Part 8 (1/2)
Having arrived at the county jail, the mob forced
open the door.
=153. Agreement of Verbs.=--One should watch one's verbs carefully, too, to see that they agree in number with their subjects. One is sometimes tempted to make the verb agree with the predicate, as in the following:
The weakest section of the course are the ninth,
tenth, and eleventh holes.
But English usage requires agreement of the verb with the subject. If the subject is a collective noun, one may regard it as either singular or plural. But when the writer has made his choice, he must maintain a consistent point of view. One may say,
The mob were now gathering in the northeast corner
of the yard and yelling themselves hoa.r.s.e,
or
The mob was now gathering in the northeast corner of
the yard and yelling itself hoa.r.s.e.
But the two points of view may not be mixed in the same sentence or the same paragraph. That the following sentence is wrong should be evident at a glance:
The Kellog-Haines Singing Party has been on the
lyceum and chautauqua platform for eight years and
have toured together the entire United States.
Confusion is often caused also by qualifying phrases intervening between subjects and their verbs. Thus:
The number of the strikers and of the members of the
employment a.s.sociations do not agree with the report
made by the commission.
And sometimes one finds a plural verb wrongly used after the correlative terms _either ... or_ and _neither ... nor_, as in the following:
Neither the mother of the children nor the aunt were
held responsible for the accident.
Finally, one often finds reporters consistently using a singular verb after the expletive _there_. In fifty per cent of the cases the writers are wrong. Thus:
The briefest glance at the yard and premises would
have shown that there was more than one in the
conspiracy.
Here _was_ should be _were_.
=154. Coordination and Subordination.=--The third error in grammatical construction, failure to coordinate or subordinate sentences and parts of sentences properly, cannot be treated with so much sureness as the two preceding faults; yet certain definite instruction may be given.
_And_, _but_, _for_, _or_, and _nor_ are called coordinating conjunctions; that is, they are used to connect words, phrases, and clauses of equal rank. If one uses _and_ to connect a noun with a verb, or a past participle with a present participle, or a verb in the indicative mood with one in the subjunctive, he perverts the conjunction and produces a consequent effect of awkwardness or lack of clearness in the sentence. Look at the following:
The sister residing in Albany, and who is said to
have struck one of the visiting sisters, followed
them into the sick room.
In this sentence _and_ is used to connect the participle _residing_ with the p.r.o.noun _who_, and the consequent awkwardness results. This is the much condemned _and who_ construction. Likewise, in the next sentence:
Five hundred persons saw two boys washed from the
end of Winter's pier and drowning in twenty feet of
water at noon to-day.
_And_ is here used to connect the past participle _washed_ with the present participle _drowning_, and the sentence is thereby rendered clumsy.
=155. Clauses Unequal in Thought.=--An equally great inaccuracy is the attempt to connect with a coordinate conjunction clauses equivalent in grammatical construction, but unequal in thought value. Other things being equal, the ideas of greatest value should be put into independent clauses, the ideas of least value into dependent clauses or phrases.
_Other things being equal_, be it understood, for by a too strict observance of this rule one may easily make the sentence ludicrous. Take the following as an ill.u.s.tration:
We were to raid the hall precisely at midnight, and
we set our watches to the second.
Here the thought-value of the two clauses is not equal, no matter how the writer may attempt to make it seem so by expressing the ideas in clauses grammatically equal. The second clause contains the main idea; so the first should be subservient. Thus: