This time out, we have a triple-whammy (or quadruple-whammy, depending on how you count) from the New York Review of Books.
SENTENCES: The larger question is about the Democratic Party as a whole. First, whether the campaign of the nominee and the Democratic National Committee and various state and local Democrats around the country can coordinate a response to attacks; second, whether the Democrats have yet grasped the importance of emotional appeals in political combat, a skill many Republicans have mastered.
WHERE: Tomasky, Michael. “Election Fever.” The New York Review of Books 54.17 (November 8, 2007): 22.
CORRECTION: The larger question is about the Democratic Party as a whole: first, whether the campaign of the nominee and the Democratic National Committee and various state and local Democrats around the country can coordinate a response to attacks; second, whether the Democrats have yet grasped the importance of emotional appeals in political combat, a skill many Republicans have mastered.
CRITIQUE: Fragment! Fragment, fragment, fragment! You can’t just put a couple of clauses out there, hang a semicolon between them, and call it a sentence. To me, the original sentence looks like something that got tried several different ways and ended up bungled in the final edit.
Even as a corrected sentence, what I’ve got isn’t exactly a masterpiece of conceptual clarity. “The larger question” about the Democratic party is actually two question, one of which is about various groupings of Democrats rather than the party itself. Next to that doozy of a fragment, though, we’ll let it go.
SENTENCES: A national popular vote would … force candidates to campaign in states they don’t much bother to campaign in now because they’re either firmly red or blue …. The push it really needs is from the large states that are either reliably blue or red.
WHERE: Tomasky, Michael. “Election Fever.” The New York Review of Books 54.17 (November 8, 2007): 23.
CORRECTION: A national popular vote would … force candidates to campaign in those firmly red or blue states they don’t much bother to campaign in now …. The push it really needs is from the large states that are either reliably blue or reliably red.
CRITIQUE: Oh, Mr. Tomasky! What happened here? There are a number of problems, including an ambiguity about whether it’s the states or the candidates who are firmly red or blue. I’m especially struck, though, by the two misplacements of either.
Let’s look at the first example. Either firmly red or blue describes a noun by saying it is in one of two conditions: on the one hand, it might be firmly red, while on the other, it might be blue. Firmly blue is not one of the possibilities.
You’ll note that my correction uses reliably twice. That might look like a redundancy, but we can’t go with reliably blue or red, because that would simply mean that we can rely on the states in question to elect either a Democrat or Republican rather than someone else. (Think of it this way: a traffic light is reliably red, yellow or green.) The only way to be sure the message is clear is to use reliably twice.
SENTENCES: In a world in which more and more people worked for wages, often in large companies, rather than running their own businesses or conducting independent trades, a significant part of the citizenry was plainly unable to protect themselves against losses and hardships resulting from problems in the economy at large for which they bore no individual responsibility.
WHERE: Friedman, Benjamin M. “FDR & the Depression: The Big Debate.” The New York Review of Books 54.17 (November 8, 2007): 26.
CORRECTION: In a world in which more and more people worked for wages, often in large companies, rather than running their own businesses or conducting independent trades, a great many citizens were plainly unable to protect themselves against losses and hardships resulting from problems in the economy at large for which they bore no individual responsibility.
CRITIQUE: So it is not merely Michael Tomasky who’s at a loss in this latest edition of The New York Review. Apparently their copy editor just snoozed through this issue.
Here Benjamin Friedman makes a pair of classic mistakes, but in sort of an unusual way.
It’s quite common for people to get confused about agreement in number (making sure the subject and predicate are either both singular or both plural) when a prepositional phrase gets in the way.
Consider this example: A huge number of people are waiting in the hall. The example is incorrect because the subject of the sentence is number, which is singular, not people, which is plural. The correct way to say it is A huge number of people is waiting in the hall. (And yeah, I know that sounds a little goofy. Idiomatic speech, to sound normal, sometimes has to violate the rules for standard written English. David Foster Wallace has a great essay in Consider the Lobster that touches on this topic.)
Friedman does fine with his subject and predicate — part and was — but then blows it by using the plural pronouns themselves and they. We can see the error clearly if we remove the prepositional phrase, which leaves us with a significant part was unable to protect themselves. And that’s just not right.
In my correction, I take a bit of a gamble and leave out the word significant, replacing it with the more colloquial great many. If the word had been majority or plurality — some word that had specific implications in terms of proportion or quantity — I might have worked harder to keep it in the sentence. Significant, however, in this case merely means noteworthy, which can go without saying because we’re in the process of noting it. It is left to the reader to imagine what might constitute a significant part of the citizenry. Eighty percent? One hundred thousand? Five brothers from Minnesota? The sentence doesn’t say, but we can assume that the idea is many.