I’ve been writing something formal (a grad school statement of purpose). I’ve been corrected by someone on a phrase similar to the following:
“A core mechanic of the game is training your creature…”
My friend thinks it should be
“A core mechanic of the game is to train your creature…”
The latter sounds so stilted to my ear that I would personally believe it incorrect. I do note, however, that I’ve seen my grammar browser addon mark similar constructs to the former as “incorrect”, though I’ve never had such a thing marked wrong by English instructors.
I probably will continue using a gerund there in everyday writing, but I’d like to know if in formal or academic writing there’s a strong preference for the latter. If so, I’ll begrudgingly use it in such contexts where my grammar will be nazi’d.
From this style guide. It doesn’t look as though your original wording was ‘wrong,’ only that maybe there’s a consensus in style that the infiitive might be a better choice. Edit: It doesn’t appear to me that the fact that it follows a copula is relevant.
In reality however, we don’t know how similar. You presented us with a sentence that you feel is syntactically equivalent to the one that was deprecated by your colleague. But it’s possible that some seemingly extraneous aspect would motivate a different choice in the example sentence.
Having said that, while the use of the gerund after the copula seems fine to me, one concern in this case is that the resulting sentence is ambiguous (it can be parsed with the noun phrase “a core mechanic” as the subject and the verb phrase “is training…” rather than the intended meaning where "the “is” couples two noun phrases). The choice of the infinitive helps to reduce this ambiguity and avoid a “garden path” effect.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this wording except that it can be parsed in more than one way: it makes me picture a guy with a wrench who is busy training your creature. To remove the ambiguity, I’d either go with the second wording (“to train”) or change the word order (“Training your creature is a core mechanic of the game”).
Re: mechanic vs. mechanism, I suspect it depends on who your audience is. I’m an avid board gamer and so reading “core mechanic” made total sense to me and I never even considered that you meant a person who fixes cars, etc.
I think mechanic is perfectly acceptable as you’ve used it.
Okay, I’ll admit that it’s actually the exact phrase I used. I said “similar” to hedge my bets because I didn’t want to look up and see if I used identical wording. It is that exact phrase.
And as for the mechanic/mechanism thing, I think given the context of the paper most of the readers would be familiar with the term. Especially with the added context in the paragraph.
At many universities the professor does not have the last word on acceptable style, there’s a whole different department that ensures thesis and dissertation papers adhere to the acceptable style and these people are seriously particular.
In my experience, this sort of thing is usually the fault of the grammar checker not understanding a the purpose of a word in the sentence. Real grammar checking requires understanding the meaning of what is being said, and no software can actually do that. So it falls back on rules, e.g. assuming that a certain word is always a certain part of speech.
I bet if you gave examples of these marked constructs, posters would easily find a word or phrase that is tripping up the grammar checker. As, ultimately, neither construct (in general) is wrong. Both gerunds and infinitives can be used for that purpose.
Yes, I was also going to suggest, “the training of” as a better sounding alternative to both. A mechanic (either a guy with a wrench or a mechanism) is a noun and “the training of”, while not technically a noun, has the feel of a specific item. It is a practice, and a practice is a noun.