"By clicking on the Unsubscribe button, a confirmation message will be
emailed to you"
"By clicking on the Remind button, your password will be emailed to you"
========================================
>From "The New Webster's Grammar Guide" (A Complete Handbook To English
Grammar..)
When the gerund phrase at the beginning of a sentence does not have
a logical relation to the subject of the sentence, the result is often
humorous. The careful study of a sentence like the following will help
you understand the error and the reason for the correction:
By pressing a button, the table comes out of the wall. (incorrect) (pressing – dangling gerund)
This sentence clearly indicates that someone must press a button
before the table will come out of the wall. According to the way in
which the sentence is written, the table performs that function. Such
an interpretation would be absurd.
The trouble with the sentence is the subject has no logical
relation to the gerund. The subject of the sentence should be a word
that would indicate the doer of the action expressed by the gerund.
That word does not appear in the sentence as it is written. The
sentence would be correctly written in either one of the following
ways: … If you press a button, the table will come out of the wall.
========================================
What am I missing, guys? Most of you clicked these buttons after you
had read mentioned mailman phrases. Are these sentences grammatically
correct? (Upon reading these mailman phrases, the buttons were clicked
by most of you :-)
Thank you in advance.
Mike, Ukraine.
---
PS
BTW, where is this old grumpy Olin PICking now, does anybody know?
Perhaps he's got not that much high-society manners, but I'm not a
US president too, to expose perfect manners with good respectable
language.
What do I need is just uncensored plain EE-related talks. Raw open
country-stylish kicks can't spoil good conversation as for me :-)
> What am I missing, guys? Most of you clicked these buttons after you
> had read mentioned mailman phrases. Are these sentences grammatically
> correct? (Upon reading these mailman phrases, the buttons were clicked
> by most of you :-)
I'm assuming you interpret these sentences as intended, and that you aren't
trying to decipher the meaning, right?
Gramatically, no, they aren't correct. To correct them, the subject of the
sentence must be changed. A correct version might read:
"By clicking on the Unsubscribe button, you are requesting a that a
confirmation e-mail be sent to you."
This wording indicates that YOU (the reader) are the one pressing the
button. As written above, the confirmation e-mail is the one pressing the
button, which is a patently ridiculous concept.
In common conversation or writing, however, almost no one will ever
even notice that difference (I had to read it twice to figure out the
problem). It is, in many ways, just like ending a sentence with a
preposition.
"That is the item I was thinking of!" - Incorrect. "Of", as a preposition,
should never be used without an object.
"I was think of that very item!" - Correct. In this case, "of" is used as
a part of a prepositional phrase.
Frankly, most of this stuff made almost no sense to me (a native
speaker) until I took German. I think the take-away lesson is that
English is quite flexible, and most English speakers can interpret
your meaning even if it is quite mangled (although I have generally
found your postings to be extremely well written, far better than I'm
ever likely to manage in any foreign tongue).
> "By clicking on the Unsubscribe button, a confirmation message will be
> emailed to you"
>
> "By clicking on the Remind button, your password will be emailed to
> you"
>
> ....
>
> Are these sentences grammatically correct?
No, for the reason you quoted. However, the meaning is clear,
since passwords can't click on buttons.
The error is more obvious when the subject COULD do the action,
e.g., "By annoying the people on the list, James will ban you."
-Andrew
=== Andrew Warren -- .....aiwKILLspam@spam@cypress.com
=== Principal Design Engineer
=== Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
===
=== Opinions expressed above do not
=== necessarily represent those of
=== Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
> "That is the item I was thinking of!" - Incorrect.
> "Of", as a preposition, should never be used without an object.
> "I was think of that very item!" - Correct. In
> this case, "of" is used as a part of a prepositional phrase.
I'll check this out.
> Frankly, most of this stuff made almost no sense to me
> (a native speaker) until I took German. I think the
> take-away lesson is that English is quite flexible, and
> most English speakers can interpret your meaning even if
> it is quite mangled...
But this definitely makes sense to those whose native
language is not English. A lot of folks can't always take
English flexibly for the lack of practice and can easily
misinterpret one's meaning when it is quite mangled.
> ...although I have generally found your postings to be
> extremely well written, far better than I'm ever likely
> to manage in any foreign tongue).
The level of English usage on PICList is surprisingly high.
That's the reason I prefer English-speaking PICList to my
native Russian-speaking EE-oriented forums, where the level
of Russian language usage is usually just frightening.
The reason, I suspect, is that all members are
native-speakers and "this stuff makes almost no sense to them"
So, I originated this thread not as an attempt to troll a bit,
as some might think, but as an attempt to make something to
keep the standards high. Perhaps I should have chosen a
better form for doing this, I am not sure.
Andrew Warren wrote:
> The error is more obvious when the subject COULD do
> the action, e.g., "By annoying the people on the list,
> James will ban you."
Cypress' people are smart :-) If I'll be about to
choose a USB chip, I'll choose Cypress' one.
mit.edu> wrote: