{"id":1448,"date":"2003-09-17T21:44:25","date_gmt":"2003-09-18T04:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/09\/17\/1448.html"},"modified":"2003-09-17T21:44:25","modified_gmt":"2003-09-18T04:44:25","slug":"partial-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/09\/17\/partial-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Partial series"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I've been seeing grammatical constructions like this a lot lately (examples made up by me), both in fiction and elsewhere:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>He had lived in California, Oregon, and had been born in Nebraska.<\/li>\n<li>She voted for Clinton, Gore, and was a staunch Democrat.<\/li>\n<li>I like cheese, pickles, and I'm awfully fond of onions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(There's a slight structural difference between that third one and the first two, but it's irrelevant to my point, and I've seen both structures recently.)<\/p>\n<p>The problem here is that each of these sentences is structured as if it presents a three-part series, but the third part isn't grammatically parallel to the first two, so it's not actually a three-part set; it's a two-part set with a third grammatically unrelated clause tacked on.<\/p>\n<p>The easiest way to resolve this is generally to change that first comma to an \"and\" (and sometimes to also remove the second comma):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>He had lived in California and Oregon, and had been born in Nebraska.<\/li>\n<li>She voted for Clinton and Gore, and was a staunch Democrat.<\/li>\n<li>I like cheese and pickles, and I'm awfully fond of onions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sometimes you can instead change the third clause to match the first two: \"I like cheese, pickles, and onions.\"<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been seeing grammatical constructions like this a lot lately (examples made up by me), both in fiction and elsewhere:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}