The Grammar Logs
#538

• To improve profit, the company fired several unnecessary employees.
• To improve profit, several unnecessary employees were fired.

Question: The second sentence is passive and the subject is omitted. Does the second sentence have a dangling modifier? If the sentence is changed to:

To improve profit, several unnecessary employees were fired by the company.

Would it be all right?

You're obviously not writing for the union! (You want to watch whom you call "unnecessary"!) That infinitive phrase, though, wants to modify something, and it's going to try to modify the first thing that comes along. As long as it can modify "the company" or "management" or something appropriate, it's OK, but when the next thing that comes along is the employees, you've got problems — whether the sentence is couched in the weasel-worded passive or not.

In the sentence:

I blew out the candles.

What part of speech is "out" Is it a preposition or part of the verb or adverb. …

"Out" is still a preposition, but it's definitely part of what we call a phrasal verb. (Another word, like "extinguish," could be substituted for it.) If you were diagramming a sentence with a phrasal verb, you would leave the two parts, the verb and the preposition, together, as one unit.

Which sentence is correct in stating I'm glad she is pregnant and I am not?

• "Better she than I."
or

• "Better her than me."

A search in Google.com reveals that "better him than me" is used 100 times more frequently than "better he than I." In extremely formal language, I think one could argue that the subject forms of the pronouns would be appropriate in a kind of shorthand for "better that it be he rather than it be I." But no one would ever talk that way, and no one I know would ever write that way. Use "better her than me." (Incidentally, I can find nothing in my writing manuals and reference books about this phrase — which surprises me.)

Regarding the following sentence:

I didn't want to sit too (close, closely) to the chaperone on the bus.

Do I need the adjective or adverb form of the word "close" in this sentence?

You want the adverb, but the adverb of "close," in this context, is "close." (There are other situations in which you will want "closely," as in " a closely kept secret.")

If you were writing that phrase in a regular piece of text, you'd probably treat "coordinated" and "family focused" as two coordinate adjectives, which means you'd put a comma between them: "We specialize in coordinated, family focused care." Because you're using the phrase as a program title and you probably don't want a comma in the title, the only way to avoid a misreading (i.e., someone wondering what a "coordinated family" means), is to put a hyphen between "family" and "focused."

This question concerns the use of "was" vs. "were" in the following sentence:

"I know the family found comfort in the respect, honor and consolation that WAS provided to them during this difficult time."

Is the sentence correct as written? Or should "were" replace "was"? What is the rule on this please?

Thank you for your superb website and for taking the time to reply to this question.

I do not think that "were" would be wrong; it's possible to conceive of these three things as discrete elements. However, I think the "was" makes more sense. These three elements are really part of one thing, one notion, one "theme," as it were. I'd use the singular was.

Is the following sentance grammatically correct? Also, is "devouring her body wantonly" an adverbial clause?

His eyes were wide, devouring her body wantonly.

There go those eyes of Texas again! Aside from the cartoonish suggestion of eyeballs with teeth, there's nothing wrong grammatically with this sentence. The final phrase is participial (not adverbial), modifying "eyes." That's part of the problem.

My boss writes" Thank you's to....." Is this correct? How do you pluralize you?

Although "thank yous" would be correct, it's still going to look odd, if not awful. What would be wrong with "thanks" or "our gratitude"?

I'm a teacher of English in a college in Turkey and couldn't explain this sentence to my students why .

Her recovery from the illness , everybody said was incurable , was nothing less than miraculous.

( , everybody said was incurable , ) My question is that ; What kind of clause is it ? How was it connected to this sentence and what is the name or rule of this connection ? Is there also another connection between (,everybody said) AND (was incurable ,) ? Thanks.

We need the information in that clause so we shouldn't set it off with a pair of commas. It would be better off, however, with a "that" to introduce it (and I would also change "the" to "an"):

Her recovery from an illness that everybody said was incurable was nothing less than miraculous.

Which is correct:

• Every year the Girl Scouts gives clothes to people who do not have any.
• or
• Every year the Girl Scouts give clothes to people who do not have any.

If you want to use the singular, you're going to have to change Girl Scouts to something like "The Girl Scouts troop" or "The Girl Scouts organization." Otherwise, the singular is going to sound peculiar with "Girl Scouts" because people will assume you're talking about more than one scout. I'd use the plural "give."

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