Sunday, December 23, 2012

language pop quiz

I pulled the following sentence, which contains an error, from an article at The Atlantic titled "Is the Ivy League Fair to Asian Americans?" Here's the sentence:

Again, the implication here seems to be that while Asian-American applicants as a group excel at tests, an important factor in admissions, their talents, skills, and other interests tend to be significantly inferior to students of other races, and having them around isn't as enriching for other students.

The nature of the error is:

(A) poor tense control
(B) faulty/illogical comparison
(C) ambiguous pronoun reference
(D) dangling or misplaced modifier

From the same article, another sentence with an error:

As I see it, we know that even well-intentioned people regularly rationalize discriminatory behavior, that society as a whole is often horrified at its own bygone race-based policies, and that race is so fluid in our multi-ethnic society that no one can adequately conceive of all the ways it is changing; knowing these things, prudence dictates acceptance of the fact that humans aren't equipped to fairly take race into consideration. [italics in original]

The nature of the error is:

(A) poor tense control
(B) faulty/illogical comparison
(C) ambiguous pronoun reference
(D) dangling or misplaced modifier




_

No comments: