Grammar confusion


Urstadt
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Which is the right way to state the following sentence:

 

 

Today's democracy has engrained into people the belief that they must have an opinion about everything, and the freedom to do so without all the facts.

 

or,

 

 

Today's democracy has engrained the belief into people that they must have an opinion about everything, and the freedom to do so without all the facts.

 

?

 

Also, are there any grammar experts in here who can explain why one is correct and the other isn't?

 

Thank you, everybody!

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The first is better, in my judgment, but neither is quite good.

 

This isn't really a matter of grammar, but of structure. "The belief" and "the freedom" are parallel; you are trying to say "[subject A] has engrained both B [with modifiers] and C [with modifiers]." So try this:

 

Today's democracy has engrained into people both the belief that they must have an opinion about everything and the freedom to do so without all the facts.

 

Note the lack of comma. I would probably replace "Today's" with "Modern", though of course that would depend on the context of the preceding and following writing.

Edited by Vort
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"It's not grammatical but structural"

Very well done!

 

When I was in the sixth grade, I had a teacher who taught us grammar AND outlining sentences.  But I really began to to apply what I learned when  I took Latin and Greek.  They are about 20% vocabulary, and the rest was grammar and understanding sentence structure. There's nothing like having the subject at the beginning of the sentence and the verb at the end, and throwing the rest into the middle.  Add a conditional clause with a aorist subjunctive*, gerunds, etc.  and you had an interesting sentence to translate.  It makes the "prophetic future" tense a piece of cake -- you use the past tense in speaking of a future event, which gives it a stronger sense that it will be fulfilled.

 

What about the BOM saying that Christ will be born "AT Jerusalem".  It didn't say "IN Jerusalem", but means.......

 

Don't get me started.

 

*e.g. it might have been possible, if....

 

present subjunctive, "If I be wrong, then...."

Edited by cdowis
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Another mistake is in that sentence is the belief that America has a democracy for a government. Our government is a republic. We have the rule of law and we elect representatives to represent us in our government.

In a democratic government if 50.1 percent of the people can be persuaded to vote for something than it happens. We have the Constitution that is meant to protect American citizen rights from being violated. (Read the Bill of Rights for a basic understanding on American citizen rights.)

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The first is better, in my judgment, but neither is quite good.

 

This isn't really a matter of grammar, but of structure. "The belief" and "the freedom" are parallel; you are trying to say "[subject A] has engrained both B [with modifiers] and C [with modifiers]." So try this:

 

Modern democracy has engrained into people both the belief that they must have an opinion about everything and the freedom to do so without all the facts.

 

 

Excellent! Thank you so much. This is the one I will use. I am paraphrasing several paragraphs from the book On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt. So, that's why I am asking. But, it also means that there is no preceding or succeeding sentence.

 

Another mistake is in that sentence is the belief that America has a democracy for a government. Our government is a republic.

 

I agree. That's why I was a little suprised that this scholar from Princeton referred to our society as a democracy instead of a Constitutional Republic. I think it's because our society is democratic even though our government is a republic. But, I can't confirm that: my scope of practice in clinical mental health counseling, not political science.

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Now that that is resolved, I'm going to extend the thread to whine about spelling.  Kids these days have a tendency not to bother with proper spelling especially on social media.

 

"When my husband left this morning, I could still smell his colon on my sheets."

 

Yes, spelling is that important, kids!

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