Monday, May 26, 2008

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".

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