User talk:Zbbentley

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Hello, Zbbentley, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome! -Rrius (talk) 19:10, 1 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Grammar"

Your supposedly grammar-related comments at Scott Brown were problematic in that none of the problems you pointed out had anything to do with grammar. Your first edit did correct a problem, but the problem wasn't what you said in your edit summary. "It" wasn't vague in the least; only an idiot would think that in "he believed it [would cause trouble]", "it" referred to his own beliefs. Rather, the problem was that the clause was a sentence fragment. Your second edit replaced "he" with "Brown", with your edit summary saying "he" could refer to Brown or Coakley, with the latter having been the subject of the previous sentence. Both parts of that are wrong. Martha Coakley, whose first name was used, is a woman, and "Martha" is unambiguously a woman's name. As to the second part, "Brown" is clearly the of the preceding sentence. Finally, "although" can in fact be used as conjunction just as it was in that sentence. It may not be the best stylistic choice, but there is nothing grammatically correct. Even if your intention was to improve the style, "however" is itself inferior to "but".

In the future, please be careful not to assume something is somehow ungrammatical when grammar is not implicated. Also, do a better job of reading what is around a pronoun before getting rid of it. It appears that you misread two sentences, then changed the pronouns without even bothering to verify that your reading had been correct. -Rrius (talk) 19:28, 1 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fair, my allegations of grammar problems were stylistic rather than grammatical, though I hope they improved the article stylistically (if not grammatically ;) ). How do you figure that "however" as the first word in a sentence is inferior to "but"? While both are technically allowed by most english language style guidelines, I think "however" is near-unanimously considered the proper choice for formal language, which seems to be the norm for Wikipedia. Zbbentley (talk) 21:33, 1 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't personally think "however" is problematic, but if one objects to "although", the same objection obtains with respect to "however". From Garner's Modern American Usage, 2nd ed., page 414, "However", entry A. "Beginning Sentences with"—

It seems everyone has heard that sentences should not begin with this word—not, that is, when a contrast is intended. But doing so isn't a grammatical error; it's merely a stylistic lapse, the word But ordinarily being much preferable. The reason is that However—three syllables followed by a comma—is a ponderous way of introducing a contrast, and it leads to unemphatic sentences."

-Rrius (talk) 23:38, 1 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]