From the latest novel by a New York Times bestselling author:
"We found the address he gave me without difficulty."
I'm glad it wasn't difficult to give out the address. Or was it not difficult to find the address? Oops. The finding, not the giving, turned out to be easy. Let's reword:
"It wasn't hard to find the address he gave me."
Or perhaps this is better:
"It wasn't hard to find the address he had given me."
When you have a prepositional phrase, be sure to place it correctly!
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2 comments:
You can’t be serious about the possible ambiguity here. This is little more than grammatical nitpicking.
Please, I defy you to tell me the last time you heard someone say or write ‘he gave it without difficulty’. Sometimes, reader common sense must prevail over being finical and looking too hard for possible errors.
In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with this sentence and any normal human reader would understand perfectly well what is being said.
Addendum:
In any case, what's wrong with a simple rearrangement of syntax, instead of a complete recasting?:
"We found without difficulty the address he gave us."
'Ambiguity' solved!
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