement about getting an oil change.  The statement  was, "Get your oil changed for free."   This has always been a pet peeve of mine which I forgot to mention earlier. I have always thought   for free was  not grammatical.  The correct sentence would be "Get your oil changed free."   For is omitted because  free is an adjective or an adverb and therefore cannot be preceded by for.  Nouns are preceded by for.   This is according to http://wiki.answers.comIs_the_expression_for_free_incorrect_grammar
However, according to   http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/for_free.htm  for free is now considered grammatically correct and understood by most people.  So this would be yet  another  example of  language  changing.

Funner is a word

Rules Project
    Friends and family usually ask me grammar questions because I  have a degree in journalism.  So yesterday my daughter told me "funner" was a word.   That did not sound like correct information.  Nevertheless, my daughter is right.    "Funner" is a word.   This is an example of  the evolving of language.  Until  recently,  fun  was only  a  noun, according to http://grammarist.com/usage/funner-more-fun/     
Nouns do not have  a comparative or superlative form.   However after reading the website information, I learned that  fun is also an adjective.   The comparatives and superlatives of one syllable adjectives require the er and est endings such as in the word funner.

Rules Project

Today I  reviewed  the following website:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/prepositions.htm   
The following sentence  is a quote from the website:
"We use on to designate days and dates."

However, when I was studying to be a journalist, I was taught to omit the preposition  on  in sentences such as, "She is going to the supermarket on Sunday afternoon." 

Rules project- Thoughts about Commas

Rules Project
I love language because there is always something new to learn.   Today I learned  why there is a comma between some adjectives and not between others. It is because of  coordinate and non-coordinate adjectives.  Coordinate adjectives describe a noun in the same way to the same degree, consequently requiring a comma.   Non-coordinate adjectives have an unequal relationship to the noun and therefore do not require a comma between them.   In the June 9th issue of the Albany Times Union, page 12 of the "Unwind" section, in an article entitled "Not every adjective needs a comma" by June Casagrande,  there was an example of a sentence with  coordinate and non-coordinate adjectives.  The sentence was,   "The handsome, articulate, intelligent man wore a bright green midriff peasant blouse."
"Midriff" is specific to the blouse.  "Bright" is describing "green" more than blouse.
The grammar rule according to Casagrande and www.grammarist.com is that non-coordinate adjectives which precede a noun are not separated by commas.    June Casagrande says when in doubt to place "and"  between adjectives or change the order of the adjectives..  If "and" between the adjectives works then replace "and" with commas.  If the adjectives are interchangeable, then no commas are necessary.   In rare cases the sentence is correct with or without commas, according to Casagrande.  An example of this from the article would be "a beautiful sunny day" or "a beautiful, sunny day." Both sentences are correct.

Intriguing

It intrigues me that one sentence has different meanings depending on the context of a  situation.  
I was at  the park with my son and his friend today.  A little girl was having trouble waiting her turn to go on the swings.   Her dad said to her,  "Go after the boys."  
Such a sentence could mean  that she should  take her turn after the boys are  finished.   It could  also mean to chase the boys. 

Odd Sentences

"Parents treats military officer as if he's still a young child."  
That was the headline I read in section D page four of   The  Daily Gazette June 6th.
Of course the verb "treats" is in the wrong tense and it should be written as "treat."

The following is also from the June 6th issue of The Daily Gazette  section B page four.
"The grandmother was so happy to see Bowman that she didn't even tell Carter the gift he had brought her."
The sentence is not well written.  "About" should follow "Carter" and it is not clear whether "he" refers to "Carter" or "Bowman."  I discovered,   from reading the article further, that "he"  refers to "Bowman."

Punctuation might change the meaning.

Grammar Rules Project
I think it is interesting that punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence.  Some writers don't think about this.
For example, "Keep drinking Haymitch."  A comma is needed after "drinking" or the name of the drink is "Haymitch."   This was a sentence from an advertisement about the movie "The Hunger Games."

 I found two more examples  in the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves written by Lynne Truss.
 Page nine includes the following sentences:

"A woman, without her man, is nothing."
"A woman: without her, man is nothing."
  

The Journalism Professor

A journalism professor of mine once insisted that it was grammatically incorrect to use "over"   rather than     "more than."   However, according to   https://www.writersdigest.com   there is no grammatical rule which prohibits using "over" rather than  "more than."    For example I had thought it would be grammatically incorrect to say,  "I had  over $10.00.  Now I know  it does not matter.

Grammar Rules Project

     Katie Couric and I share a grammar pet peeve.  She said she is annoyed when people use bad grammar such as, "He really doesn't like Suzie and I."   The sentence should be "He really doesn't like Suzie and me."  "Me" is one of the objects and not the subject.   
     Sometimes  an object pronoun is used instead of a subject pronoun.  For example, I have often heard,   "Me and him are going to the store."     The sentence should be, "He and I are going to the store."

     According to A Practical English Grammar by  A.J. Thomson and A.V. Martinet  (Oxford University Press)  pp38-39,   Subject pronouns such as "I", "he" and "she" can be subjects of the verb.    Object pronouns such as "me" and "him" are used when the pronoun is a direct or indirect object of the verb.

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I said it is money before matrimony!

The following is a quote from an article entitled "Talk Money before Matrimony"  June 3rd  section A
page four of the Schenectady Gazette.
"Ever since the beginning, I was like, you know, I'm going to have a lot of debt."    I would prefer to say, "Ever since the beginning, I said I would have a lot of debt."
  I am not sure if replacing the verb "to say" with a form of   "to be" followed by    "like"  will soon become standard English grammar.  I hope  not.  However, according to our assigned reading "Understanding English Grammar" the status of language changes according to its usage. So language changes especially if teachers, members of the university community,  and public figures speak this way. 

What would happen if I were superwoman?

     Many people are not aware that the word "if" should be used with "were."  For example,  If I were superwoman,  life would be more peaceful."  A plethora of  people begin sentences with "If I was" rather than "If I were" and so unless it will cause conflict, I  make the correction.  I have heard  politicians, musicians,  and even  radio journalists  make this mistake.