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Leobroun Posted 5 years ago
Grammar

Reading difficulty

Let me post this question again because nobody has answered yet for the one I had posted on July 3rd.

If it happen to be a stupid question or so vague, please delete the previous question (remaining unanswered) and do not post this one. Thank you for your trouble.

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I think there might be some omitted parts in bold faced sentences( I guess verb phrases, such as were present in ex.1, and did in ex.2)of these sentences. How can you explain this kind of writing grammatically? is this a kind of ellipsis?

ex.1) Occasionally only Lieutenant Awn and the day's attendants came to the morning ritual, but usually others were present. The town's medic, a few of the Radchaai who had been granted property here, other Orsian children who could not be persuaded to go to school, or care about being on time for it, and liked the glitter and ring of the disks as they fell.

ex.2) While the Radch wanted everyone to remember what had happened to the Garseddai, they wanted on one to know just how the Garseddai had managed to do what they'd done wat no one had managed to do for a thousand years before or another thousand years after- destroy a Raddchaai ships. Almost no on e alive remembered. I knew, and any still-extant ships that had been there. Anaander Miannaai certainly did.

And Seivarden, who had seen for herself what the Lord of the Radch wanted no one to think was possible- that invisible armor and gun, those bullets that defeated Radchaai armor- and her ship's heat shield- so effortlessly.

(These are some extracts of the novel 'Ancillary Justice' by Ann Leckie)

Thank you for your help.

  

Top answer

1 You are merely seeing clumsy writing. A writer is free to use a sentence fragment if it works, but not if it doesn't work, and she is not free to omit the closing conjunction from a list and then both throw in a parenthetical starting with "or" and drop an "and" in later so it looks like she is completing the list but isn't. There should be an "and" before "other", and "and liked" should be "but liked".

— Anonymous

  • 1 You are merely seeing clumsy writing.
  • A writer is free to use a sentence fragment if it works, but not if it doesn't work, and she is not free to omit the closing conjunction from a list and then both throw in a parenthetical starting with "or" and drop an "and" in later so it looks like she is completing the list but isn't.
  • There should be an "and" before "other", and "and liked" should be "but liked".
  • She should have used an em dash after "present", otherwise we are waiting for a verb that never comes, as you noticed.
  • What a mess.
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2 Answers
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leobrounwere present in ex.1

You are merely seeing clumsy writing. A writer is free to use a sentence fragment if it works, but not if it doesn't work, and she is not free to omit the closing conjunction from a list and then both throw in a parenthetical starting with "or" and drop an "and" in later so it looks like she is completing the list but isn't. The

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Thank you very much. Actually I'd kicked my self for not having understood the meanings of sentences in the novels. Whenever I encounter somewhat strange parts I struggle to figure out them- scrutinizing the words in dictionary, analyzing it by using all the knowledge I had learned from school. We (I mean not native readers) presume that the words, phrases, sentences, expressions which appeare

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