Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Sentence of the morning

Diagramming party aft to splice the mainbrace!

As you ponder the strange unnatural beauty of this sentence, think of all the ways it could have gone right -- all the easy choices the writer, or any of several downstream editors, could have made to avert the syntactic train wreck that resulted.

And here's a bonus post-peak thistlebottom, in case you're expecting to be mugged by a rogue slot on the way to class:

If "school choice" are buzzwords in education today, schools like the Upland Hills School in Oxford offer the ultimate in choice.

I doesn't think "school choice" are buzzwords. "School choice" is a buzzword -- a buzz NP if you must, but surely nobody means to suggest that "school" has suddenly become the buzzword in education. (Stop the press!) It seems fine to say that "choice" is a buzzword in education, but as it stands, someone got a little too picky for his
her their own good.

Labels: ,

2 Comments:

Anonymous Eli said...

I'm thinking that some editor (or someone else in the print chain) blindly replaced "The fact that" with "Because" in this graf. Making the reverse substitution restores grammaticality to the sentence.

3:24 PM, September 07, 2010  
Blogger fev said...

Nice catch. I don't know any references that call for replacing "the fact that" with "because," but I can certainly see somebody coming up with it on the fly.

12:38 AM, September 08, 2010  

Post a Comment

<< Home