English Grammar Essentials For Dummies by Wendy M. Anderson

Author:Wendy M. Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Avoiding Tricky Situations

In This Chapter

Including everyone with inclusive pronouns

Unravelling some confusing word pairs

Placing even, almost and only accurately

Selecting present or past tense appropriately

Using two-part conjunctions correctly

Identifying and eliminating empty subjects

Using prepositions to end sentences

So what’s the point of all this proper grammar and precise punctuation anyway? Well, although it can’t come up with ideas for you, good grammar creates no confusion for your audience when you communicate those ideas. Clear and accurate writing conveys the same (or as similar as possible) information to every reader. This book provides you with knowledge about some of the core skills of effective communication. It also helps you develop your skills as a critical reader and editor. In this chapter, we look at ten areas of grammar that commonly trip writers up. Eliminate these stumbling blocks from your writing — or check for them when you edit — and you’ll be ahead of the pack in the race for success.

Eliminating Sexist Pronouns

Language is a very powerful tool. Publishers of books like this one edit them to eliminate any language that’s racist, sexist, ageist or any other -ist. Whatever you think about equality, it’s an important issue. And it affects pronouns (remember that a pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun; see Chapter 4 for more about pronouns).

Consider this sentence:

A doctor is no longer expected to visit his patients at home.

We aren’t talking about a specific doctor here. This is any doctor — a typical doctor — who treats his patients. How can you avoid suggesting that no doctors are women?

A doctor is no longer expected to visit his or her patients at home.

That’s clumsy, isn’t it? And it makes her sound like an afterthought. Try a different pronoun:

A doctor is no longer expected to visit their patients at home.

Well, no. That sentence doesn’t exactly work either because a plural pronoun their is matched with a singular noun (a doctor). Although some people support this sort of mismatching on the grounds that it’s not sexist, better ways exist to avoid this problem:

Doctors are no longer expected to visit their patients at home. (Make the whole thing into the plural, then the gender-neutral their is correct because it’s also plural.)

A doctor is no longer expected to visit patients at home. (Leave the pronoun out.)

Your computer is likely to draw attention to potential problems with the mismatched pronouns we’re talking about in this section. To revise a sentence that mismatches a singular pronoun with a plural one, you can rewrite the sentence to omit one pronoun or revise the sentence so that it is all plural. But what do you do if neither of those techniques works? Look at this sentence:

No-one should have to feel that their life is at risk. (no-one = singular, life = singular, their = singular?)

The sentence, as it stands, is fluent, clear and natural-sounding. How, then, could we revise it?

People should not have to feel that their lives are at risk.

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