Thursday, September 20, 2007

Relative Pronouns

Hi everyone! I'm sorry for the late entry, Pat.

In this week’s assignment, I came across some problems with sentences that dealt with relative pronouns (who, which, that). According to Technical Editing (Fourth Edition), who refers to persons; which and that refers to things. For example, it would be preferable to say, “The people who came to the meeting brought tape recorders,” rather than “The people that came...”

See you all in class.

1 comment:

Pat said...

Yes, that's right, Don. Sometimes we use "that" for group nouns, though: "The group that went ahead was caught in a traffic jam." Depends on the noun; for instance, we do say, "The children who went ahead were caught in the rain."