A terrible sentence that has derailed my reading of a what might have been a promising article in the December 2007 issue of The Word magazine:
The list includes, but is not limited to, what, when, where and how much will my kid eat, to what and how much will my kid wear, to who are my kid's friends, to what time and how much will my kid sleep, to what will his or her grades be in school, and on and on and on.
There are so many things wrong with this sentence: I don't know where to begin. But I suppose one must begin somewhere. First, then, the sentence is much too long and there are too many commas to have excluded semicolons. Second, it seems the writer (or editor?) took seriously the rule to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition; however, apparently he does not have any idea which phrases actually require them and which do not. And third, "to who are my kid's friends" has two errors: "to who" should be "to whom" -- or, even better, "with whom" -- and "kid's" should be "kids" since "to who(m)" fills the possessive function. Except, on further inspection of the sentence, "kid's" shouldn't even be attempting to be plural in the first place because the rest of the sentence is talking about one "kid," so this item in the list should follow suit.
Here is my reworking:
The list includes, but is not limited to: what, when, where, and how much will my kid eat; what and how much will my kid wear; with whom is my kid friends; to what time and how much will my kid sleep; what will his or her grades be in school; and on and on and on.
Much better. Now that that is off my chest I can continue reading the article.
Or, I could if I could figure out why the first paragraph or two of this post is double-spaced and the rest is single-spaced. ARGH!
