PSAT Glitch

[David Colburn]

> The point of the rules, or generalizations, proposed in
> these earlier grammar textbooks was, I think,  to give
> students a tool which they could used to apply in most
> instances.
>
In most instances? "My neighbor's wife left him." "My neighbor's car is
parked on my lawn. I'll have to call him up and scream at him." "My
neighbor's lawnmower is very noisy, and he mows every Sunday morning at 6
a.m. Everyone else on the block hates him."  "Jayson Blair's ingenuity
allowed him to get away with plagiarism for months on end." These examples
are so ubiquitous that we don't even notice them. Just because some badly
written sentences happen to use possessive nouns as antecedents doesn't mean
that there's anything wrong with the practice per se -- it just means that
whoever wrote those sentences didn't know how to write clearly.

Even if one wants to defend the use of general guidlines for avoiding the
pitfalls of unclear writing (better described as "rules of thumb" than
"rules," I think), this particular guideline still isn't defensible.