I’m helping my boyfriend edit one of his final papers for school. He got his draft back and his prof had circled the word “This” at the beginning of the second sentence here:
We couldn’t figure out why the professor circled that word. I gave him some suggestions for changing it (I don’t remember what they were) but his ultimate solution was to change the two sentences to this:
Now, I graduated cum laude with a BS in journalism so I like to think I am good at grammar, but I know I’m not that good. The one thing that trips me up the most is semicolon use.
Did he use the semicolon in the right way there and am I just being jumpy? It doesn’t seem right at all to me but I don’t know why.
And if it’s not right…why do you think the prof circled “This” and what could we substitute it with?
I don’t know why the prof circled it. It might have been an error. The sentences were correct as they were. You could indeed add the semicolon and create one sentence, as you already did, but it’s not necessary. Maybe the prof just likes semicolons…?
Either version is correct. My only guess is that the professor really, really dislikes the word “this,” although I don’t know why he’d circle it in this context, where it’s perfectly clear what it refers to (“this finding”). (Vague “this” and “it,” with an unclear or nonexistent antecedent, are the bane of freshman comp teachers; maybe the prof was just too quick on the trigger in this case.)
Thanks guys, for the reassurance! I read the Wikipedia article on semicolons - maybe I’ll use them more.
The prof is one of those dudes who has very specific rules about what he doesn’t want to see in papers, word-choice wise. But, at least he admits it - he handed out a “thesaurus” to use with the final exam. “This” wasn’t on it, though, so I’m still not sure why he circled it.
The two sentences read fine as they are, and you get a really long pair when they are spliced with an semi-colon. I concur with Fretful’s guess that the prof goofed.
Personally, I would prefer the first version. There really is no good reason to combine them into a complex sentence. There might be other reasons to edit the sentences to make them tighter, but I can’t see any problem with the use of “this” as it is in the first version.
It’s barely possible he considers that a plurality of sources requires a plural subject, despite the summary single conclusion; in other words, “these findings”. That’s about the only way I can see someone arguing for that being ‘wrong’.
(I don’t think it’s wrong, but I can see a prof arguing the point, depending on what sort of paper this is.)
I posed the question to the BF yesterday as to how much English training one needs to become a professor - since they all seem to like to mark up papers in a way that makes me think they all go to “Persnickety Grammar 2000” class. I never really cared about this or thought about this when I was in school because the majority of my papers were graded by actual English or journalism professors, so I expected them to be marked up in such a way.
I guess when you read hundreds of papers each semester, you just get to be good at grammar. Or rather, get a really solid idea of what “grammar” means to you.
Well, you generally don’t get to be a professor unless you’ve published books and/or papers. And you don’t get to publish books and papers unless you’re able to write and edit reasonably well. This is true in the sciences, too, by the way; papers that are poorly written will (usually) be rejected (although I’m sure all the scientists here can present counterexamples in their fields).
You can be a professor and not publish anything, but you still must know the ins and outs of grammar and such.
It's also possible that the professor marked the word, realized later it didn't need to be marked, but forgot to white it out because he was in a hurry and had a huge stack remaining to be graded.*
I suspect that when you’re referring to Austin’s 1999 finding and Facer’s 2006 finding, you should refer to them as “these findings.” But jeez, that’s really nit-picking.