extends beyond grammatical needs to logical concerns. That is,
subordinatingconjunctions cannot in themselves create the connection of meaning between clauses;
there must also be sensible construction of the clauses to support the relationship suggested by the conjunction.
WRONG When we have reorganized, Martell was vice president Grammatically, this example
could be considered correct, but the relationship between the
tenses of the
verbs makes no sense—the dependent clause suggests an
action to come in the future, while the independent clause depicts a condition in the past. The two things don’t go together. Many writers, however, fail to provide logical consistency or agreement between clauses and rely too heavily on the connecting power of conjunctions.
More formal grammatical agreement errors are also common. WRONG “When
Jones
is vice president, their problems will be solved The error is the lack of agreement between the singular nouns in the dependent clause and the plural
possessive pronoun their
which has no clear plural antecedent with which it can agree. The only way to avoid such errors is to reread, revise, and check everything you write to make sure clauses agree logically and grammatically. The more complex or longer
the pieces of a sentence, the more careful you must be to preserve clear,
sensible relationships between clauses. Having more than two clauses in anyone sentence simply multiplies the need to pay attention to agreement among all the statement’s elements. See also
revision, number, and
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