8 Grammar Errors That Make Admission Officers Cringe

HarrietMWelsch
Fri, 18 Oct 2019 19:45:21 +0000

+1 to @skieurope (as usual), for the sense and the always-worth-repeating quote.

@RichInPitt, take this with all the salt you like; I don’t mean anything unkind by it. But if colleges are actually dinging kids whose essays are otherwise well written (and carefully proofread) for split infinitives or the occasional well constructed sentence that just happens to end in a preposition, they’re not using good judgment. And I really can’t believe that very many actually are.

Language changes. Standards in places that I’m betting you respect have long since moved past the notion of following those two particular rules in any kind of hidebound, hard-and-fast way.* It doesn’t mean that a writer (applicant or otherwise) shouldn’t look at a sentence with a split infinitive to see IF there’s a better way to write it, or re-think a sentence that you’ve casually ended with a preposition to see whether it could work a different way. It means those constructions aren’t categorically wrong, and it’s a petty way to look at writing.

*And I do mean long since. Like, a lot of us on this board were still in college. Or maybe high school. “CMOS has not, since the thirteenth edition (1983), frowned on the split infinitive.” (Chicago Manual of Style) Just for one example.