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Anonymous Posted 20 years ago
Grammar

their education or educations?

I'm involved in a research project which requires approval of the consent form from the university's (out of control) Institutional Review Board, which apparnetly thinks it should reject applications with minor grammatical errors. In this case they claim my phrase "...continue their educations after high school..." must be replaced with "...continue their education after high school...." I've seen the construction "their educations" plenty of times -- who's right?

Thanks,

David
  

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4 Answers
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(duplicate deleted -- MM)
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Both are fine. With plural subjects, the distributive plural is the usual choice: They should continue their educations (each receives a single education). However, the singular is also frequently used to stress this parenthetical remark-- unless confusion is created with either form: They injured their feet (both feet? A foot apiece?). In your case, I suspect that the Review B
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0Thank you, Mr. M.02br
02br
00So for most of cases, if not all, when we have plural subjects, either the singular or distributive plural (which I presume means one for each person) is possible unless a confusion results. Are you saying that the singular and distributive plural 01u00both are stressing the fact that each is responsible for a single thing02u0
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0I've forgotten the totality of this conversation, but it looks like I said that the singular stresses the singularity (whatever I meant by that)-- '01i00the singular is also frequently used to stress this02i00'.02br
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00As for your sentences, I would use 01i00hands02i00 in the first, by preference.0-
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