Thursday, March 19, 2020

Definition and Examples of Relative Pronouns in English

Definition and Examples of Relative Pronouns in English In English grammar, a relative pronoun is a  pronoun that introduces an adjective clause (also called a relative clause).   The standard relative pronouns in English are which, that, who, whom, and whose. Who and whom refer only to people. Which refers to things, qualities, and ideas- never to people. That and whose refer to people, things, qualities, and ideas. Examples and Observations One of the smaller girls did a kind of puppet dance while her fellow clowns laughed at her. But the tall one, who was almost a woman, said something very quietly, which I couldnt hear. (Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969)Spaghetti at her table, which was offered at least three times a week, was a mysterious red, white, and brown concoction. (Maya Angelou, Mom Me Mom, 2013)Wilbur was what farmers call a spring pig, which simply means that he was born in springtime.(E.B. White, Charlottes Web, 1952)On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down. (Woody Allen, The Early Essays. Without Feathers, 1975)An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.(attributed to John Buchan)[T]o hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this years fashions.(Lillian Hellman, letter to the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, May 19, 1952) He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. He had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in lifes gas-pipe with a lighted candle; of one whom the clenched fist of Fate has smitten beneath the temperamental third waistcoat-button.(P. G. Wodehouse, The Man Who Disliked Cats)The people who had it hardest during the first few months were young couples, many of whom had married just before the evacuation began, in order not to be separated and sent to different camps. . . . All they had to use for room dividers were those army blankets, two of which were barely enough to keep one person warm. They argued over whose blanket should be sacrificed and later argued about noise at night.(Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 1973)In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid.(Joseph Heller, Something Happened, 1974)Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Moms. Never sleep with a woman whose trou bles are worse than your own.(Nelson Algren, quoted in Newsweek, July 2, 1956) Franz Ferdinand would have gone from Sarajevo untouched had it not been for the actions of his staff, who by blunder after blunder contrived that his car should be slowed down and that he should be presented as a stationary target in front of Princip, the one conspirator of real and mature deliberation, who had finished his cup of coffee and was walking back through the streets, aghast at the failure of himself and his friends, which would expose the country to terrible punishment without having inflicted any loss on authority.(Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. Viking, 1941) That and Which in American English Interestingly enough, American usage manuals and US editorial practice for almost a century now have been based on the fiction that a clear functional separation between that and which should exist- which is either an interesting case of a collective illusion taking hold among educated members of a speech community or a  modern-day revival of the 18th-century impulse to bring natural language into line with logic and thus remove its perceived defects. Whatever its motivation, prescriptive teaching, in this case, has not been without effect: a comparison between British and American databases . . . shows restrictive which to be seriously under-represented in American English in comparison to British English.(Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith, Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge University Press, 2012) Who, Which, That, and the Zero Relativizer Three relative pronouns stand out as being particularly common in English: who, which, and that. The zero relativizer [or dropped relative pronoun] is also relatively common. However, . . . the relative pronouns are used in very different ways across registers. For example: In general, the relative pronouns that begin with the letters wh- are considered to be more literate. In contrast, the pronoun that and the zero relativizer have a more colloquial flavor and are preferred in conversation.(Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, and Geoffrey Leech, Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson, 2002) That and zero are the preferred choices in conversation, although relative clauses are generally rare in that register.Fiction is similar to conversation in its preference for that.In contrast, news shows a much stronger preference for which and who, and academic prose strongly prefers which.

Monday, March 2, 2020

How to Avoid a Computer Disaster (4 Tips on Backing Up Data)

How to Avoid a Computer Disaster (4 Tips on Backing Up Data) How to Avoid a Computer Disaster (4 Tips on Backing Up Data) Most college work is now written on computers, not by hand. There are many advantages to this, since you can edit work more easily on screen, and a printed paper is usually much easier to read. However, one benefit of pens is that they rarely break and delete several hours of your work. Computers, meanwhile, can crash without warning (especially if you’re prone to spilling your coffee on your laptop). As such, we’ve got a few tips on backing up data to share. 1. Save Regularly The first and most basic tip we can offer is to save your work regularly. One way to do this is to configure the auto-save options in your word processor to create a recovery file every few minutes. If your computer does crash, this should stop you from losing too much work. You can’t rely on auto-save completely, though, so make sure to save manually as well. Just hit Ctrl and S. Its that easy. 2. Using Multiple Saves In fact, while you’re saving manually, make sure you have at least two copies of any file you’re currently working on. That way you’ll have a backup in case you accidentally overwrite one. If you’re working on a longer document, like a thesis or dissertation, you might even want to save each new draft separately. This protects you against losing information, but also lets you compare different versions of a document during the editing process. 3. Backing Up Important Files Most important of all is not putting all of your (electronic) eggs in one (computer) basket. In other words, create a backup of all the important information on your computer. This applies to personal stuff (photos, music, etc.) as well as your college work. This could be on an external hard drive, via a cloud service, or on other storage media (e.g. CDs or DVDs). That way, if your computer does break, you have a way of quickly restoring lost data. Probably not a floppy disk, though, unless your computer is very, very old.(Photo: George Chernilevsky/wikimedia) How often you back up data is up to you, but we’d suggest doing it at least once a month. 4. Data Recovery Maybe you’ve found this blogpost because your computer has already crashed and won’t start again, so now you’re googling desperately for a solution. If so, we might have the answer. Data recovery is the process of retrieving data from a hard drive. If it’s just a case of having deleted something by accident, there’s a good chance you can retrieve it with the right software. But if the hard drive is damaged, recovering data is more difficult. Your college’s IT department might be able to help with this. If not, there are professional services that can. Data recovery can be expensive, though, so backing up your work before it comes to this is wise!