Coming to this a bit late in the day! Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to use 'which'. The following sentence caused a slew of problems and confusion when it appeared in a post on Academia Stack Exchange:
- If the professor is an IEEE member then they signed an ethics statement and are subject to IEEE censure. IEEE has a way to denounce someone that protects the whistle-blower.
The problem is the structural ambiguity concerning the relative clause "that protects the whistle-blower". Does it modify the noun phrase "a way to protect someone" or does it modify the smaller noun phrase functioning as the object of the verb "protect", i.e "someone"? When read the wrong way, it sounds as if IEEE wants to punish people who protect whistleblowers. The author here has obeyed, consciously or otherwise, the mythical rule stipulating the use of "that" and not "which" in restrictive relative clauses. The ambiguity could easily be cleared up, of course, by using "which", incompatible with an animate "someone" antecedent.
What a wonderful example. I come across the restrictive "which" in legal documents sometimes, and it's not unusual to find it an aid to clarity in clause-rich sentences. The IEEE example, though, is especially powerful--especially for whistleblowers and their allies!
"There’s a usage option wrongly said to be wrong that I mean to set things right about, and there’s some story to it, and there’s a condensed but nutritious grammar review, and there’s a moment when I concede that “which” persecutors have a stylistic point in their favor in certain situations, and there are lots (some will say too many) literary examples."
All you did was whet my grammatical appetite. This was instructive and delightful. I must confess to using that which sounds better without overthinking it. :)
Thank you! Doing research and trying to sort out the scattered shards of my linguistic memory is a great experience for me because it's so much fun to track down the quotations and revisit good writers choosing words with care--and to piece together some of the actual story of English usage.
I'm quite happy with a "that which" now and then. Translators seem to like it when Socrates or Kierkegaard is trying hard to figure out something important, so it must have its moments. That which is most likely to be true or good is that which deserves some think time.
Well, I'm very much enjoying following along as you piece together that story. I'd be interested if you wrote a post on sentence diagramming. Is it really a help in understanding and constructing sentences well? Is it just fun for the language nerds? I taught it as part of my school's curriculum but I'm not sure it really improved my students' writing.
"That which" does convey a sense of importance, but mostly I couldn't help slipping it in a comment on a post dealing with thats and whiches. You get so few opportunities to use it either earnestly or for fun.
Like you, I'm skeptical about sentence diagramming as it's generally taught helping much with student writing. It tends to play out as an isolated exercise in puzzle solving, with the living sentence getting forgotten and the diagram not having much to do with a sentence a student will write tomorrow. Part of this has to do with the rules about *making* the diagrams being a big part of the mental load of learning diagramming while other more fundamental things (what is a prepositional phrase and what can it do?) get swallowed up in the picture making.
What I used to do in class was go very basic and then ask questions: "I went to the store." Ask for the verb first (because subjects can be sneaky), then ask who was "doing the went-ing," and now we know we've got a clause because we've got a subject and a verb. Then we'll change the situation by adding "When" and creating a subordinate clause, which means finding an independent clause to make friends with: "When I went to the store, I bought cookies."
I had the best luck getting the grammar to stick by talking about errors. "Let's take out the 'When' now. We've made comma splice! You should remember this pattern, because it's going to cost you on your papers in this class and in other situations. It makes it seem that you don't know what a sentence is."
The other thing I emphasized was what thing or things a grammatical unit in a sentence "pointed to." This would be illustrated with circles and arrows. This helped with agreement errors, and also with misplaced modifiers.
With lessons on creative writing or prose style, I took a more bag-of-tricks or toolkit approach, especially with things like participial phrases, appositives, nominative absolutes, and other nifties you can use to interrupt or extend a sentence. A lot of creative writing students get ready to run when they hear the word "participle" or "appositive," but if you introduce the concept briefly and then give a literary example of someone doing something magical with the thing itself, it can help writers improve their pattern recognition and broaden their range.
I might get to some diagramming eventually because some sentences are even more awe-inspiring when you see the branches. And you can learn from diagrams, I think, if you've already got a good grasp of grammar. I'd be hard pressed, though, to approach the visual sentence-parsing of Bas Aarts, whose *English Grammar* Substack is a treasure trove of deep grammatical knowledge.
Diagramming the Roth and Nabokov sentences and the final Tartt sentence would all be excellent workouts!
Your approach is really sensible, and I might steal some ideas as I'm doing formal grammar with my homeschooled 3rd grader and I have quibbles with the curriculum I chose.
Diagramming just for the heck of it is a delightful exercise. One time I was a bit fed up with a rowdy group of sophomores, so I assigned them three sentences from The Scarlet Letter to diagram, and the whole thing backfired when I realized I couldn't even diagram them confidently. Hawthorne writes some extremely complex sentences. On my own time without an audience, it would have been very fun.
Thank you for pointing me in the direction of Bas Aarts!
Joan Didion said somewhere that she did not know any formal rules of grammar. She wrote by ear. It worked for her!
Coming to this a bit late in the day! Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to use 'which'. The following sentence caused a slew of problems and confusion when it appeared in a post on Academia Stack Exchange:
- If the professor is an IEEE member then they signed an ethics statement and are subject to IEEE censure. IEEE has a way to denounce someone that protects the whistle-blower.
The problem is the structural ambiguity concerning the relative clause "that protects the whistle-blower". Does it modify the noun phrase "a way to protect someone" or does it modify the smaller noun phrase functioning as the object of the verb "protect", i.e "someone"? When read the wrong way, it sounds as if IEEE wants to punish people who protect whistleblowers. The author here has obeyed, consciously or otherwise, the mythical rule stipulating the use of "that" and not "which" in restrictive relative clauses. The ambiguity could easily be cleared up, of course, by using "which", incompatible with an animate "someone" antecedent.
What a wonderful example. I come across the restrictive "which" in legal documents sometimes, and it's not unusual to find it an aid to clarity in clause-rich sentences. The IEEE example, though, is especially powerful--especially for whistleblowers and their allies!
"There’s a usage option wrongly said to be wrong that I mean to set things right about, and there’s some story to it, and there’s a condensed but nutritious grammar review, and there’s a moment when I concede that “which” persecutors have a stylistic point in their favor in certain situations, and there are lots (some will say too many) literary examples."
All you did was whet my grammatical appetite. This was instructive and delightful. I must confess to using that which sounds better without overthinking it. :)
Thank you! Doing research and trying to sort out the scattered shards of my linguistic memory is a great experience for me because it's so much fun to track down the quotations and revisit good writers choosing words with care--and to piece together some of the actual story of English usage.
I'm quite happy with a "that which" now and then. Translators seem to like it when Socrates or Kierkegaard is trying hard to figure out something important, so it must have its moments. That which is most likely to be true or good is that which deserves some think time.
Well, I'm very much enjoying following along as you piece together that story. I'd be interested if you wrote a post on sentence diagramming. Is it really a help in understanding and constructing sentences well? Is it just fun for the language nerds? I taught it as part of my school's curriculum but I'm not sure it really improved my students' writing.
"That which" does convey a sense of importance, but mostly I couldn't help slipping it in a comment on a post dealing with thats and whiches. You get so few opportunities to use it either earnestly or for fun.
Like you, I'm skeptical about sentence diagramming as it's generally taught helping much with student writing. It tends to play out as an isolated exercise in puzzle solving, with the living sentence getting forgotten and the diagram not having much to do with a sentence a student will write tomorrow. Part of this has to do with the rules about *making* the diagrams being a big part of the mental load of learning diagramming while other more fundamental things (what is a prepositional phrase and what can it do?) get swallowed up in the picture making.
What I used to do in class was go very basic and then ask questions: "I went to the store." Ask for the verb first (because subjects can be sneaky), then ask who was "doing the went-ing," and now we know we've got a clause because we've got a subject and a verb. Then we'll change the situation by adding "When" and creating a subordinate clause, which means finding an independent clause to make friends with: "When I went to the store, I bought cookies."
I had the best luck getting the grammar to stick by talking about errors. "Let's take out the 'When' now. We've made comma splice! You should remember this pattern, because it's going to cost you on your papers in this class and in other situations. It makes it seem that you don't know what a sentence is."
The other thing I emphasized was what thing or things a grammatical unit in a sentence "pointed to." This would be illustrated with circles and arrows. This helped with agreement errors, and also with misplaced modifiers.
With lessons on creative writing or prose style, I took a more bag-of-tricks or toolkit approach, especially with things like participial phrases, appositives, nominative absolutes, and other nifties you can use to interrupt or extend a sentence. A lot of creative writing students get ready to run when they hear the word "participle" or "appositive," but if you introduce the concept briefly and then give a literary example of someone doing something magical with the thing itself, it can help writers improve their pattern recognition and broaden their range.
I might get to some diagramming eventually because some sentences are even more awe-inspiring when you see the branches. And you can learn from diagrams, I think, if you've already got a good grasp of grammar. I'd be hard pressed, though, to approach the visual sentence-parsing of Bas Aarts, whose *English Grammar* Substack is a treasure trove of deep grammatical knowledge.
Diagramming the Roth and Nabokov sentences and the final Tartt sentence would all be excellent workouts!
Your approach is really sensible, and I might steal some ideas as I'm doing formal grammar with my homeschooled 3rd grader and I have quibbles with the curriculum I chose.
Diagramming just for the heck of it is a delightful exercise. One time I was a bit fed up with a rowdy group of sophomores, so I assigned them three sentences from The Scarlet Letter to diagram, and the whole thing backfired when I realized I couldn't even diagram them confidently. Hawthorne writes some extremely complex sentences. On my own time without an audience, it would have been very fun.
Thank you for pointing me in the direction of Bas Aarts!