It has happened to me a lot in this forum. I asked a question. Some native speakers commented on my post. And don't get me wrong, I really appreciate it.
But sometimes, the helpers give contradictory advice, and more often than not, they don't work together to arrive at a final conclusion. They j...
@anIELTSlearner For the particular case you cited, looking at the answers and comments overall, the general consensus seems to be that the highest upvoted answer is correct but that the sentence is confusing enough that you should probably reword it. Is your understanding of the situation different?
@anIELTSlearner TimR's comment is not a direct answer to your question, but a frame-challenge that suggests a way to reword the sentence to avoid the issue. Because of that, it does not really contradict with James K's answer, which directly answers the question. When many people find your sentence confusing, you may get a wide variety of advice on how to reword it in addition to direct answers to your question.
To my mind, the fact that James and FF both gave me direct answers showed that the way "counterparts" was used wasn't wrong. Maybe it was not the best, but it was still acceptable. Am I mistaken here?
Tim said that using "counterparts", plural, was totally wrong, and that's in contradiction to the other two's answers.
@anIELTSlearner Your sentence allows two parsings: one of which is ungrammatical and one of which is extremely unusual in its wording. You can force the unusual reading to work by using "their", but the sentence is still confusing, and many native speakers would dismiss the unusual interpretation as impossible and assume you made a mistake.
So why did FF and James bother giving me answers when my sentence had already been ungrammatical and unnatural in the first place? Don't get me wrong I don't mind if my sentence is incorrect. I'm just trying to understand why native speakers answer questions in certain ways.
Hi Yon, thanks for helping me. This is the first time I have ever used this function
@anIELTSlearner Because you asked for an answer to a specific question, so some people focused on answering that very specific grammatical point, while other people were focused on helping to move you toward better English in general. Don't forget that answers are for people in the future googling as well as for the asker, so someone may have the same very specific grammatical question you had while not having the same issues with your example sentence.
When you talk about "male counterparts" the answer is clearly to use "their" because they are human. A future googler may only care about that, and not about whether the "male counterparts" successfully contrasts with "female fitness membership".
What would you do on another forum if you got contradictory advice? For example on StackOverflow, if one answer said "raise an exception" and another said "return a value that signals an error"?
In your particular question, there is simply a difference of opinion. As others have noted, the best thing to do might be to rewrite the sentence completely, as it was rather wordy. But you asked a specific question, and I felt it could be specifically answered, since the pronoun referred to "women" not "membership", and so must be plural. But, more substantial reworking of the sentence would improve it.
But, of course, this isn't a rewriting and proofreading service. I have, at times, offered other suggestions for improvement. I have sometimes answered with a frame challenge that the entire sentence is unnatural and needs to be thrown away. I didn't feel that those were justified in this case. But others might have a different opinion. But the simple fact is that there can be more than one correct response, and there might be more than one way to express an idea.
Discussion between YonKuma and an IEL…
Discussion between YonKuma and an IEL…