Sentence grammar
Hi all,
Is there any problem with the sentence below? If so, what is that and what is the reason, please?
It’s been a delight to come by some means to whereby figure out the mystery and help solve it afterwards
Top answer
" There are other problems: To figure a mystery out and to solve it seem to be the same thing. The reader wonders what you mean by mentioning both, and "afterwards" is puzzling. "It's been a delight" sounds old-fashioned, at least here in the US, and there is some clash with coming by something, which seems unlikely to have provided occasion for delight.
- " There are other problems: To figure a mystery out and to solve it seem to be the same thing.
- The reader wonders what you mean by mentioning both, and "afterwards" is puzzling.
- "It's been a delight" sounds old-fashioned, at least here in the US, and there is some clash with coming by something, which seems unlikely to have provided occasion for delight.
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Just for grammar, "whereby" is in the wrong place: "It’s been a delight to come by some means whereby to figure out the mystery and help solve it afterwards."
There are other problems:
To figure a mystery out and to solve it seem to be the same thing. The reader wonders what you mean by mentioning both, and "afterwards" is puzzling.
"It's been a delight" sounds old-fashioned,
0There are several problems with this sentence.
The word "whereby" is misplaced. It should go directly after "means", but the result still feels awkward to me. In this case I would give up on "whereby" and say "some means by which to ...".
The use of the word "afterwards" is confusing. In fact, all of "... and help solve it afterwards" is confusing. If you've figured it out then you
0The split infinitive is an imaginary error. Feel free to split every infinitive you write. But that is not the problem with this sentence. "Whereby" and its like cannot be in that position because they refer to the entire infinitive clause.
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