Rules against most?

[Randy Alexander]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Barbara Need <bhneed at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am teaching developmental writing these days and one of my students
> threw me this evening. We working on organizing ideas and I was
> putting together a paragraph from what we have and I wrote a sentence
> that began something like the following: Next, most students use the
> internet for communication. When I was just about done with the
> paragraph, one of my students (40-ish black male, if that should be
> relevant--Chicagoland) said he thought I should delete "most" and he
> expressed surprise that a writing instructor should use this
> construction. I asked him to say why he found the surprising, but he
> could not articulate it beyond he didn't expect an writing instructor
> to use. Any guesses as to what rule I violated?
>
> It did occur to me as I was driving home that he may have been told
> not to use most when it is short for almost, but I'm not sure.

I can't imagine anything wrong with that usage.  As I was reading
this, I thought the problem was going to be with "next", which sounds
strange to me without a context.  Here, "most" is most certainly not
short for "almost".  It's a perfectly normal use of the determinative.

Maybe (I'm just guessing of course) his objection was one of citation?
 It's certainly foul play to pop out facts like "most X do Y" without
supporting numbers.

[As I was writing that, I mistyped "pop" as "poop" and then cracked up
at the eggcornishness.]

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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