Asymetrical sentence

Even an Atom has a symmetrical appearance.....





The sentence below is taken from the OVERVIEW of the Business Section of a popular national English daily.

EPMB (the contracted name of a company) has a three-pronged strategy to keep profits affloat by increasing our export sales, global sourcing and growing its water meter business agressively.

A company can be treated as a singular or plural noun. By the use of "has", the writer has treated it as singular but has continued the sentence with "our" (a first party plural pronoun) and allowed the sentence to be followed by "its" (a third party singular pronoun). How asymmetrical is this sentence?

Rewritten the sentence should be "EPMB (the contracted name of a company) has a three-pronged strategy to keep profits affloat by increasing its export sales, global sourcing and growing its water meter business agressively."

Besides, common usage has required the compound adjective "three-pronged" to be "three-prong".

Incomplete sentences as a writing style

When writing, better follow the rules of grammar.




In the OVERVIEW of a popular national English daily, it states, "In the eyes of Myanmar's military rulers, everyone is a potential enemy. Even foreign aid workers."

The statement consists of a sentence and a phrase.

Everybody knows that in writing especially a formal one, the message must be conveyed in a complete sentence or sentences.

However, nowadays incomplete sentences can be seen everywhere in articles, newspapers and even reference books guiding their users to better speaking and writing of the English language. This is perceived as a writing style not to bore the readers and aiming for clarity and emphasis; but clearly that is done at the expense of the basic grammatical rule.

This arguably effective style disregards that 'every sentence must have a full verb and can stand on its own', such rule having now become only the schoolroom rule, which, without any doubt, must nevertheless be observed by students.

In cases where you can use grammatical sentences to arrive at an effective style, why don't you follow the rules and be safe?

Like the aforesaid statement, it can be changed into a grammatical (or grammar-compliant) sentence without sacrificing clarity and emphasis: In the eyes of Myanmar's military rulers, everyone is a potential enemy - even foreign aid workers.

As can be seen, this is done by joining the sentence and the phrase by means of a dash which is used to suggest a note of surprise or an emphasis.

Relative pronoun/conjuction

Loving her discouraged









In the HEART AND SOUL column of a popular national English daily, readers write in for advice of personal problems.

The following paragraph appears in one such letter written by a female student in her final year at university asking for guidance to solve her predicament of being unable to get over her feelings for a girl who has rejected the student's advances for a relationship.

The paragraph which has in one sentence an omission of "me" added in brackets states, "Two years ago, I told you that I was in love with my best friend, a girl, which made (me) feel like a lesbian. She went abroad to study and I couldn't get over her."

Any reader will have a doubt that what made the writer feel like a lesbian - the writer being in love with her best friend or her best friend, the girl. If it is the latter, the relative pronoun "which" used therein should have been "who"; and if otherwise, that particular sentence would have to be re-written as "Two years ago, I told you that I was in love with my best friend, a girl, and that that made (me) feel like a lesbian."

You will notice that the re-written sentence has three "that's". The first and the second ones are each a conjunction used to introduce a subordinate clause as object of the principal verb (told) as the necessary complement to a statement made. The third one is a pronoun used to indicate a state or event mentioned before.

Past Continuous Required But Past Simple Used

Left or just leaving?





They paid for their purchases and left the mini-market together. Eh Poh Nim was manoeuvring her shopping cart down the ramp when she saw a man running along the road. He was headed in her direction.

The above is a paragraph taken from a newspaper Article, Life in the idioms, which is a narative account of events happening in the writer's encounter with her neighbour at a mini-market.

The hightlighted verb "left" indicates a completed act of leaving, but the next sentence still talks about the process of leaving.

Such verb should be in past continuous tense to avoid a lapse in logical sequence.

Re-written the paragraph should read as "They paid for their purchases and were leaving the mini-market together. Eh Poh Nim was manoeuvring her shopping cart down the ramp when she saw a man running along the road. He was headed in her direction.