Jose Carillo's Forum

MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

If you are a new user, click here to
read the Overview to this section

Team up with me in My Media English Watch!

I am inviting Forum members to team up with me in doing My Media English Watch. This way, we can further widen this Forum’s dragnet for bad or questionable English usage in both the print media and broadcast media, thus giving more teeth to our campaign to encourage them to continuously improve their English. All you need to do is pinpoint every serious English misuse you encounter while reading your favorite newspaper or viewing your favorite network or cable TV programs. Just tell me about the English misuse and I will do a grammar critique of it.

Read the guidelines and house rules for joining My Media English Watch!

Newspaper writers, editors need to master subject-verb agreement

For newspaper journalists, achieving subject-verb agreement in sentences is so basic a writing skill that it should logically be a nonrecurrent source of grammar error. Yet every so often, some writers and editors of the four major Metro Manila broadsheets betray an embarrassing lack of mastery of this aspect of English grammar.   

Take a look at this lead passage of a recent news story in one of the broadsheets:

Manila Bulletin: Two subject-verb disagreement errors in a row

Rains worry mango producers in CAR

BANGUED, Abra, Philippines – Unpredictable weather patterns that precipitate too much rain is worrying mango producers in the Cordillera region.

Experts said rains are generally helpful to farmers but it may not be a welcome phenomenon to some such farming activities as mango production, especially in this conflict-stricken province which depends heavily on this agricultural produce.

The lead sentence above commits a glaring subject-verb disagreement error. Its true subject is not the singular noun “rain” but the noun phrase “unpredictable weather patterns that precipitate too much rain,” which, of course, has for its nominal subject the plural “weather patterns.” The operative verb therefore shouldn’t be the singular verb “is” but the plural form “are,” such that the sentence should correctly read as follows:

Unpredictable weather patterns that precipitate too much rain are worrying mango producers in the Cordillera region.”

The second sentence of that passage in the news story similarly commits a serious subject-verb disagreement error. In the statement attributed to experts, the subject is the plural noun “rains.” This is the antecedent noun of the pronoun that follows in that sentence, so that pronoun should also be in the plural form. However, what was used as pronoun is the singular form “it,” which disagrees in number with the plural “rains.” The correct pronoun in this case is, of course, the plural form “they.”

In both incidences of subject-verb disagreement error, it’s evident that the writer—and the copyeditor as well—wrongly thought that the noun nearest to the operative verb was the subject of that verb. This proximity factor is an erroneous, ill-advised basis for that choice; the choice should always be the inherent logic of the statement where the subject (whether noun or pronoun) and the operative verb are found.

Before offering a corrected version of that second sentence in the lead passage, I must also point out that its fastidious use of the phrase “some such” is semantically uncalled for (“such” alone is the correct usage), and that its use of the relative pronoun “which” in the phrase “especially in this conflict-stricken province which depends heavily on this agricultural produce” is grammatically wrong (it should be “that” instead because what follows is a restrictive clause, not a nonrestrictive one).

Here, then, is that entire flawed passage as corrected:

“BANGUED, Abra, Philippines – Unpredictable weather patterns that precipitate too much rain are worrying mango producers in the Cordillera region.

“Experts said rains are generally helpful to farmers but they may not be a welcome phenomenon to such farming activities as mango production, especially in this conflict-stricken province that depends heavily on this agricultural produce.”

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

(1) http://ph.yahoo.com/: Wrong word choice

The lead statement to the main story reads as follows:

“At least four people were killed and scores were injured in a bus explosion along EDSA in Makati City.”

The use of the word “scores” is grammatically and factually wrong. A “score” means 20, so the plural “scores” would mean at least two “scores” or 40. As the news story later states, though, the injured totaled only 13, which, of course, is less than even just one “score.”

To avoid such serious semantic mishaps, reporters and editors should be more circumspect with the use of terms whose meaning they don’t know or are unsure of.

(2) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Grammatically and semantically faulty news headline   

This news headline from Inquirer.net was e-mailed to me by Forum reader Cedric Bagtas:

Cops relieved for mistaken killing of wrong man

Mr. Bagtas’s comment: “Imagine a mistaken killing of right person”!

Take your pick of these three corrected versions of that headline:
(1) Cops relieved for killing of wrong man
(2) Cops relieved for mistaken killing of man
(3) Cops relieved for killing man by mistake

Click to post a comment to this critique

View the complete list of postings in this section




Copyright © 2010 by Aperture Web Development. All rights reserved.

Page best viewed with:

Mozilla FirefoxGoogle Chrome

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid CSS!

Page last modified: 30 January, 2011, 7:20 a.m.