"The Giants also were able to shake off Kevin Boss' early fumble and kept the woebegone Seahawks from gaining any life from it." — From an article by Vinny DiTrani in The Record(Bergen County, NJ), November 9, 2010
I know weird things happen when we write. Isn't that why we revise? An out-loud reading of this demands, it seems to me, keep instead of kept. That's how I feel about it.
R.
5 comments:
Heh. It's hard to make your mind stop reading things that way, isn't it.
If you're working with ESL students, then your focus on determiners (which I'd have called definite or indefinite articles) makes sense. When I worked in the writing lab back in the day, a lot of the ESL students that I worked with (the university had a particularly large Japanese contingent) had severe issues with those.
And so did I -- one of those things where I know exactly how it's supposed to be done, but could never explain it to someone else. I'm not sure there is a logical way to explain that usage to someone whose native language doesn't have a framework for it.
I usually just ended up writing the correct ones in because trying to explain why "a" instead of "the," or why anything at all, made both my client and me feel like our heads were going to explode.
I don't know if it's fair for you to expect a sports writer to know how to ......you know, write. Besides, it's Saturday.
Those determiners are a real challenge. Where I'm at, we have a lot of Middle-easterners, and they don't use them either.
As far as being a sports writer goes, I expect him to know how to talk. I defy someone to read that statement out loud and not feel the wrongness of it all the way to their core. It is less a criticism of his writing than of his revision.
I can't really debate about it being Saturday, except that it probably wasn't a Saturday when he wrote it. But it could have been.
R.
I suppose you could say that "and" is conjoining up with the first verb of the sentence instead of the second. "The Giants were . . . and kept . . ." It's not a huge stretch in my mind. Which isn't to say it's a good thing.
I still remember the day I learned the real difference between "a" and "the" in one of my linguistics classes. It was like a bolt of lightening. The choice of "a" or "the" isn't really grammatical. It's semantic. Typically, you use "a" the first time a particular noun is introduced into a discourse, because the entity is new--it hasn't become definite yet. Thereafter you typically use "the." It's not quite that straightforward, because context could indicate that the noun is definite even if it hasn't been specifically mentioned yet. But it works as a general principle. Watch for it next time you're reading and you'll see it.
I don't suppose there's a chance journalist are now using mom-type? I hear it's quite up and coming! :-)(whatever that means.. )
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