[to be added]

The progressive is most commonly used to indicate a temporary condition, namely that:

1. the event takes time to occur, rather than happening all at once;
2. the event lasts for a limited time.

With some verbs, the progressive shows that the event is not necessarily complete:

(40) Simple past: I read Margaret Atwood's latest novel yesterday.
(41) Past progressive: I was reading Margaret Atwood's latest novel yesterday.

Because progressives specify a block of time, they are frequently used for actions that overlap some other point in time:

A form of the verb ending in -ing is traditionally called a present participle, or occasionally an -ing participle. Although we will use the traditional term, note that "present" does not mean that the participle has a tense of its own. Phrases formed with present participles are not limited to appearing in present-tense sequences:

(36) Reaching the summit of the mountain, Bob let out a shout of triumph.

Heidi Harley has noted the presence of Steve Kowit's poem "The Grammar Lesson" on the Poetry 180 site. This is a nice poem, but my favorite poem with a grammar theme is Kenneth Koch's "Permanently".

This is the one that opens,

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.

New Technology

The practice of diagramming sentences first began in America in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its sudden appearance and subsequent popularity owes much to a significant shift in methods of teaching grammar that occurred at the same time.

I haven't written more installments in my series lambasting the College Board recently, but the following may prompt me to continue sooner rather than later. (I have a lot more to say about useless explanations.) I have discovered what appears to be an error on an operational test question. In other words, this question counted towards the scores of all students who took this particular test.

The May 2007 SAT. Section 6, question 24 has the following question:

After the uprising of October 10, 1911, that has led to the establishment of a Chinese republic, many Chinese Americans decided to return to China in hopes of a bright future there. No error

Do you see the problem?

Here are my answers to the question I set in this post.

The constituency problem, as Jangari correctly noted, concerns the prepositional phrase "with the solemn precision of scientists articulating chemical equations." The original diagramming indicates that the "we" of the sentence are learning with precision, but it seems much more natural to assume that it is the diagramming that occurs with precision. In other words, the PP modifies diagram, not learned.

I just finished reading Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey, a book that purports to tell the history of sentence diagramming. It's not as bad as I had imagined it would be. I had braced myself for an old-fashioned paean to the virtues of diagramming, but in fact Florey is honest about the limitations of diagrams and skeptical about claims that diagramming helps improve one's writing.

That said, there are irritating errors in the book.

This is part of a continuing series documenting the shortcomings of the College Board's view of grammar, particularly as exemplified in its explanations for multiple-choice writing questions. (Part 1, part 2, and part 3 here). Please see part 1 for an explanation of how I reference individual questions.