I'm a bit too sleepy to look it up, but my understanding of the breakdown is to treat the conditional as if it isn't really a part of the clause, but rather to group it with the conjuction: "This is where the one from earlier was supposed to go."Hoi Polloi wrote:I'm no grammar expert. Are those independent clauses?
"If this is where the one from earlier was supposed to go," doesn't seem to me like it can stand on its own.
Understanding the source is critical to determining the validity of data in the absence of any practical, direct means of verification. Since I doubt the sheriff would tolerate all of us calling for clarification and verification, it is important to understand how well these processes would have been handled by the reporter.seamusTX wrote:Is this discussion really helping our understanding of this issue?
Look at it this way; the reporter, assuming he went through a normal American education, had over 1500 hours of classroom instruction (not counting homework or any other study outside the classroom, like speaking to other people or reading anything that's properly written) in English without gaining particularly good skills. As a reporter, he also presumably uses written English as a communications medium far more than many people. If he's still writing at a 5th grade or lower level (basic comma usage is 4th grade in most curricula) after all that, I really don't trust whatever few hundred hours of journalism instruction he's had to have made him a very good fact checker or reliable communicator of facts.
