The Grammar Logs
#599

In English 10 class, we just started the poetry unit after finishing the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Today, the class was introduced to the poetic words (such as metaphor, allusion, oxymoron). Then we were given a poetry book and the teacher told us to scan all the poems in it to decide whether a certain part is metaphor or oxymoron, etc. I found this very boring and so did most of the people in my English class. Am I going to need to know these poetic words for the later part of my life? What's the purpose of learning these kind of things?

Have you ever taken an art class, especially one in drawing — or opened a textbook in drawing? What do you see there? drawings of bones, of muscles — all the stuff that makes the thing — the hand, the arm, the face, the back — beautiful. And those gorgeous drawings of birds by Audobon? You know what he did before he drew those birds? He cut them apart, dissected the bejeebers out of 'em. If you are to understand the beauty of anything, you have to know how it works — the underneath, the guts of it. A more mundane example might be your best friend's motorcycle or fixed up jalopy. If you really want to know what made a '56 Chevrolet Impala a beautiful car, you had better be prepared to get your hands dirty.

Is it proper usage to say "It was a great concept and execution of the project"?

The sentence gets off to a bad start and then gets worse. What if you start with "the project" and say something like "The project was nicely conceived and brilliantly executed"?

Is this sentence grammatically correct: The cause of death is unavailable.

It's grammatically correct, if a bit a perplexing. I suppose there are times when newscasters cannot say that "the cause of death is unknown" because it's quite possible that someone does, in fact, know the cause of death. It's just that that cause has not been shared with news sources — so they say "unavailable." There ought to be another word for "known, but not by us." Something like "We don't know the cause of death"? or "The cause of death has not been released to news reporters"?

I am working on a group project and one person insists on using "is when" and I insist that it is not proper to use them together. Here is the text:

B.A.R.S. or behaviorally anchored rating scales method is when various levels of performance are defined and combined with different dimensions relevant to a particular job.

Using "is when" in that construction is a common error. Your sentence is using "when" to describe a thing, not a time (as in something like "Tomorrow is when you want to make your decision.") If we can come up with a more interesting verb than "is," we'll probably solve the problem: "A behaviorally anchored rates scale (BARS) method is used to define various levels of performance when combined with different dimensions relevant to a particular job."?? (And can we come up with something more specific than "different dimensions"?)

Which is correct:

1. As evident by the description.....
2. Its is evident by the description......
3. As evidenced by the description......

These phrases are beloved by lawyers, but they can be replaced to good effect by phrases and verbs like "as shown" or "as demonstrated" or "as indicated." It's hard to imagine that a description ever "evidenced" anything, but certain circumstances might. Garner gives us this sentence: "The inescapable conclusion, evidenced by the clutter of takeout coffee containers, is that sloppy folk on their way to work in the morning drain their cups, roll down the windows of their vehicles and heave out the empty containers."

From Garner's Modern American Usageby Bryan Garner. Copyright 2003 by Bryan A. Garner. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., www.oup-usa.org, and used with the gracious consent of Oxford University Press.

My question is about relative clauses. Students often use them in their papers, and the effects can be very confusing. A simple case illustrates what I mean: "He cut off his long hair, which made him look younger." Is it the long hair or the cutting of his hair that made him look younger? I think the task is to make clear what is the antecedent of the pronoun "which." If the antecedent is the whole clause "He cut off his long hair" the sentence takes on a different meaning from that where the antecedent is "his long hair."

So what's my question? I guess my question is "Am I right to criticize students' writing on this point, or am I being too picky? In truth, I teach a course in biochemistry, which is not as easy to understand as haircuts. Sometimes I can't tell whether a student understands what s/he is saying. For instance: "LF inhibits the MAP pathway, which is responsible for cell death." Is it the pathway or the inhibition of the pathway that is responsible? What do you think?

I think we need to do something about this MAP pathway and stop cell death in its tracks, for one thing! Other than that, I think your students are in good hands. The problem, as you describe it, is really not that hard to address. They have to do a word-processor search for the word "which" and ask the kind of questions that you're asking here. Is it always perfectly clear what "which" refers to — and if it isn't, the sentence needs to be rewritten. If you gave them a few examples prior to their first writing (like the "pathway" sentence), they'd probably get the idea. (After students do this a few times, they'll probably be on guard for errant "whiches" without this extra step.)

Sometimes the problem is a result of students trying to cram into a relative clause an idea that truly deserves its own sentence or at least its own independent clause. Or they will have to reorder or prioritize the ideas differently: "He looked younger when he cut off his long hair." I don't think you're being too picky. Precision and clarity and biochemistry should be good friends. I don't know if we can prove that slipshod thinking and writing is evidence of slovenly habits in the lab, but cell death is nothing to mess around with.

Where do you place a comma after the word "which?"

I doubt if that happens very often. I suppose it could happen if a parenthetical element were to be introduced immediately after the relative pronoun "which":

The Plymouth Fury, which, with its ridiculous fins and outlandish tail-lights, looked like a Buck Rogers space-ship, signaled the end of excess in the auto design of the 1950s.

You could say either, and sometimes you'll mean exactly the same thing. "Very good" is probably used more in the sense of total approbation: someone has done or said something that you wholeheartedly approve of. "Very well" can suggest "very well done," but it is often used to suggest, "Well, so much for that. Now let's go on to something else."

Is this sentence correct?
"The majority of the older population ARE women?" or should it be "The majority of the older population IS women?"

The word "majority" is singular when you are thinking of the statistical entity (and unity) that makes up the majoritiy (the "majority is silent"). It is plural, though, when you are thinking of the individuals that make up that majority. Here, especially, since you are talking about the individuality of the population (women as opposed to men), I would use the plural "are." This also goes along with a principle known as "notional agreement."

In the following sentence, is the use of the word 'fairly' grammatically correct?

• "People want to be treated fairly"
or would it be better to say;

• "People want to be treated fair"

because 'fairly' is an adverb and must have something after it?

The word "fair," normally an adjective, is used as an adverb in some idiomatic expressions, like "Play fair." Here, though, the adverb "fairly" would be an improvement. I don't know what you mean by "must have something after it." The adverb can (and often does) come after the verb it modifies.

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