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Old 02-12-2008, 05:00 AM   #13 (permalink)
Titan
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I'm not an English major because, honestly, there is no need to major in it to either write well or comprehend English language structure. Over time, I've read/half-read almost every book on English grammar and style at my local library, as well as a myriad of public domain books on the Internet. My English teachers rarely find grammatical mistakes in my papers; when they do, it is usually something I would have caught if I had proofread.

I know two English majors that say ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong. It is a very wrong conception by grammarians trying to impose Latin rules; good English writers have been placing prepositions at the end of sentences throughout the 500 year history of Modern English. Here's a few:

Jonson (Catiline, 1611):
The bodies that those souls were frighted from.
Bunyan (Pilgram's Progress, 1678):
Now, thought he, I see the dangers that Mistrust and Timorous were driven back by.
Shakespeare's famous soliloquy:
To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to.

I have other examples, but despite the evidence, there is no shortage of English majors who think it wrong.

dt mentioned computational linguistics, which would be a useful field in which to find someone. But that could be difficult; to my knowledge, linguistics is a small field itself, so I'm sure computational linguistics is even smaller. Computational linguistics is also very complex.

I see two options for your project: replacing words with synonyms, which is very easy; and rearranging sentence syntax, which is very hard. For the former, just make a list of interchangeable synonyms (e.g. from my first paragraph: comprehend/understand and many/a myriad of). It is worth considering your opportunity cost for the latter.

I hope some of that was helpful.
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Last edited by Titan : 02-12-2008 at 05:40 AM.
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