An Awkward Sentence
Linguistic principles come into play most effectively in the space between drafts. The sentence in bold below is part of an essay in which the student discusses school funding.
“What else would this money be used for? New textbooks for classes, having new and better school utilities, and making school buildings look better. These all may be good things to have a new and good look for things, but it is still taking away the creativity that students may carry.”
The problems in the bold sentence are grammatical, logical, and semantic.
The grammatical ones relate mostly to pronouns. The subject of the first sentence is these, and so the reader looks to the last occurring nouns before the pronoun (new textbooks, school utilities, and making school buildings look better) to endow this pronoun with meaning. What are school utilities? Is she referring to electricity, heating and cooling, or to some sort of convenience or maintenance? making school buildings look better is also vague. Does she mean painting, cleaning, redesigning, or something else?
The subject of the first sentence, these, is already vague and confusing. The subject of the second sentence, it seems to hark back to the vague these of the first sentence, but these holds only the confusing meaning of its own antecedents. The reader is left to make her own sense out of the sentence.
The logical development in this sentence is also flawed. The sentence says that students’ creativity is taken away by it or these which seem to refer to new textbooks, better school utilities, and making school buildings look better. This surely does not make sense.
The semantics add to the confusion:
The word things is too general in the sentence a new look for things. What things? There are two undefined things in one sentence.
School utilities does not refer to anything easily identifiable — one has to impose a definition.
Students do not “carry” creativity.
This is one of the longer posts on this blog, which illustrates just how complicated it becomes when statements are ungrammatical (using pronouns without clearly identifiable antecedents), illogical (the statement that students’ creativity is endangered by new textbooks, better school utilities, and making things look better), and vague (things, misleading or incorrectly applied verb, carry.)
When these lapses are addressed between drafts, the writer now has a chance to say it well in a second or third draft. She may not be all that sure what these and it mean herself, and she now has a chance to clarify her thoughts.
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