[greymule]

Congratulations, GarthB.

From Harper's English Grammar: "There is a good grammatical rule to the effect that a pronoun cannot take as antecedent a noun in the possessive case." But the book also acknowledges that most writers give the rule little respect, if they are even aware it exists. In actual usage, there are times in which a good writer would observe the rule, and times when he could justifiably ignore it. It is also possible that the pronoun could be an obvious reference to something named in a previous sentence; not every sentence must be grammatically complete within itself.

"The umpire's handling of the game gained him respect from the coaches" is technically incorrect, though the meaning is obvious. "The way the umpire handled the game gained him respect from the coaches" would probably be better, though.

In my medical editing, I will change "our new drug's efficacy makes it the number one choice for patients with xxx" to "the efficacy of our new drug makes it the number one choice for patients with xxx."

Two famous examples, each from a poet very careful about grammar:

(1) . . . a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's—he takes the lead
In summer luxury . . .

(2) And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.

Dave has pointed out other flaws with the sentence, one being the ambiguity about exactly what genius does. Of course, the writer is trying to praise Toni Morrison and fit in the word genius, but does anything claimed for her genius—like writing about the experiences of black people—really require genius? We need to be told something about those novels for which the invocation of genius would make sense. You don't need genius to connect the experience of black people with a novel about the experience of black people.

The sentence itself is rather puffed-up writing. Create novels? Dickens wrote novels. Incidentally, it's not actually bad grammar, but using injustices as the object of both from (preposition) and express (verb) is weak style. Besides, why not delete "arise from" entirely and say simply, "TM writes ingenius novels that express the injustices African Americans have endured" or even just "about the injustices . . ."? Isn't it then obvious that the novels had arisen from those injustices? I suspect the writer of the sentence thought that complicated syntax would sound more "intelligent." To Dave, it understandably sounded more like "run-on sentence."

(Toni Morrison herself has been criticized for "stretching" grammar unnecessarily. In fact, she lives not too far from here, though I've never met her. I'll have to go give her a hard time about it at some point.)

I'd be interested to know what Carl has to say on this matter.