Consolidated Writing Questions (Need help)

silverturtle
Fri, 01 Jun 2012 01:11:27 +0000

1. I don’t think a relative pronoun can have a verb antecedent. In any case, it makes more sense for “which” to refer to the techniques.



A relative pronoun cannot have a verb as its referent, but it can – arguably in formal writing – be used to refer to the entire preceding clause, as in I am tired, which means that it’s time for bed. We use this clausal antecedence frequently in speech and writing, and such use is supported by some style guides. I don’t know whether the SAT writers will ever test a student’s recognition of and from the opposing viewpoint that pronouns’ referents must be nouns, but such an assessment would be rightly objectionable.

But thankfully, we don’t have to indulge those worries in order to figure this one out: Indeed, the pronoun’s logical referent is “techniques.” “Which involve” would have to instead be “Which involves” if a clausal or (ungrammatical) verb reference was the intention because verbs and clauses are treated singularly.



2. This is case of an illogical shift in person. The 3rd person is used in the independent clause while the 2nd person is used in the dependent clause. Rearranging the sentence is an easy way to spot the error. In theory, if you switch the order of dependent and independent clauses, the sentence should still make sense. If you do that with this sentence you get:



When you have a tendency to complain about ailments that are largely imagined, a hypochondriac is.



Now the error becomes much more apparent.



You have provided an interesting rearrangement of the syntax in order to demonstrate your hypothesis. However, the original sentence is wrong actually because it exhibits faulty predication; a solution to the ostensible person shifting would still yield an illogical relationship between the verb and its subject.

The sentence intends to be definitional: “A hypochondriac is…” Is a hypochondriac when anyone has anything? Hypochondria may occur under the described condition, but to preserve precision we must take care to not conflate the two concepts – here, I mean not “hypochondriac” and “hypochondria” but the verbal qualities of definition and those of action description.

Everything that succeeds “hypochondriac is” is the predicate nominative of “hypochondriac,” serving as its general sense of meaning. A predicate nominative must be a noun or noun phrase, here the latter. “When you have a tendency…” is, as you noted, a dependent clause. Let’s render it not so. We can also clean up what you considered a person shift (though even “When one has…” would be faulty) in the process. Simply omit “When you have.” “A tendency to complain…” is sufficient as the noun phrase we need to define the subject of the sentence.



3. Verb tenses aren’t always parallel and they don’t have to be. This sentence makes sense because it’s saying the paper was deteriorating even before it was found.



Right, parallelism doesn’t really apply here. The concept of parallelism itself is slightly hazy at the margins, though. We could consider the need to use verbs rather than, say, a verb and an infinitive (“…even though the writing was difficult to decipher and the paper beginning to disintegrate”) to be parallelism, but the error is justifiable on other grounds as well. Parallelism is applicable to tenses not structurally but merely from the perspective of ensuring consistency in logic.

The beginning of the disintegration must have occurred prior to the difficulties in deciphering. When a past action proceeds another past action, we use the past perfect tense to convey the former action. This tense is characterized by “had” followed by the past participle of the verb.



4. Both are correct but the latter choice is wordy and clunky (two "that"s in a row). When two sentences are both grammatically correct in the Improving Sentences section, pick the shorter one.



Yep, both are grammatical. This is one instance in which we can accept “that is” as implicit and omit it.



5. Inserting “for” wouldn’t make sense because the relative pronoun “whose” already implies possession.



I’m not sure that the thinking behind inserting “for” was to convey possession. Certainly, as you say, “whose” is possessive; the original writing is substitutable for “…of John and Priscilla Alden, the romance of whom he celebrated…” Would “for whose romance” seem more possessive to someone? I’m not sure what adcomb had in mind.

Whatever the intention, a preposition is unnecessary because “whose” is the object of the transitive verb “celebrated.” The appearance of an objective relative pronoun before its verb is normal. To reverse the order of the verb and object, as occurs when we don’t have a relative pronoun, reveals that there is no need for “for”: “He celebrated their romance” rather than “He celebrated for their romance.”



6. I thought “for president” was right too. If this had been a Identifying Sentence Errors question, I would’ve gotten it wrong. Because it’s a IS question, I would have probably saw “elected” and chose that because it’s shorter and still grammatically correct.



Fortuitously, my explanation of the previous question is relevant here. “Elect” is a transitive verb whose object follows it immediately, without need for an intervening preposition. For examples (and on days when I describe my activities most concisely), I don’t eat for my sandwich, mow for the lawn, celebrate for their romance, or elect for the president.



7. Yes that would be correct. But CB thinks the shorter the sentence, the better, so in IS questions, go with the shorter answers as long as they don’t sacrifice correct grammar.



This explanation probably suffices practically, but I have two qualifications to offer. First, “many of which were found nowhere” ought be “many of which are found nowhere.”

Also, although these different syntaxes carry essentially the same meaning and are certainly correlates in use, they aren’t generally mutually substitutable (as in question 4). What I mean is that “many found nowhere else on the planet” is not simply a condensed version whose explicit expansion is “many of which are found nowhere else on the planet.” The former is a participial phrase (“found” is the participle), whereas the latter is a relative clause. Maybe this differentiation is pedantic.



8. Refer to 7



My explanation from question 7, in which the comparison between the phrase and clause is pragmatically didactic and clarifying but not precise, applies here too. We could write the participial phrase “The thickness of the iceberg depending…” at the beginning and preserve grammatical syntax; the same cannot be said for the clausal correlate. Also, a comma should precede “initially” in addition to the one succeeding “least.”