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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (45660)	7/15/1999 12:56:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

The original sentence was: I may have told the story here before long ago, but when I was teaching expository writing at a school near Vassar College I used to go into the Vassar library, go to the section where they shelved the Masters and Doctoral theses, pick an expository one (English, history, philosophy, etc., rather than biology, mathematics, etc.)off the shelves at random, open it at random, and copy two or three pages and have a wonderful example of lousy writing to take back to my students and ask them to a) try to understand it and b) rewrite it in good English. Perhaps beyond reproach on purely grammatical grounds, but if I were to write it I would make 3 sentences of that.

To: jbe who wrote (45660)	7/15/1999 1:10:00 AM
From: E	Respond to of 108807

I completely accept your rewriting, and find no problem with 'it,' the antecedent of which is "example of lousy writing" in your rewriting. In other words, your "I have a wonderful example of lousy writing to take back to see whether they can understand it." is fine to me, and you rewrote it that way to make it sound fine to you, of course! But "I have a wonderful example of lousy writing to take back and ask them to try to understand it." reads better, to me, with the 'it' omitted: "I have a wonderful example of lousy writing to take back and ask them to try to understand." Do this: Pare away the "try to," and compare "I have a wonderful example of lousy writing to take back and ask them to understand it." to "I have a wonderful example of lousy writing to take back and ask them to understand." Do you see, when the skeleton is revealed, why I object to the 'it'?