NCAA batting out of order?

[greymule]

Maybe there's a further trick to this question. All it says is, "The bottom of the sixth inning is then completed." But it doesn't stipulate how.

Perhaps no pitch was thrown in the bottom of the inning. Maybe all three outs resulted from batters who refused to enter the batter's box.

[ctblu40]

Originally Posted by greymule

Maybe there's a further trick to this question. All it says is, "The bottom of the sixth inning is then completed." But it doesn't stipulate how.

Perhaps no pitch was thrown in the bottom of the inning. Maybe all three outs resulted from batters who refused to enter the batter's box.

I guess that's a possibility but...

What exactly is the test writer trying to test here? If he's testing my ability to rule on baseball situations, he has lost.
If he's testing my ability to think outside the box, I suppose he has won.

[greymule]

I'm pulling your leg, of course, ctblu40.

Even Educational Testing Service, which every year spends millions of dollars to develop just the SAT verbal, gets caught on a question for which there are actually two correct or even no correct answers. I admit they seldom make mistakes as obvious as the one you cited from the NCAA test, but they still make them.

A couple of years ago, ETS had to revise some PSAT scores because it had erroneously included the following sentence as a grammatically correct example:

Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.

(Anyone know why this sentence is NOT grammatically correct? Only one person contested the question, but that person had a valid point.)

Most of us take tests on certain codes every year, and there are inevitably several questions on each test that someone with a real stake in a score could contest and win. We often find ourselves asking, "Is this a trick question of some kind, or are they simply trying to remind us of a particular interpretation but didn't take much care in writing the question?"

[SanDiegoSteve]

Originally Posted by greymule

A couple of years ago, ETS had to revise some PSAT scores because it had erroneously included the following sentence as a grammatically correct example:

Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.

(Anyone know why this sentence is NOT grammatically correct? Only one person contested the question, but that person had a valid point.)

Yes, unless you are listing things, such as apples and oranges, a comma is to be placed prior to conjunctions such as, but not limited to, "and," and "but." So there should be a comma placed between "from" and "and." Notice that no comma was required between "from" and "and" in my sentence.

[GarthB]

Originally Posted by SanDiegoSteve

Yes, unless you are listing things, such as apples and oranges, a comma is to be placed prior to conjunctions such as, but not limited to, "and," and "but." So there should be a comma placed between "from" and "and." Notice that no comma was required between "from" and "and" in my sentence.

BZZZZZT! Sorry. Thanks for playing.

But, nice try.

Actually, under common usage, there really is not an error in the sentence. However, picking nits to the point of making language "un-understandable" (sic), the antecedent of "her" is not "Toni Morrison." The antecedent is"Toni Morrison's genius."

Therefore, the sentence technically should read "Toni Morrison's genius enables IT to create novels..."

[Dave Hensley]

Originally Posted by GarthB

BZZZZZT! Sorry. Thanks for playing.

But, nice try.

Actually, under common usage, there really is not an error in the sentence. However, picking nits to the point of making language "un-understandable" (sic), the antecedent of "her" is not "Toni Morrison." The antecedent is"Toni Morrison's genius."

Therefore, the sentence technically should read "Toni Morrison's genius enables IT to create novels..."

I agree with your first point, that there's really nothing wrong with the sentence as written. It's kind of a run-on sentence, and therefore poorly structured but I detect no actual grammatical error.

I disagree that it is Toni's genius that is creating the novels. Toni creates the novels; her genius enables her to. I don't think that's what greymule is going to say is the error.

But it's definitely not SDS's desire to litter the sentence with superfluous commas, either.

Edited to add:
I've discovered that Garth's answer (that "her" is the error) is indeed the reason the PSAT people changed their minds and agreed the sentence was flawed. I still disagree, but I'm no English teacher; merely an honors English graduate.

[RPatrino]

Now I have a question. I have been reading a book, whose author makes liberal use of the colon: is this proper?

[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.

[Carl Childress]

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.

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."