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Fire1 Posted 5 years ago
Grammar

Has as its goal to do

A. Our training has as its goal to develop lawyers professionally to ensure they have the necessary skills required in their role as a lawyer.

I just found A on Google, but should A be written with "it" as in B because "has" lacks its direct object.

B. Our training has it as its goal to develop lawyers professionally to ensure they have the necessary skills required in their role as a lawyer.

In B, it refers to "to develop lawyers professionally".

So, my questions are

1. Are both sentences A and B correct?

2. In sentence A, is this part "to develop lawyers professionally " used as a direct object of "has" ?

3. Is there a construction similar to "has as its goal to do"?


Personally, I think sentence A is wrong unless A is rewritten with dashes to indicate "to develop lawyers professionally" as a noun phrase as the direct object of "has", as in "Our training has as its goal -to develop lawyers professionally - to ensure they have the necessary skills required in their role as a lawyer"

  

Top answer

fire1 1. Are both sentences A and B correct? (A) is theoretically possible if "to develop lawyers professionally" is taken as the object of "has", but in practice it reads incorrectly, or at least very awkwardly, to me.

— GPY

  • fire1 1.
  • Are both sentences A and B correct?
  • (A) is theoretically possible if "to develop lawyers professionally" is taken as the object of "has", but in practice it reads incorrectly, or at least very awkwardly, to me.
  • (B) also feels awkward.
  • The obvious way to write this part is "...
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3 Answers
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fire11. Are both sentences A and B correct?

(A) is theoretically possible if "to develop lawyers professionally" is taken as the object of "has", but in practice it reads incorrectly, or at least very awkwardly, to me. (B) also feels awkward. The obvious way to write this part is "... has as its goal the development ..." (but then the rest of the sentence h

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Setting aside the labels "right" and "wrong", let's just say that both A and B are less than optimal. Here's my opinion of how it should be written.

The goal of our training is to develop lawyers professionally to ....

'Y has as its X' is an inferior transformation (my opinion) of 'The X of Y is'. The meaning is the same.

Likewise:

The goal of aikido is

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fire1I just found A on Google, but should A be written with "it" as in B because "has" lacks its direct object.

Yes, but nobody does it, and I do mean nobody, so it's moot. The entire infinitive clause is the object, and everybody knows it, so some grammarians are just going to have to live with their panties in a bunch. The sense of it would put everything

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