This chapter obviously owes a great debt to Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations. Professor Shaughnessy not only taught us that students’ errors are themselves rule-bound, i.e., patterned such that four or five mistaken "rules" may account for hundreds of individual errors in a student’s writing, but she also devoted much of her book to syntactic errors. Readers of Errors and Expectations will find some of the same errors discussed here, but I hope that this chapter expands on Professor Shaughnessy’s work in three ways. First, Professor Shaughnessy was working primarily with "basic writers," i.e., students who were considered to need remedial help; the errant sentences discussed in this chapter are taken from the writing of average students, from fourth graders to college Freshmen. Second, in organizing her discussion of errors, she groups them into four main categories: Accidental Errors, Blurred Patterns, Consolidation Errors (Coordinate Consolidations, Subordinate Consolidations, Juxtaposition Consolidations), and Inversions. (47) The organization here provides a different perspective -- errors are grouped by syntactic constructions, and the constructions are presented in the same order that has been used throughout this book. Thus, the errors which result from prepositional phrases are discussed first, etc. 

     The third difference, which concerns what should be done about the problem, is more complicated. As she herself notes, Professor Shaughnessy emphasizes process and practice rather than "direct grammatical instruction as a way of improving syntax." (88) Readers of this book need not be told that I favor direct grammatical instruction. But I would suggest that the grammatical instruction for which I am arguing is a kind that Professor Shaughnessy never considered and that, had it been available and had she considered it, she might very well have liked. In discussing the "causes and cures of syntactic errors," she states: 

when academically ill-prepared young adults write, which they rarely do except in an academic situation, they often mismanage complexity. This mismanagement gets explained in different ways. One explanation focuses on what the student has not internalized in the way of language patterns characteristic of written English, another on his unfamiliarity with the composing process, and another on his attitude toward himself within an academic setting. And each of these explanations suggests a pedagogy: the pedagogy that stresses grammar, whether in the abstract or as a set of forms to be generated through practice with sentences, tends to assume that students do not have command of many of the forms required in written English and must therefore learn them through explicit instruction; ... (72-73) 

     Having said all this, I need to emphasize that students should not be taught about errors. Typical pedagogical practice is exactly the opposite of what it should be. The students who have the most problems with sentence structure are the ones who are most frequently required to do workbook exercises in which they are instructed to correct fragments, comma-splices, etc. But these are also the students who have done the least reading -- they are the students with the smallest mental storehouse of images of good written sentences. Having them work with incorrect sentences simply increases the percentage of ill-formed sentences in their memory, thereby reinforcing the very errors that the exercises were meant to eliminate. Throughout this chapter, therefore, I will suggest how the instructional approach discussed in this book will automatically result in the students’ avoiding errors. Such improvement will not, of course, occur overnight. Students will not learn to analyze clauses and immediately stop writing fragments. Assimilation requires practice. But as students continue to analyze clauses in good sentences, they will begin to realize that there is something wrong with their fragments. They do not need to be told the names of the errors -- instead of writing "frag," "cs," or "dm" in the margins, teachers need only write "ss" for "sentence structure," which would indicate to the student that she needs to focus on, and improve the structure of the sentence. As I hope to explain, the student could then examine the sentence just as she has been examining numerous others and correct the error. But what is an "error"? 
 
 

     For the last few decades there has been a growing debate about the very existence of "errors." The movement for the "students’ right to their own language," over-reacting to the prescriptivism of traditional grammar, has led some teachers to conclude that they should simply not concern themselves with errors, that everything is "correct." But this debate, like many others, is simply a question of definition. There are errors, and then there are errors, and English does not have a word to distinguish them. Roughly speaking, we can make a distinction between errors of syntax and errors of usage. Since traditional grammar did not make such a distinction, the reaction against prescriptivism is in part justified. But the distinction is real. There is no syntactic error in: 

If this is to be considered incorrect, it can be justifiably so considered only from the perspective of usage, i.e. one group of English speakers will object to it, some adamantly, but the sentence is perfectly acceptable in the context of another group of speakers. As teachers, we should urge, coax, and cajole students into learning standard usage, but we should not tell them that non-standard usage is "incorrect." The question is one of preference and of being able to address different audiences, it is not a question of grammatical error. 

     Some teachers will argue that usage is logical and can therefore be considered a matter of error, not of preference. One of their favorite arguments is the double-negative. Everyone knows that in math two negatives equal a positive; thus, we are told, in language, a double negative, as in "I ain’t done nothing," equals a positive. But this argument fails on three counts. First, linguists have discovered languages that regularly use double negatives. Second, everyone understands the sentence as a negation, not an affirmation. Third, if we adhere to the logic of the double negative, then we should all say either "I wash meself," or "he washes hisself." If, in other words, usage is logical, then we should say either:

  I wash myself. 
  You wash yourself. 
  He washes hisself. 

  I wash meself. 
  You wash youself. 
  He washes himself. 

     Unlike problems in usage, syntactic errors involve the reading process and cause the reader either to misunderstand what was meant or to have to reread in order to reconstruct it. Psycholinguists have basically shown us that a reader’s mind looks for nexal (subject/verb/complement) patterns. But the syntactic part of language processing occurs in what the psycholinguists call "Short-Term Memory" (STM), and STM can only hold five to nine "bits" of information at a time. The nature of a "bit" of information is complex and far beyond my scope here, but even if we simply consider each individual word a "bit," we can immediately see that the mind cannot hold all the words in an average main clause in STM at the same time. To process a sentence, it resorts to "chunking," i.e., grouping individual words into larger "bits." Exactly how the mind does this is still a matter of research, but we can imagine the process and even develop a little model to suggest what creates a syntactic error. 

     Basically, "chunking" involves syntactic connections. As a simple example, we can use the sentence: 

Seeking a subject, the reader’s mind perceives "the," and "little," both of which are held as adjectives. But when the mind perceives "boy," "the" and "little" are immediately chunked to it such that instead of three "bits," the phrase only occupies one. "In," "the," and "brown" add three more, but as soon as "shirt" is perceived, not only is the prepositional phrase chunked into one bit, but that bit may also be chunked to "boy," thus reducing the seven words to one bit. My model is, of course, overly simple and crude, but it does reflect the basic processing of language and it also helps us understand the nature of a syntactic error. 
 

     A syntactic error is anything that causes the reader to make incorrect chunks. In the sentence: 

Wearing a silver bracelet and white petticoat, the boy dreams of an encounter with his love. 

     Since I am about to present a catalog of syntactic errors, I would like to emphasize that it is for teachers, not for students. Teachers should not only be able to identify all these errors, they should also understand something about their causes. As we will see, many errors result from students’ attempts to use more complicated syntax, and in some cases I will argue that such errors should simply be ignored, perhaps even encouraged. Much depends on the age and experience of the student. I  suggest that fifth grade teachers totally ignore occasional comma-splices in their students’ writing. But if comma-splices still appear in the writing of an eighth grade student, the teacher should make some response.

     The response, however, should not be a focus on the errors. Students do not need to know the names for comma-splices, fragments, etc., and they certainly do not need to study all the errors in the following catalog. The best response is probably to use the approach described in the preceding chapter to give the student a firmer sense of the basic structure of normal sentences. Students should, moreover, be encouraged to write frequently and freely, without worrying about grammar. Syntax should be integrated with writing, but with revision, not with first drafts. 
 
 

     The erroneous sentences in the following reflect the errors of students at all grade levels. The catalog is not complete, but it is more complete than any I have found in print. Almost all the errors result from one of two causes -- an underdeveloped sense of nexus, or a misunderstanding of modification. Indeed, the catalog could be reorganized under these two groups, and, for example, all fragments could be discussed together, but such an organization would blur the developmental arrangement. More advanced students, as we will see, may write subjectless sentences when they attempt to make a gerund the subject. This kind of problem with nexus is quite distinct from a seventh grade student’s inability to feel the nexal connection between a regular subject and its verb. I have therefore deemed it wiser to organize the errors by constructions, keeping the constructions in the same order in which they have been discussed in preceding chapters. 

Reference Errors 

     A typical error with prepositional phrases is that they get connected to the wrong thing: 

Having students place parentheses around prepositional phrases and draw arrows to the word modified helps them recognize the problem, which may be more common and more serious than we realize. (See the discussion of dangling gerundives, below.) 
 

Interference with Subjects and Verbs 

     A student’s lack of feeling for nexus may result in his inserting the semantic subject in a prepositional phrase: 

The result of this "care-free" life at an early age, resulted in what I feel to be mild ignorances. 

     A more common problem is the interference in subject / verb agreement caused by phrases that separate the subject from the verb: 

The advancement of computers rely on the individual’s typing and programming abilities.

Superfluous Prepositions 

     A strange and somewhat inexplicable error is some students’ use of superfluous prepositions. In some cases, the preposition is simply doubled: 

In writing letters to friends or relatives, you not only need to know the standard usage of words but it is also important, to whom you are writing to, that you keep them interested. 

The instructor then began to go into detail about the essay and the things in which it should include. 

Both knew they each had a deep dark secret in which the other did not even know about. 

From that discussion Raimi again leads us into Natural Division by discussing the subjects in which he had to take in school. 

After asking the question in which I’ve waited years to know, I gave her the phone number of my dorm and waited daily for the answers. 

Subject / Verb Agreement 

     Some students do have problems getting subjects and verbs to agree in number, but their problem is not that they do not know that they should write "he says" instead of "he say." Most of these students have done hundreds of workbook exercises on subject / verb agreement, but these exercises do not help because they are almost always too simple. Indeed, most of these exercises identify the verb for the student:

Such an exercise completely misses the students’ problem: they can’t identify the verb in the first place. Half of my college Freshmen (and they are not untypical) cannot underline all the finite verbs in their own writing. In effect, the verbs get lost in a maze of words. Once they learn how to underline all the finite verbs in their writing, most students will automatically correct errors of agreement. If a student underlines all the subjects and verbs correctly and still has problems with agreement, then the teacher has reason for calling the student’s attention to the agreement problem.

Spelling Errors 

     Some readers may be surprised to find "spelling errors" discussed under syntax, but some of the most blatant and most persistent errors in spelling result, not from the student’s inability to spell, but from his poor understanding of syntactic patterns. The student who, in a written evaluation of my course, wrote: 

knows how to spell "of," "have," "past," and probably "passed." We can, of course, explain to the student that "of" is a preposition, that "have" is the verb, etc., but the explanation will not help until the student also learns how to determine when she is using a preposition, when a verb. Similarly, we can tell students that "it’s" means "it is," "they’re" means "they are," and "who’s" means "who is." But in the heat of writing, it is precisely the poor writer who will not feel the nexal verb and who will have too many other problems on his mind to be able to think about it. Here again I would suggest that exercise with underlining the subjects and verbs in entire passages will help these writers develop a feel for the nexus, but such exercises should be part of the normal course of instruction and not specific punishment for making errors. 

Subject / Verb Logic 

     An inadequate sense of nexus and of the purposes of the four variations of the basic nexal pattern also explains many students’ problems with subject / verb logic. Frequently, the error involves the predicate noun variation: students don’t realize that the subject and the predicate noun must name the same or equivalent things. Thus a student wrote: 

Some readers may not feel this as an error, but the student has confused a cause/effect relationship with one of identity: peer pressure can cause fear. In working with syntax, we should try to help students keep logical relationships as clear as possible. Another student wrote: 

If we point out to a student that "rooms" do not equal "time," he will often respond, quite correctly, that we know what he meant. I immediately admit this, but suggest that we know what he meant because the idea being conveyed is fairly simple. But that the writer equates space ("rooms") with "time" suggests that readers cannot trust this writer to lead them through any ideas that are not simple. The error, in other words, is not just grammatical. It suggests that the writer cannot distinguish spatial from temporal relationships.

     Once a writer gets beyond simplistic sentences, we teachers should always remember that errors may be the result of our own prodding. The following sentence, for example, was a student’s excellent response to my urging that students include more details in their writing: 

The taste of a sizzling foot-long hotdog coated with tangy sauerkraut with mounds of pickle relish is a typical snack when accompanied by a tall chilled paper cup of Coke. 

     Frequently, a syntactic error results from interference from another construction. As in the preceding example, many "logic" errors actually result from the writer’s placing the semantic subject in a prepositional phrase: 

The quality of the majority of the papers the instructor will receive could be extremely boring. 

The setting of this poem takes place by a trellis in the late summer or fall season. 

The location of the commercial takes place by a pool. 

Inflated Balloons,  or Main Ideas in the Main Slots 

     Students who write inflated balloons, who use weak words in the primary sentence slots and thereby shunt the important ideas into subordinate constructions, are not really making syntactic errors. This question, therefore, could just as logically be discussed in Chapter Ten ("Writing and Style"), but it fits here because the problem reflects the interaction between syntax and vocabulary. Although most textbooks urge students to put the main idea in the main pattern, some teachers object to the advice, noting that good writers don’t always do so. Both sides of the argument are correct -- the difference is one of perspective. Good writers don’t always put the main idea in the main slots, but they usually do. On the other hand, some students rarely do. Many a student’s paper is inflated by sentences such as: 

After the invention of the bike, many manufacturers created a lot of varieties in the size and in the style to make each bike different from others. 

     But the problem goes beyond that -- the student needs to look at his sentences to see if he is saying anything meaningful. In the preceding example, the opening two prepositional phrases are meaningless: could the manufacturers have possibly varied the size and style of bikes before they were invented? Likewise with the closing infinitive, "to make each bike different from others." The infinitive, one of purpose, does not convey a purpose: it simply restates the main clause in different, more general words. The writer of inflated balloons, in other words, usually can’t see that words have meanings and implications. Having such writers attempt to put the main ideas in the main patterns is thus an attempt to help them align vocabulary and syntax. It is also an exercise in syntactic flexibility. In introducing students to the parts of speech, I usually include a discussion of word families: 

 Verb      vary 
 Noun      variety, variation 
 Adjective variable, varying, varied 
 Adverb      variably 

Teachers who object to the advice about putting the main idea in the main slots apparently feel that it creates a straight-jacket for students. But it has just the opposite effect -- it increases students’ syntactic flexibility. Students are not going to follow this advice in every sentence they write: no one does. For those students who need it, the advice can work wonders. 

Punctuation 

     Fragments, comma-splices, and run-ons are almost always errors of punctuation. They are also often major syntactic errors which force the reader to go back and reprocess the sentence, but as later examples will demonstrate, they do not result primarily from a misunderstanding of the basic nexal pattern. Workbooks which give students fragments, usually subjects without verbs or verbs without subjects, probably miss the major cause of such errors, thereby confusing not only the students, but also the teachers, who are led to believe that exercises with simple sentence patterns will help.

     The role of punctuation in such errors can be seen in the following example, a sentence written by a student about auto-racing: 

At that moment everyone seated rises to their feet and shouts and cheers out-do even the loudest engine. 

Many readers will process "through these emotions" as a prepositional phrase, hit the verb "can be expressed," and then have to reprocess to locate its subject. The problem occurs because "these" can be either a pronoun or an adjective, and without a comma after it, most readers will take it as an adjective. Textbook instructions to "set off long introductory phrases with commas" miss the point -- the purpose of punctuation is to help the reader distinguish and process syntactic units. 
 
 

Punctuation 

     Most textbooks suggest that subordinate clauses before the main subject and verb should be set off with commas, whereas those after need not be. The problem with this suggestion is that it doesn’t explain why. The following sentence, taken from a student’s paper, does: 

Some readers will feel that there should be an "it" after "approached," and it is true that including the "it" would prevent the reader from processing "the light" as the direct object of "approached." But as we have seen in Chapter Four, deletion is a sign of syntactic maturity. A comma after "approached," on the other hand, is a signal to the mind to close the clause and to start looking for another subject. If the clause is placed at the end of the sentence, the problem doesn’t occur: 

The subordinate conjunction indicates that a new subject is coming, and the final period closes the subordinate as well as the main clause. Our example, of course, is an extreme which clearly indicates the problem, but the comma after any clause at the beginning of a sentence serves as a signal of closure. 

Comma-splices and Run-ons 

     Comma-splices and run-ons are obviously punctuation errors, but attempts to "treat" them as such are doomed to failure. Here again the problem is usually not that the students’ don’t know the rules: they know them -- or at least they learned them at one time, found them useless, and then forgot them. What they don’t know is how to distinguish the ends of their main clauses. Run-ons are probably the more serious of the two errors, primarily because, as with unpunctuated subordinate clauses at the beginning of a sentence, the reader receives no signal to close the clause: 

The hometeam Courtland Cougars struck first a lightning quick run by Bill Culley made the game seven nothing. 

I was disliked by some children because of my kindness they had the impression that I was rich. 

     Since the comma in the comma-splice indicates at least a degree of closure, the error is not as serious. Indeed, professional writers, who almost never use run-ons, often resort to comma splices. Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with thirteen of them: 

     It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.  (Heritage edition)

The song writer puts onto paper his feelings, [:] an excellent example of a song writer is Barry Manilow, he [who] expresses many feelings in his songs which he then sings with the emotions he has expressed. 

Fragments 

     Many fragments result simply from the student’s punctuating a subordinate clause as a main one: 

Because I never knew what was going on in class. I was always thinking about something else. 

Complete thought = main clause 
subordinate clause <> main clause 
Therefore: subordinate clause <> complete thought.

     Another ridiculous attempt to solve the student’s problem is frequently used: "put periods where the pauses are." Teachers who give this advice ought to listen to themselves talk: 

 "Why did you take a cookie?" 
 "Because I was hungry." 

     Although some subordinate clause fragments are only a matter of punctuation, others result from the student’s inability to keep track of the preceding elements of his sentence. Thus some students will begin a main clause, go into a subordinate clause, and forget to finish the main: 

Students [who cannot write grammatically,] [who cannot express their ideas and personal experiences]. 

     The subtleties of clausal embedding can easily result in fragments: 

On the other hand, another story I heard by Julie, my older sister, about a blind date that was thoroughly enjoyable. 

On the other hand, another story I heard by Julie, my older sister, was about a blind date that was thoroughly enjoyable. 

On the other hand, I heard another story by Julie, my older sister, about a blind date that was thoroughly enjoyable. 

Interfering Constructions and Increasing Maturity 

     We have already seen how prepositional phrases can interfere with subject / verb agreement, but they can also result in mangled syntax: 

In "The Town Dump," Stegner spoke of the skeleton of the colt, which was once his, was found skinned and lying on the dump. 

In "The Town Dump," Stegner spoke of the skeleton of the colt was found skinned and lying on the dump. 

     The error, in other words, may be a sign that the student has mastered subordinate clauses and is in the process of learning to reduce them to gerundives. Having added the "which was once his, the student may have sensed that the gerundive "found" would be too far from "skeleton." The "was" is thus an interesting retreat to the subordinate clause, almost suggesting that the student perceives the strength of nexus as opposed to junction. 

     I am not, of course, suggesting that the student consciously performed all this syntactic analysis. Were the student capable of that, he probably would have omitted the "was." Syntactic growth takes place naturally, with or without instruction. Students test and probe, trying new combinations and matching them against their individual, internalized sense of "sentence," a sense developed from their reading and from reactions to their writing. Along the way, they make mistakes. Here, as always, I am suggesting that a conscious understanding of syntax 1) will help teachers understand why students make the errors that they do, and 2) will help students more quickly understand which of their combinations are successful. 
 

Faulty Noun Clauses 

     Noun clauses used as subjects don’t seem right to many students, some of whom avoid them by using adverbial clauses followed by a pronoun which refers to the adverbial clause: 

When Madame Bovary tries for the power of attorney and gains it, this shows her influence over Charles. 

That Madame Bovary tries for and gains the power of attorney shows her influence over Charles. 

     A main clause followed by a gerundive that modifies the entire preceding clause is another indication of students’ problems with the noun clause as subject: 

The setting is very dark, meaning depression or loneliness. 

Jeans have never gone out of style, making them a worthwhile investment. 

Keats compares the artistic scene on the urn to real life, which questions his sense of reality. 

Cause and Effect and Other Faulty Noun Clauses 

     For decades, textbooks have been instructing students not to use "The reason is because . . .," but students continue to use it, in part, at least, because the textbooks have never explained what is wrong with it. Nor, apparently, have the writers of the textbooks noted the similarity between this "error" and sentences such as: 

One innovative idea was when balls of string were used to bond the congregation together literally as Christ’s love bonds the congregation together. 

Another thing silly about adults is when they are calling their pets. 

The only thing that stopped them was when my mom called the principal and he talked to B.B. and me. 

The first method was when he had one of his new classes read only for pleasure. 

     A variation of this problem is the use of an adverbial clause as a subject: 

When the Master tells Ivan that "Satan is whom you met," might suggest that the Master has an inner relationship with the devil. 

Subject Verb Agreement and Subordinate Clauses 

Students problems with the case of relative pronouns, especially in subordinate clauses, are well-known. Thus we find sentences such as:

In the play, Oedipus vows that he will punish whomever brought, to the kingdom of Thebes, the plague. 

Subconsciously humans cause their libido to function and secrete excesses of hormones which in turn raises their sex drive. 

Besides being wrapped up in drugs, he has gotten involved with false philosophies which leaves out Christ. 

Dangling Gerundives 

     At the college level, gerundives are the most likely modifier to dangle: 

Walking into the room, the eye immediately goes to the single, glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling. 

and mean that she was thrown from the car. If we imagine this sentence in a police report used at a trial which the policeman cannot attend, we can foresee some serious miscommunication. Thousands of such misplaced modifiers go undetected each year simply because the teacher is able to construct an acceptable meaning even though the meaning is not what the student intended. When such misplacements are detected, they are thus a serious problem, not as individual "errors," but as a reflection of the writer’s inability to understand how words relate to each other within sentences. 

     As we noted in Chapter Five, gerundives, reductions of clauses, are, as Hunt calls them, "late-blooming constructions." The better readers and writers may have problems with gerundives in the early grades, but most students won’t use them (except as "formulas") until grades nine and ten. The following sentence illustrates the kind of problem that students may have: 

The first story was called "The Brown Wasps" and we discussed the story in detail and then numbering the paragraphs and then dividing the story into sections. 

The student has attempted to reduce "numbered" to the gerundive "numbering," but has retained the "and then" from the less mature version. We could, and perhaps should, in other words, view this "error," the incomplete reduction of a clause, as a sign of progress. Reduction accounts for many lost gerundives: 

Recently, when leaving for college, my mother had a hard time letting me go. 

     In the frequent "repressed egocentric dangler," the dangling gerundive expresses the writer’s actions: 

Looking around the room, it becomes obvious that two people live in it. 

While reading the article, it consisted of suggestions for good and bad [sic] blind dates. 

 Continuing in a circular motion, bunk beds are beside the wardrobe on the opposite wall facing the window. 

As I was looking around the room, ... 
While I was reading the article, I noted that it ... 
As I continued in a circular motion, I saw that ... 

Our stomachs were full of butterflies wondering whether, after all this work, we could pull the performance off as a success. 

Gerundive Fragments 

     Every individual has a sense of "correct" sentence length -- after a certain number of words, we feel the need for a period. Every individual’s sense is, of course, different, and as was suggested in Chapter Four, "sentence" length increases with age. Many fragments may result from the students’ sense of sentence length -- the student writes sufficient words to fill his sense of a sentence, puts down a period, and then continues with the sentence, thereby writing a subordinate clause or gerundive fragment: 

All at once I was overwhelmed by the thought of a good meal and before I knew it I was asking for the dark brown glistening object on my plate. Thinking awful thoughts such as what if it’s so raw inside the steak that it will run off my plate the first time I try to cut into it or what if it’s so well done that it’s been lying there and now is as hard as a rock. 

Gerunds as Subjects 

     Some inexperienced writers avoid using gerunds as subjects. When they do attempt to use them, they frequently do so incorrectly, often making the gerund the object of the preposition "by": 

By seeing and hearing the closeness between those sisters in the sorority made me want to join more. 

      Occasionally, a gerund as subject is immediately followed by an unnecessary "it" to shore it up: 

Being involved it assures the individual that he has helped in the decision making. 

Everybody feels lust, (except certain parts of New Jersey) and by feeling lust, without being able to control it, it can backfire and cause severely negative reactions. 

The thought of doing another uniformed paper, was just seen as another meticulous assignment. 

Personal gain through taking advantage of others is a threat to us all. ["Taking advantage of others for personal gain threatens us all.": It is not, after all, the "gain" that is a threat; it is the "taking advantage."] 

Creating illusions like that were very helpful in conquering my enormous fear of death. 

Voracious Verbals 

     In the discussion of "When I approached the light was red," we have already seen the voracity of verbs. The problem becomes more common as sentences become more complicated. Some of the most amusing sentences that students write result from their failure to realize that, once a verb or verbal appears in a sentence, it has a tendency to gobble up nouns as its objects:

I remember the men who dressed like Cherokee Indians dressed long ago, wearing the brightly colored feather bonnets and all the trees and unusual rocks. 

     Some voracious verbals may result in sentences that we ache to correct but don’t know if we should:

Learning and practicing sentence structure, paragraphing, organization, and a fairly extensive vocabulary is necessary. 

Infinitives as Subjects 

     As with gerunds and noun clauses, inexperienced writers are ill-at-ease with infinitives as subjects and may prop them up with a redundant pronoun: 

To be a good nurse it requires a person with very unique qualities. 

 a.) Stegner’s sentence is hard to read. 
 b.) To read Stegner’s sentence is hard. 

Fragments 

     The same sense of sentence length that underlies gerundive fragments probably causes most of the infinitive fragments. Whereas teachers usually focus on fragments only long enough to write "frag" in the margin, we should look at each in the context of the preceding and following main clauses. Usually, we’ll find that the fragment fits, but sometimes the syntax doesn’t: 

Or, if you went somewhere, such as a restaurant, and you liked the food and the service, you might want to write a letter telling the owner how you feel about the restaurant. Or to let the owner know if there was something you did not like about the restaurant, so that he might change the problem. 

but the gerundive would be so far removed from the verb "want" that it would lose the sense of purpose. Hence the student instinctively opted for the infinitive, an infinitive of purpose. Unable to perform this syntactic analysis, the student ended the thought after restaurant with a period and expressed the complementary, and also complete, thought in the fragment. The easiest solution to this particular sentence is probably to make the second "or" join two infinitives: 

For students to be able to see this on their own, however, they have to be able not just to recognize constructions, but also to untangle their interrelationships. 
In the right context, some fragments are not only "acceptable," but even excellent writing: 

No sooner had the leaves begun to enjoy their ravishing youth when they were torn from the security of their home to lie on the ground and be trampled on by others. Never again to relish life except for in the whirlwind periodically. 

Other infinitive errors 

     In Chapter Six we noted that sentences such as "They made Bill captain" can be analyzed as having an ellipsed infinitive ("to be") as the object of the verb, with "Bill" as the subject and "captain" as the predicate noun of the infinitive. In its simplest form, the infinitive as direct object causes students no problem. But as Kellogg Hunt noted, when more constructions are packed into a sentence, the chance of problems increases: 

A doctor told me that a 5% loss of water will make the skin shrink, the mouth and tongue become dry and hallucination begins and a 15% loss is fatal. 

     What Mina Shaughnessy called "blurred patterns" are much more likely to occur when gerunds and infinitives, especially ellipsed, appear in the same clause: 

Computer modernization has made the process of obtaining lengthy information and hard to find facts much more readily available. 

     What should we do about such blurred sentences? Some teachers promote "KISS" ("Keep it simple, stupid.") But KISS is only part of the answer. Although "computer modernization" could probably be simplified to "computers have made" without any loss of meaning, how do we simplify the rest of the sentence: 

...has made lengthy information and hard to find facts much more readily available? 

... has made the process of obtaining lengthy information and hard to find facts much quicker? 

has made the process of obtaining information quicker and hard to find facts much more readily available. 

Fragments 

     We have now arrived at the latest of the late-blooming constructions, the appositives and noun absolutes. Young children, of course, use appositives ("Uncle Bill"), but these appositives are short and undeveloped. The maturer writer tends to modify the appositives, and some of the modified appositives are cut off as fragments: 

The shadows are diminishing as the smell of freshly cut grass emanates from the house across the street, via a crisp, chilly breeze. A breeze that seemed to signify the prelude of a new season coming forth, a breeze that falsified the radiating warmth of the sun. 

The sea represents physical love, for in the town there is only a well and it is stagnant. Stagnant as the girls’ sex lives. 

There was Ken’s room, and Davy’s room. Ken’s room being "Off Limits" to Davy, and vice versa. 

Appositives 

     Except for their being punctuated as fragments, appositives cause few problems. When other problems do occur, however, they are interesting: 

Christian religions condemn it by saying it is an act of adultery; one of God’s commandments. 

     A more common, but still relatively rare problem involves keeping appositives parallel: 

Within the conscience there are two types of voices, the one that says "go ahead" even when one knows he should not, and the other voice says "do not do it" even though one may really want to. 

Noun Absolutes 

     The same kind of reversion to a finite verb appears when students subordinate ideas with noun absolutes: 

Imagine for example a student writing a paper which is due the next day and the power goes off. 

     The absolute, of course, may easily become entangled with gerundives and dangling modifiers: 

First of all, children’s appearance should be acceptable, with hair neat and combed and wearing nice clothes. 

Coordinating Conjunctions 

     Over and over again I have to tell students that the smallest and simplest words cause the biggest problems. I have reserved a discussion of coordinating conjunctions until last because, although they cause problems at all age levels, the most severe problems result at more advanced levels when students attempt to compound clauses, gerunds, and other developed constructions. It annually amazes me that most college Freshmen do not know what coordinating conjunctions are. If they do "know," they have usually only memorized definitions which they are unable to apply. The interference caused by these conjunctions has been implicit in many of the previous examples, but note how the "and" functions in:

Squadsmen will always remember how the evening that began with excitement ended with tragedy, and with thoughts of how lucky they are to be alive and well. 

     Near the beginning of this chapter, I stated that almost all errors can be attributed to one of two causes, an underdeveloped sense of nexus, or a misunderstanding of modification. The poor sense of nexus is reflected in semantic subjects placed in prepositional phrases, in major ideas presented in subordinate constructions, and in some fragments. A misunderstanding of modification results primarily in prepositional phrases and gerundives that dangle or modify the wrong thing.

     But we have also seen three other factors that underlie students’ errors. First, every student has a sense of the "appropriate" length of a sentence, and if his sentence becomes longer, he is liable to put a period in the middle of it. This accounts for subordinate clauses, gerundives, infinitives, appositives and noun absolutes all being punctuated as fragments. Second, we have seen what might be called "developmental" errors: as students attempt to include more advanced constructions in their writing, they make mistakes. Some of these mistakes simply result from the students’ being unable to keep track of syntactic connections among a larger number of words. Other mistakes result from the students’ lack of knowledge (or confidence) about the use of constructions, but even here the mistakes form a pattern -- in attempting to use clauses, gerunds or infinitives as subjects, students frequently support the subject with a superfluous "it" and/or place the gerund or infinitive in a prepositional phrase, or use an adverbial rather than a noun clause. Finally, some problems may result from our own instructions -- telling students not to use the first person or not to end a sentence with a preposition.

     The patterns in these problems, their interrelatedness, suggests that they can be solved with a simple solution, if that solution addresses the cause of the problems. The ultimate cause of the problems is that students do not understand how syntax works. In the preceding chapter, I have proposed a sequence for teaching students just that. Students do not need "remedial" instruction in avoiding errors; if we teach students how to analyze the syntax of their own sentences, they will eventually eliminate their errors themselves. All we have to do is be patient and expect errors as our students continue to grow. 

1. What makes an error an error?

2. Do you or your schools distinguish between errors of usage and errors of syntax?

3. The chapter argues that many syntactic errors are signs of syntactic growth. Is that argument convincing, and, if so, what are its implications?

4. The chapter also argues that the best way to deal with students' syntactic errors is to ignore them and focus on teaching students to anaylze "correct" sentences. Do you agree or disagree with this strategy? Why?
 

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