Saturday, January 28, 2017

grammar - A better way to express this sentence to clarify its meaning?




I apologize if this is a broad question.



My friend and I have been arguing about the following sentence for 2 hours.
I think that there is something missing in the following sentence. Though, I am not a native English speaker, the sentence doesn't sound good to me. Are there any tips or guidelines to know whether a sentence is meaningful or not? Or is this is just based on personal English knowledge and intuition? I agree that there are English Grammar rules for writing correct sentences, but I am also looking for clarity in the sentence. Moreover, I think that there should be a better word instead of describes.



Could someone resolve this, please? It would be great if you pointout any grammatical mistakes in the sentence.




In this article, he describes how a choice made by three computer science legends 30 years ago produced dangerous consequences and in the worse it took 15 years for getting a realization about this.




Answer



The part of the sentence that seems dubious to me is:




... and in the worse it took 15 years for getting a realization about this.




The part preceding that, 'describes' and all, is completely acceptable (and could be terminated as a sentence before the 'and').




The part afterwards is wrong. Explaining why is harder than stating the fact.



One trouble is 'in the worse' is not an English idiom. I think that 'what is worse' would fit the context reasonably well.



The other trouble is 'for getting a realization about this'; that is not regular English either. Again, in the context, something like 'before people realized that this was a problem'.



Assembling these variants yields:




In this article, he describes how a choice made by three computer science legends 30 years ago produced dangerous consequences, and (what is worse) it took 15 years before people realized that this was a problem.





You might want to insert a 'that' before 'it took', though it isn't 100% necessary.


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