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Thursday, May 19, 2011

Criminal Sentence 557: Listening to Yourself Make a Mistake

From today's Sports section (in an article about a struggling baseball player who had a key hit):

"...when listening to him talk, he doesn't seem to have lost much confidence."

Someone has lost his sense of grammar!

The problem lies in the word "listening." The "he" of the sentence--the baseball player--is not the one listening, so we need to specify:

"...when I listen to him talk, he doesn't seem to have lost much confidence."

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