« A department rethinks its job evaluation arrangement (John Deere) | Main | The lobbying function and its oblique relation to law departments »
The Write Stuff: Emphasize an action with a gerund phrase
(1) “The draft agreement lacks clarity on environmental concerns, creates major risks, and contains no addenda.”
(2) “The draft agreement lacks clarity on environmental concerns, creating major risks, and contains no addenda.”
Sentence (1) puts equal emphasis on all three verbs, “lacks” and “creates” and “contains.” In (2), however, the lawyer emphasizes a consequence of the draft’s unclear writing, the lack of precision of which plants the seed of major risk. The writer achieves that emphasis by the gerund phrase -- using a verb form [“creating”] as a noun.
To give equal weight to actions (verbs) you can use a compound structure – two or more balanced verbs joined by a conjunction. To indicate one of the actions is more important than the other, consider a gerund phrase.
Posted on March 3, 2006 at 12:19 PM | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834519fb069e200d83527d4a553ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference The Write Stuff: Emphasize an action with a gerund phrase :
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

