Re: IS or ARE

[yehoshua paul <ysp10182 -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Any sentence that leads to hair splitting is a sentence that needs to be
rewritten. Every single time a person who cares about documentation and/or
English reads this sentence, he is going to start a discussion with the
author on whether or not the sentence is correct. Sentences like these
should be taught in syntax classes. For your everyday technical writing
purposes just revise the sentence to active. It will save a lot of
headaches for everyone in the long term.

Just my two cents,
Yehoshua Paul,
Your friendly neighbour hood technical writer (who has a new tagline!)



On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Phil03 <philstokes03 -at- googlemail -dot- com> wrote:

> > But are we just picking at hairs
>
>
> I like picking at hairs (it's what I was trained to do!). :p
>
>
> > You see: "months of free service" is the object in this specific form of
> the statement
>
> No, that's not possible to determine from syntax alone. You have to
> consider the semantic intent.
>
> Whether 'two' is modifying 'months of free service' or whether 'two
> months' is modifying 'free service' depends what question the statement is
> implicitly answering:
>
> 'How many months of free service do you give?' versus 'How much free
> service do you give?'
>
> That kind of context is normally understood and not made explicit in most
> communicative channels (eg., speech).
>
> When you are writing fossilised documents to an imagined audience, the
> writer has to choose a context and a form that fits it.
>
>
> Phil
> http://applehelpwriter.com
>
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