Question sent by e-mail by Neyo (July 1, 2011):Hi, Joe!
I am an avid follower of your blog/forums and I find them very helpful in my job in a publishing.
My question is: Is the sentence below grammatically correct?
“Divided into quarters to correspond with the grading periods of school year, each quarter opens with pictorial summary (grades 1 – 3) and highlights (grades 4 – 6), which is a listing of what the pupils expect to learn in about two and a half months.”
I found it grammatically incorrect. Let us look at the part of the sentence that the modifier “divided into quarters to …” refers to. Obviously, it is the quarter (”each quarter”). If this is so, and if we remove the extension of the modifier, we read thus: “Divided into quarters…, each quarter opens….” This is an awkward construction, if not absurd for this purpose. (A quarter divided into quarters?) Now, using the same construction, and using “series” instead of “quarter” as a subject, we read thus: “Divided into quarters…, each series opens...”
Our chief editor, however, thinks otherwise. To him, there is no dangling modifier here. As he is a linguistics major, he even used the term exospheric referencing (ellipsed subject) used in linguistics, whatever that means.
Is this a situation of a dangling modifier or only an error in style? And is there an application of ellipsed subject here? (Note: “exophoric referencing” in the field of linguistics.) Is an ellipsed subject (if there is any) a rule in constructing a modifier?
Please help me convince my boss that there is an error in that sentence.
Thanks.
My reply to Neyo:You asked if the following sentence is grammatically correct and whether it contains a dangling modifier:
““Divided into quarters to correspond with the grading periods of school year, each quarter opens with pictorial summary (grades 1 – 3) and highlights (grades 4 – 6), which is a listing of what the pupils expect to learn in about two and a half months.”
Offhand I’ll tell you that it’s a very badly constructed sentence, one with the following very serious grammatical flaws:
1. It has no subject either in the main clause or in the modifying participial phrase. Semantically, the noun “quarter” as used in the participial phrase and in the main clause itself can’t be the subject of that sentence. The sentence has therefore ended up saying so many things about nothing in particular. Indeed, unless some title or heading right before that sentence makes it clear what the subject is, I would consider that whole sentence itself a meaningless statement.
2. That sentence having no subject, the modifying participial phrase up front has also ended up as a dangling modifier, unable to logically modify any noun in the main clause. As you said, because of the false use of the noun “quarter” as subject of that sentence, we have the grammatical anomaly of each “quarter” dividing itself up into “quarters,” a process that, when pursued to its logical conclusion, would yield a total of 16 divisions for whatever it is that the sentence is talking about.
3. Also semantically doomed as a dangling modifying phrase is the relative clause at the tail end of that sentence—“which is a listing of what the pupils expect to learn in about two and a half months.” This is because that relative clause doesn’t have a clear antecedent subject to modify in the main clause. The head noun of that relative clause, “listing,” has no clear syntactic relation to any of the nouns in the main clause, namely “quarter,” “pictorial summary,” and “highlights.”
4. The sentence also has three instances of missing articles (“the” twice, “a” once) and one instance of a missing modal (“can”), which to me are indicative of less than thorough copyediting.
You say that your chief editor considers that sentence grammatically correct. I think he is sorely mistaken and should reconsider his position. My feeling is that if someone has to defend a doubtful sentence construction by taking recourse to such abstruse linguistic terms as “exospheric referencing” and “ellipsed subject,” he must have painted himself into an indefensible position. The fact is that the sentence in question is meant to be read and interpreted not by linguistics majors but by elementary school teachers and pupils, so where’s the wisdom in writing it in a confusing way? And what’s the point in further confusing them with linguistic jargon and justifications that none of them will understand?
In fairness to your chief editor, though, I must say that you must have misheard him when you quoted him as using the term “exospheric referencing.” The word “exospheric” is a scientific term that means being located in “the outer fringe region of the atmosphere of the earth or a celestial body” (
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary). He must have said “exophoric reference,” a linguistics term used to describe generics or abstracts without ever identifying them, meaning that rather than introduce a specific concept, the writer refers to it by a generic word like “everything,” as in “
Everything in my life is in shambles” for the opening of a novel. (
Click this link for a layman’s discussion of “exophora” in the About.com website.) In any case, after looking very closely at the sentence in question, I simply can’t fathom precisely what word was used as “exophoric reference” in that sentence. And even if assuming that the “exophoric reference” was indeed clear in your chief editor’s mind, isn’t it foolhardy to expect nonlinguists to understand “exophoric reference” the way he has invoked it?
You say that your chief editor also used the alternative term “ellipsed subject.” By definition, an “ellipsis” is a grammatical device in sentence construction in which, after a certain word or phrase is mentioned in a sentence, that word or phrase is omitted when it has to be repeated later in the sentence. Ellipsis is meant to avoid needless repetition, to streamline sentences, and to make them easier to articulate, as in this ellipsed sentence: “Their older son is now a college graduate, the younger still in high school.” (The words “son” and “is” were ellipsed or omitted from this full sentence: “Their older son is now a college graduate, the younger
son is still in high school.”) This being the case, I’m still wondering what subject or words your chief editor thinks were “ellipsed” from that sentence in question.
I realize that this critique of mine has gotten unduly long, so let me end it now by offering the following rewrite whose grammatical correctness won’t have to be defended by resorting to some linguistic mumbo-jumbo:
“Divided into quarters to correspond to the grading periods of the school year, each book in the series opens with a pictorial summary (for Grades 1 – 3) or highlights in text (for Grades 4 – 6) showing what the pupils can expect to learn in about two-and-a-half months.”
This time it’s unmistakable that the subject of the sentence are the books (or manuals or workbooks or pamphlets) in the series to be published, that the subject being modified by the participial phrase is “each book in the series,” and that “the pictorial summary” and “highlights in text” don’t really list but show “what the pupils can expect to learn in about two-and-a-half months.” It’s now in grammatically and semantically airtight English that I’m sure everybody will find easy to understand.
