Hey guys, it's Brooke with SupertutorTV and today we have a very special video for you.
Donald Trump's grammar versus the SAT grammar!
The SAT abides by a plethora of grammar rules that I think even the most upstanding of world leaders would
have trouble keeping up with. So it comes as no surprise that Donald Trump's
grammar doesn't quite follow all the SAT grammar rules either.
So today what I'm going to do – I'm going to go through three tweets from the
Donald, I'm going to show you the grammar errors that he makes, and then I'm going
to help you all know how to avoid those errors when you take the SAT.
So the first tweet that I'm going to look at from Donald Trump was on March 26,
2016 – "Wisconsin's economy is doing poorly and like everywhere else in
U.S., jobs are leaving.
I will make our economy strong again - bring in jobs." So I'm not even picking on
here, by the way, the fact that he doesn't have a period and these kind of things. I mean,
come on, it's a Tweet. But what I am going to pick on is the fact that he has here
what's called an "incomplete comparison." So let's first cover what are incomplete
comparisons?
The number one rule of comparisons is compare like things. What do I mean by
that? Well, what I mean is that say we have someone like Donald Trump.
He's a person, so we would want to compare him to another person, like
Hillary Clinton. We can say "Like Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton is blonde." So you
see, Donald Trump, that's the name of a person,
Hillary Clinton that's the name of a person. What's going on in this sentence
is that we're comparing the two.
Now what we don't want to do is compare unlike things.
So here, we have Donald Trump's hair. Donald Trump's hair is not a person,
right?
Hillary Clinton is a person. We can't compare these two things. So let's take a
look.
So we can't say, "Like Donald Trump's hair, Hillary Clinton is blonde." Now we could
say, "Hillary Clinton is blonde." We could say, "Donald Trump's hair is blonde." But
this sentence does not work because the two things being compared are not in
parallel form. The other thing we could do is we could say, "Donald Trump's hair,
like Hillary Clinton's, is blonde." So we can actually cut off the word "hair." So
you see how this is possessive with hair.
We can actually just say the possessive here; we can repeat the hair if we want
but you can omit the hair if you want as well as long as this is possessive
then these become like items. So we see this Wisconsin's economy.
This is the subject of the sentence, right? And then we have, "and like
everywhere else in U.S." So here's what's happening: when I have this weird "like," I
have to compare two things. That means I need to have two things that are in the
same form.
"everywhere else in U.S." is a place. Wisconsin's economy is not a place
because Wisconsin's is acting as a possessive form, and the noun here at
work is just the word economy.
It's not Wisconsin, so that's a little bit of a problem. The second thing
that's problematic about this is when I see "like anywhere else in the U.S."
I expect the thing I'm comparing to come after the comma here. So I would expect
Lake Wisconsin would be right here
but instead, we have the word "jobs." We're definitely not comparing "jobs" to
"everywhere else in the U.S." and we're definitely not comparing an "economy" to
"everywhere else in the U.S." So I'm going to correct this sentence; I'm going to give us
a few options of ways that Donald could have said this in a more eloquent or
grammatically correct manner. We can say, "Wisconsin, like everywhere else in the U.S."
So you see how I'm comparing the place to the place is suffering economically
colon, "jobs are leaving"
So here's my evidence that it's suffering economically
I have correctly subordinated all this information and it's logical, right?
And if I really wanted to be good, I could go over here and say, "The economy
of Wisconsin"
So the economy of Wisconsin is doing poorly and "like everywhere else in the U.S., the
state is losing jobs."
So again, when I have this and then I have this comma, the thing that these guys,
this "everywhere else" has been compared to has to be right here
"the state" – that's a place. I can compare a place – right? – over here to a place over
here – everywhere else. That makes sense
So that's rule number one: you can't have what we call incomplete comparisons on
the SAT and that's exactly what Donald was doing in this Tweet.
So the second mistake that I've seen Donald Trump make his Tweets is
something called a subject-verb agreement error.
So let's just do a quick overview of what subject verb agreement is for those
of you who may not remember what that means. Subject verb agreement is
essentially the idea that subjects and verbs must agree.
What do I mean by agree? Well, in a sentence like this – "We are here" – "we"
and "are" work together, right? I can't say "We is here." That doesn't work. The "we" and the "is"
don't go together and most of you know that most of you will say, "Hey
that's super easy
how could anyone screw something like that up?" Well, there's a certain condition
in which people sometimes get confused, and that is when we have intervening
phrases.
So if you look at this insistence is actually wrong. "We the people of the
United States of America is here." You can see this is not a part of what we
call our bare bone sentence, right? "We" is the same as "the people." These are both
plural. "Of the United States of America" –
this is a prepositional phrase. It starts with "of," right? That's a preposition.
So, intervening phrases – we want to ignore. We also want to ignore what's
called interviewing clauses. Clauses have subjects and verbs, but they can get in
the middle of a subject and a verb that are separated like these two are here.
So the point is "We is here" is actually the sentence that's going on here, but
some people get confused, and the reason they get confused is they'll look at a word
like "America." If for example you just looked at this part of the sentence on
"America is here" – that would sound fine
and that's why people get into trouble with the subject verb agreement issue if
you can kind of understand,
ok? So I'm just going to fix it. "We the people of the United States of America
are here." So again, "We are here" is a barebone sentence.
All this stuff is intervening. "America" is not the subject, even though it's next to
the verb.
So let's take a look at what Donald did. "My statement" – that's singular – "on NATO
being obsolete and disproportionately too expensive (and unfair) for the U.S. are
now, finally, receiving plaudits!" So let's talk about this.
Our subject is this – "my statement" right here. This is a prepositional phrase – "on
NATO" and then "being" is a participial phrase that modifies "on NATO."
Okay? "Being obsolete and disproportionately too expensive and
unfair for the U.S." – So all of these are just modifiers,
ok? They are not a part of the subject. The subject is statement, and statement
alone. That's singular. "My statement are now" – that is not good grammar. What's so
ironic here is for the first time in a long time,
I've seen the Donald use a fairly intelligent sounding word here, plaudits.
Plaudits, by the way, means "praise." So he's using this really nice, big, Ivy League
level word, and then he has a total subject-verb agreement error earlier in
the sentence.
All we have to do here to fix this, is just switch the argument "is" – it's not that
hard.
And again it's just, "My statement is now finally receiving plaudits" – that would be perfectly
fine. We can also say, "My statements are" and that would be
perfectly fine. But the bottom line is because there is an "and" and an "and" here,
that does not make the subject plural. Intervening phrases are not what
determine the number of a subject. And when I say number, I mean whether it's
singular or whether it's plural.
This one is actually a little bit more challenging.
We'll see if you can see the error. "Just to show you how unfair Republican
primary politics can be,
I won the State of Louisiana and get less delegates than Cruz-Lawsuit
coming."
Ok again, I'm not going to pick on this "Lawsuit coming" even though it sounds kind of
funny and it's a total fragment.
I'm just going to go over here to this word "less." We use "less" to modify what we
call "non count words." Non count words are sometimes mass nouns. that can be
something like "less election mail," right? Election mail, we can have a lot of mail,
we can have a little mail – it's not like we're counting the individual pieces of
mail when we say the word mail. Mail is a word that can grow or shrink, so we call
this a non-count or a mass. Now, we can also say "less pollution" – "His plan would
give us less pollution."
So you can see "pollution" is something that can be in a large amount or a small
amount, but there's no "s" on the end – it's not plural.
We can also use "less" as an adverb that modifies adjectives.
So here we can say "less orange," right? His skin is less orange in this picture than
in this picture, and that's perfectly fine, right? Orange is an adjective. We
say like orange Donald Trump could use it like that, and "less" is just modifying
the orange. Again, orange doesn't have an "s" on the end – it's not plural.
Whatever we use "less" with should not have an "s" on the end. "Less" cannot be used
to modify plural nouns. This is the big no-no. So we don't say "less protesters," we
do
to say "less people." I know "people" doesn't have an "s" on the end, but it's still
plural. And then we want to use "fewer" when we do have plural nouns.
So the correct way to say it is "fewer protesters" or "fewer people" and my
biggest tip here is the mistake is typically using "less" incorrectly.
The fact is, people overuse "less." They'll say "less mistakes" instead of "fewer
mistakes," right?
So a big tip is, if you're not sure what the answer is
and you think both "less" and "fewer"work, "few" or "fewer" is probably right.
Ok, let's get back to the Tweet: "I won the State of Louisiana and got and get fewer
delegates than Cruz-Lawsuit coming."
That would be the proper way it is. We just want to make sure that we use the
right words at the right time. Sometimes that's called idiomatic usage,
sometimes it's called diction. It just depends on what kind of resource you're
studying from. So to wrap this all up, there are three grammar mistakes that I pointed
out today of the Donald. Our number one – incomplete comparisons.
That's when we're comparing things that aren't alike. Number two – subject verb
agreement, and that comes down to whether your subject and verb go together, right?
And number three – non idiomatic diction, and that's just the idea that you
have to use the right word at the right time, particularly when it comes to count
and non-count words.
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SupertutorTV. Thanks so much