Here’s an example of the sort of sentence structure I’ve seen unusually frequently this summer:
For the story “Mumu,” it would fit under the Social Critique heading…
Did you catch the grammatical slip there?
The sentence begins with a fragment—”For the story”—in which the noun (“the story”) is the object of a preposition (“For”). The sentence that follows the comma—”it would fit under…”—forgets that the noun “story” is the object of the preposition and pretends that it is the subject of the fragment by associating the word with the pronoun “it.”
A more correct way to craft that sentence would be to write
For the story “Mumu,” the most appropriate category would be “Stories Related to Dog Ownership in Tsarist Russia”…
That sentence is at least grammatically correct; it is, however, a bit inelegant and a bit indirect. My preference would be for a sentence comme ça:
I group “Mumu” and Great Expectations as stories partially concerning deranged older women.
Note the structure there: subject (“I”) + verb (“group”) + direct object (“story X and novel Y”) + prepositional object (“as Z”). This is the simplest grammatical structure in English, and is the appropriate sentence structure in which to express complicated ideas.
Tags: 44 Reminders
