Posted on 05/15/2003 4:07:50 PM PDT by ZinGirl
you should ask yourself this question
I thought the REAL answer was "do I feel lucky?" (snicker, snicker....good ol' Clint Eastwood knew how to handle grammar)
Trailing prepositions were good enough for Shakespeare, and they're good enough for me.
I still avoid this one....and I'm even (GASP!) now correcting MY kids...just like mom corrected me and my sibs growing up.
Consider the sentence: Bob polishes his shoes better than anyone else he knows. To whom do the words "his" and "he" refer?
What if the previous sentence was: "Joe enjoys visiting Bob's Shoe Shine Shop."?
In the PSAT sentence, Toni Morrison is an obvious possible referrent of the pronoun "her", just as Bob is an obvious possible referrent of "his" and "he". That an earlier sentence might have established a stronger pronoun 'binding' does not make the sentences ambiguous or incorrect.
I was thinking of teasing you, even though I know "up" isn't really a preposition there, but naah...
I try to avoid dangling prepositions in some situations, but I find that many word-order inversions sound unduly pretentious ["Of what number were you thinking" may be grammatically preferable to "What number were you thinking of", but sounds unduly stuffy]. I guess, with apologies to Winston Churchill, you'll just have to ask your self up with how much of such awkwardness and stuffiness you are willing to put to satisfy the 18th century grammarians.
Actually, I personally would argue that in English a preposition's proximity to a verb is far more important than its proximity to its object. Many verbs in the English language have special idiomatic meanings when used with certain prepositions; isolating the verb from the preposition tends to dilute such meaning.
In some cases this can be a good thing. Consider the following two questions:
To whom else would "him" refer? Absent other context, there's no other plausible referrent. While surrounding context might create ambiguity, such ambiguity is generally no worse than in cases where a subject or object exists to which the pronoun may or may not refer.
Consider the sentence "Bob often polishes his shoes". Whose shoes does Bob polish?
Now imagine the previous sentence read "Joe likes to visit his friend Bob." Now whose shoes does Bob polish?
Now imagine the following sentence reads "This is in stark contrast to Joe's former friend Steve, whose shoes so badly needed polish that they looked balder than Homer Simpson."
Note that while it would be possible to change the ambiguous possessive to "his own" to make clear whose whose shoes Bob was polishing, it would change the 'feel' of the sentence in an awkward way.
First of all, I would not fault anyone for using the grammatical structure of the original sentence, though I might question their judgement about Ms. Morrison and her works.
That being said, there are "rules" of English grammar that state that possessive nouns should not be referrents of pronouns.
Frankly, I don't happen to believe in such rules, any more than I believe that prepositions are something sentences can never end with.
To my mind, there are three real rules of good writing: (1) Be clear; (2) Convey an appropriate attitude [part of which is means 'don't look stupid, except on purpose']. All other "rules" of English grammar should be used as tools to help writers obey the two primary rules; they should not be seen as ends in and of themselves.
It's important to recognize that the "rules" of grammar do not represent the foundation upon which English is based. Rather, they represent an effort to explain what makes good clear writing clear and good. While understanding the rules can help one write clearly, blind slavishness to them can produce monstrous results--what Winston Churchill might describe as "the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put".
Do you mean for it to be grammatically correct?
It's my turn to be spelling cop. LOL ;-)
Maybe not but it does provide a covert way to indoctrinate youth. Parents would normally never even be able to read PSAT questions. The tests are not open for review.
As far as changing the scores for students, I thought that the PSAT was just prep for the SAT. Do colleges look at the PSAT scores?
Although there are exceptions, it is generally bad for pronouns to precede their referrent. Unless you are trying to keep the reader in suspense (sometimes an effective literary technique) you should generally avoid using pronouns before their referrents.
"No, it's a possessive noun, not an adjective."I'm sorry, but a noun in the possessive case frequently functions as an adjective modifying another noun.
In the "old" days, when students were taught to diagram sentences this would not have been an issue. It matters not a wit that it's a possessive noun, it functions as an adjective and that is the point of the question.
that has been the general consensus on the thread....along with borderline disgust that the testmakers managed to get a dig in about the evil white man.
Bwhahahahahaha!
just as well....I was only checking FR at 3:30 in the morning because I couldn't sleep....I probably wouldn't have gotten a joke, anyway! Besides, I was using a butchered "verb" of "grow up". (so there!)
To answer your grammar question,
With whom is Bob going out? Whom is Bob going out with?
the correct answer is: Bob dated ZinGirl years ago. They each went their own way.
Let's also include thousands of other words on any given SAT. Words that would be easily understood for a black kid on any SAT would be those used in the streets and gutters.
No. There are no rules in English grammar requiring that a single sentence eliminate any and all sources of potential ambiguity. If there were, there'd be no need for lawyers. The original sentence is correct as it was written.
Excellent example!!!
Thanks!
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