A local newspaper offers a survey in order to continue reading the article. The sentence on top of a few checkable options is this: "If a company offered these customer care solutions on their website, which would you prefer assuming each was equally capable of providing a resolution to your issue?"
Does that make any sense? FWIW, the options are: Self Help tools, video chat, email, faq, and chat.
It’s poorly written but I understand what they’re asking.
Makes sense to me, although I’d put a comma after “prefer” for clarity, and optionally change the “was” to a “were”.
I never read those survey questions. I just click any old answer to get to the article I wish to read.
Yes, it’s a sentence.
I like the Spanish tradition of bracketing a question with ¿…? which can even be a part of a sentence rather than the whole sentence. It makes more sense sometimes. If this were punctuated like that, it might read:
“If a company offered these customer care solutions on their website, ¿which would you prefer? assuming each was equally capable of providing a resolution to your issue.”
Yes, it’s a sentence, but needs a comma after “prefer”.
Seconded. The comma, in particular, is key.
A sentence has a subject and verb (at minimum).
Subject: “which”
Verb: “would prefer”
It’s a sentence. Maybe not a good one, but still a sentence.
It looks like “these” is functioning as a pronoun with no antecedent.
I would write this one of two ways:
If a company offered the following customer care solutions on its website, which would you prefer (assuming each was equally capable of resolving your issue): self-help tools, video chat, email, FAQ, or chat?
Assuming that each was equally capable of resolving your issue, which of the following customer care solutions would you prefer on a company’s website: self-help tools, video chat, email, FAQ or chat?
I can actually think of even better options that stray very far from the original, but those are the best I can come up with using the original as a model.
“Were” would imply that it was a condition contrary to fact: that each is NOT equally capable of resolving your issue (though the reader is being asked to imagine what it would be like if they were). “Was” allows that it may or may not be the actual case that each is equally capable of resolving your issue (though we are assuming they are for the sake of argument).
LOL
“Which” is not the subject. This is a compound sentence, so there’s lots of subjects and verbs, which is why the commas are necessary.
Let’s diagram it out, shall we?
“If a company [subject] offered [verb] these [pronoun] customer care [adjectives] solutions [object] on [preposition]their [pronoun]website [object], **which **[pronoun] would [modal verb, goes with ‘prefer’] you [subject] prefer [verb] assuming [gerund] each [subject] **was [verb] equally **[adverb] capable [verb] **of [preposition] providing [gerund] a [article] resolution **[object] to [preposition] your [pronoun] issue[noun]?”
The preferred answer I give which is as follows yes in response to that query posed.
Understand do I the meaning intended by the writer. Careful he must be, though, to confuse not his audience with poor sentence structure and punctuation.
Honestly, I don’t find the sentence confusing at all. The only problem is that the last clause, beginning with the word “assuming,” should be set off with a comma or parentheses. If that were the case, would you still all find it hard to read?
I had to read it a few times before I got it, but it is a sentence.i would put a comma after prefer.
It is a sentence. I would put parentheses around everything after “prefer” (except the period).
dependent clause 1:
conjunction - if
Subject - a company
Verb - offered
object - these customer care solutions
Main clause:
subject - you
verb - would (aux verb) prefer (infinitive)
object - which
Dependent clause 2:
conjunction - assuming (triggers the subjunctive)
subject - each
verb - was (could use ‘were’ but lots of people don’t)
predicate (or whatever you want to call this) - capable of … your issue (you could swap this whole phrase for the single word ‘effective’)
‘capable’ is an adjective
if ‘providing’ is a gerund (i.e. a noun) it cannot take an object.
It looks like you want to say:
subject - each
verb - was capable of providing
object - a resolution … issue
which is also appealing, but I don’t think it’s correct.
“Let’s eat Grandma!”
“Let’s eat, Grandma!”
Punctuation saves lives.
No, RealityChuck is correct about “which” being the subject. Everything in the sentence before that is an adjective clause modifying “which.”
“If a company’s website offered these customer care solutions, which would you prefer, assuming each was equally capable of resolving your issue?”
Needless words omitted.