who, which, that

[gristy]

From "A Writer's Reference" by Diana Hacker (a great reference):

Do not use which to refer to persons. Use who instead. That, though generally used to refer to things, may be used to refer to a group or class of people.

Quite a few DUers often use that when they should be using who.

[Maddy McCall]

1. Oh thank god THAT we have a grammar expert here to correct us as we

quickly type out posts, WHICH sometimes demonstrate the stupidity of people WHO rarely mean any harm.

Good though. I will be on my grammatical ps and qs.

Oh, and on edit, what does Ms. Grammar herself have to say about using tired, vague phrases like "Quite a few?"

[BigMcLargehuge]

2. got a sentence fragment in there jchild....

:hi:

[Maddy McCall]

3. You may be right....

but then again, it may be one of those sentences with the "understood" subject and verb. LOL!

You understand, don't you?? :hi: back atcha.

[gristy]

5. Good though.

certainly is a sentence fragment. But it works for me in this context, though maybe it needs a comma after good. Now, I know I started a sentence with But. And I like to do that quite a bit, too.

[BigMcLargehuge]

6. would've posted this earlier but my connection dropped

I love the occasional grammar rant.


Hey, look at the paragraph I had to deconstruct into English today:

"When are packets dropped with Random Early Detection? Notice smoothed queue occupancy. The average queued threshold describes that the average length of the queue maintained over some period of time. If the queue size exceeds the average queue threshold, then the probability of those packets being dropped increases as we randomly start dropping incoming packets."

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue...

[gristy]

4. Hmmm, you're right!

A simpler construction, like "Some DUers often use that when they should be using who." is shorter and simpler. And maybe better.

on edit: typo