Wednesday, February 18, 2009

At last! A president whose sentences might be diagrammed....





























From Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post...

Something that most people - even his political opponents - agree on is that President Barack Obama is a fairly gifted orator. On those occasions when he speaks extemporaneously, he still struggles with vocalized pauses - those lengthy "Uhhmmms" and "Errrrrs" - but in general, he can compose articulate sentences and typically does fine work with a prepared speech.

But is GRAMMAR, itself, in the tank for Obama? Apparently so, and all it takes to reveal this truth is a trip back to the most hated part of your middle school education: sentence diagramming. [At left], blogger Garth Risk Hallberg diagrammed a sentence from Obama's recent press conference - coincidentally, his response to the question put to him by our own Sam Stein:

My view is also that nobody's above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.


You can read the rest of Linkin's post here, including some of Hallberg's analysis... the rest of Hallberg's post may be found here.

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