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Originally Posted by 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." ....
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."
I'd be interested to know what Carl has to say on this matter.
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I'm one of those
summa cum laude graduates (master's degree), so I appreciate the chance to post in this thread. I would start by saying that I generally spell "ingenius" this way: "ingenious." Darn, those pesky typos.
The thread has some interesting points. About the colons. (fragment used for effect) The difference between the colon and the semi-colon is huge; even so, we often use them wrongly." Gag me! But my sentence is grammatical, even balanced.
A colon would be wrong. Colons connect independent clauses (so do semi-colons but....) in locutions where the second clause "explains" the first.
Here's an example from
51 Ways to Ruin a Baseball Game:
"Do yourself and the players a favor: When the second baseman is near the bag and takes a good throw as part of a double-play attempt, ...."
Even here, authorities disagree on, of all things, the
spelling.
The
New York Times style book (Should that be "Times' style book"? Maybe the "style book of the
New York Times....) requires a lowercase letter to start the explanatory clause. Thus: "Do yourself a favor: when the second baseman...."
APA style uses an uppercase letter when the material following the colon is an independent clause; a lowercase letter, when it's a phrase or a dependent clause.
Thus: "He seemed guilty: shifty eyes, slouched posture, clammy hands - all classic symptoms of the man with something to hide."
But: "He seemed guilty: The shifty eyes, slouched posture, and clammy hands gave him away."
Officiating.com endorses APA in this instance.
About the possessive:
I was taught that one shouldn't use the possessive except with animate things. Thus: "It was Benham's dog that bit me." But not "The bank's policy stiffled growth." Preferred by Mrs. Lois Smith Douglas Murray, a Baylor prof: "The policy of the bank stiffled...."
Moving on....
It's nonsense to argue that a pronoun can't have a possessive as its antecedent. Nobody pays any attention to that anymore. A more common error is failure to use the possessive before gerunds.
We get thrown off because of gender: (Explanatory material follows.)
We recognize this sentence is wrong: (Talk about embedding colons, and don't give me any Brokeback Mountain sneers) "We listened to him singing" should be "... his singing." But if it's a female, "We listened to her singing" is fine 'cause "her" is both an objective and a possessive pronoun.
Concerning the grasshopper and the demon: I don't think it fair to Keats to say he was a stickler about grammar. Which poets give a damn about grammar? How abut Supreme Court Justices? "Three generations of idions is enough." But I can't find anything wrong with the material you quoted, which was: (Oops, another colon!)
"a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's—he takes the lead."
Keat's lines are poetic, grammatical, and, punctuation-wise (grin), ahead of their time. Clearly implied is the noun [that is] "possessed" by the grasshopper. It's (Do you get people who mix up "its" and "it's"?) his "voice." Then comes the semi-colon — except Keats uses a dash.
Poe, poor lad that he was, loved internal rime. (Look up that spelling! At Officiating.com, we don't separate a verb from its particle: We looked up the spelling. We didn't look the spelling up.) But Poe wasn't that fond of subject-verb agreement. What he should have written was: "And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's [eyes] that are dreaming." But I doubt anybody would have ever quoted the line if he had written it that way.
By the way, explain this sentence: Whistler painted his mother sitting down.
How about the editor to the writer: I shall waste no time in reading your manuscript.
By the way, if you're watching football, you'll hear my favorite bugaboo, which is the dangling gerund. (Everybody's heard of the dangling participle.) Troy Aikman: "In talking with Coach Parcells, he said...."
Back to the subject, which is rambling. (Predicate nominative or predicate adjective? Who cares?)
Educational Testing Service. Lah, me.
Garth put his finger on what irritated the grammarians, a possessive noun as antecedent for a pronoun. On the other hand, you played "gotcha" with the lack of parallelism. When we find a verb-particle paired with another verb, our minds expect the second verb also to have a particle. For example: "Her genius arises from and speaks to...." Leave off the expected particle and the careful reader will always look back in the sentence. "Arise from." a compound verb, has no right to precede "expresses," a stand-alone verb.
But like you say.... (Ah, the trouble I have with writers who want to use "like" as a relative conjunction."
As you say, it's not ungrammatical, simply crummy construction.
Then there's this: "I ain't happy, (grammatical) and she ain't happy (ungrammatical). Mrs. LSDM didn't like "ain't," however I wanted to use it. She once failed a profile I wrote because of a comma fault. So I got a B in English 101 (exposition). I fooled her. I took English 102 (argument) from her — and made an A. The profile of Paul Baker, the head of the drama department, was later published, unchanged, comma fault and all.
As Holly Hunter said in
The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom: "Ah, the things you do for your kids."