Grammatical Question, can you help please?

My wife was marking some of her children’s work this evening and passed over a lovely essay that a child had done.

I read it through and remarked that the grammar in this sentence didn’t look right.

“Mum is going to try and set up a kind of school in our house so us children will be educated”.

I suggested that it should be “Mum is going to set up a school in our house, so we children can be educated”.

Now the essay was really good for a 12 year old and it was the only thing that stuck out as being slightly wrong, but my wife (english teacher) and myself totally uneducated are having a disagreement about it.

If anyone can explain to me why it looks wrong I’d appreciate it.

Regards

Pepper

i am off to make us we everyone a cuppa

“so that we the children could be educated forsooth” 😉

Remember that the rules of grammar are entirely arbitrary and were invented to try to make English conform to the same rules as Latin.

On that basis, while I agree your sentence feels less colloquial and flows nicely (though I would switch “can” for “may”), I do see why your wife is happy that the grammar is fine.

And, of course, perhaps the sentence illustrates the intentions of the child’s mother….

Lol I’ll have one sugar in my tea please!

OMITN, I see where you’re coming from, the girl who wrote the essay and my wife are both local Oxfordshire people, whereas I’m an incomer from Shropshire. So my wife would use the same colloquialism in her daily life so it’s normal for her.

The closest to the original would be, in my opinion:

Mum is going to set up a school at our house so that us children can be educated.

…the use of will is an assumption too far for me!

It ‘feels’ wrong because if you took out the word ‘children, you would use ‘we’

“us” is used when “we” are the object of the verb. She taught us, and she can teach us. But we learnt from her, and we will be taught.

The sentence, without the clarificatory “children”, is “we will be educated.” “Us will be educated” isn’t right, but “mum will educate us at home” could be.

The chap is using “us children” as a stand-in for “we”. That’s non-standard, informal and perhaps not one to encourage. “We children” isn’t a big improvement to my mind, but I’m not sure I can see that that’s grammar, is it?

🙂

yeah if I were going to change the sentence so it ran more smoothly, i’d try something like, mum is going to set up a school at home so we can continue our education.

It is non-standard, but at least that way it’s clear that it’s children being educated and not a bunch of 30-40 something IT professionals.

Grammar exists to make sure that where there is the potential for ambiguity things make sense and there isn’t confusion.

I certainly wouldn’t replace ‘can’ with ‘will’.

I’m siding with your wife on this one 🙂

Oh and it’s syntax rather than grammar anyway… isn’t it?

Lol cheers Nick,

I thought it was style rather than grammar…?

Sticking to the content in the original but making it grammatically correct:

“Mum is going to set up a kind of school in our house for us children so we will be educated”.

If you leave out the word children then it implies all the other people in the house will be educated too.

I myself taught English for too long to too many to have clue. (wink)

It ‘feels’ wrong because if you took out the word ‘children, you would use ‘we’

This.

I’d perhaps argue that it should be “… so that we children” as well. It’s still clunky language, but I think is better grammatically. I’d have said something like “My Mum is going to set up a classroom at home in order to provide additional education for us.” But, hey, (s)he’s 12, you’re lucky it wasn’t written in txtspk.

Grammatical Question, can you help please?

Yes, you don’t need to put a capital letter at the start of ‘question’.

hth.

To educate us, mum is going to set up a kind of school in our house.

In your version both mum and the person writing will be educated, Derek.

Yes, you don’t need to put a capital letter at the start of ‘question’.

S/he’s paying Tribute to the Saxon Elements of Modern English by adopting German-Style Capitalisation.

the girl who wrote the essay and my wife are both local Oxfordshire people,

Ah, the county of my upbringing. Yes, they do have peculiar modes of speech and writing in that part of the world, don’t they?

My students aren’t native speakers but I’d suggest they used a non-defining relative clause, i.e.

…so that we, the children, will be educated. (not ‘us’)
…they, the people of Libya, feel that… (and not ‘them’)
…and he, the villain in all this, gets away scot-free (and not ‘him’)

though this structure might be a bit formal.

Interestingly, “us children will be educated” means “our children” up in my neck of the (back)woods.

“We, the Children”?!

If you’re going to be pedantic then the use of ‘mum’ should be questioned. I’ve been marked down for this as apparently the correct word is ‘mother’ but I never had one of those so always wrote mum. It was only 0.5% per mistake anyway.

your wife is a teacher?

and she thinks the original sentence is fine?

I tried to keep out but I can’t.

In the original the mum is going to try to set up a kind of school. Most of the suggestions seem to lose these modifiers and while they make the statement more precise they lose the notion that mum may fail and that the thing set up may not be an actual school.

We’re optimists.

we children MAY be educated.

😆
Can we have “STW sentence of the day” threads ?
How about pics too; L&L – lithe & literate

we is homeskooled cos mom no’s bester.