I read this sentence the other day in a news article and had to read it twice: His and his associates’ excuses are not convincing. The grammar is impeccable, but the fact that its construction can make a reader stumble is enough to think carefully about its style and what other configurations are possible. The grammar of a sentence is one thing, its rhetoric, or persuasive capacity, quite another.
Let’s begin by assuring ourselves of the grammatical integrity of the sentence. The statement constitutes a simple sentence, meaning it comprises just one independent clause, or one complete thought. The subject is excuses, and that plural noun is tied to the plural verb are in the predicate. The subject phrase, which means the subject together with all the words modifying it, is his and his associates’ excuses, and we can’t make any grammatical complaint on that side of the sentence either, because the first instance of his points to one possessor of excuses, the second instance points to the possessor of the associates, and the noun associates’, with its apostrophe, points to another possessors of excuses. In other words, three of the four words in the subject phrase correctly function as forms of the possessive case. On the predicate side, brief and to the point, we would also be hard pressed to find any grammatical fault.
So why, then, does the sentence not roll smoothly off the page? As possessives, the two instances of his and the noun associates’ all need something to possess; the idea of possession, that is, always involves at least two entities: the possessor and the possessed. The reader, therefore, is expected to hold the first four words of the sentence in abeyance before the fifth word, excuses, organizes and completes the logic. An arrangement of words like this is called a suspended style, which is not a mistake, but is an order peculiar enough to presume a weightier and more intellectually involved context. I found this sentence in a news article, where the emphasis is usually more on facts than literary shaping, and it was just the assumption that I was reading for information which set the sentence askew.
So what other choices did the writer have? Both his excuses and his associates’ are not convincing. His excuses, and his associates’ as well, are not convincing. All those excuses, his own and his associates’, are not convincing. Any of these versions would bring the subject up to the beginning of the sentence, thereby orienting the reader more quickly to the matter under statement. Note, too, that each of these revisions includes a rhetorical addition to stabilize the sentence. The first version employs the correlative conjunctions both…and to create expectation: reading both, we wait for an and (this being the opposite of the suspension which characterizes the original version). The second version places the second possessor between commas, helping the reader retain the subject excuses as the chief idea. And the third places both the possessives in a parenthetical phrase, by which the focus is keep strongly on the excuses. This last version, therefore, might be the least effective choice if the writer intended to assign any culpability.
We should observe, finally, that all of these versions, including the original, mean that his excuses were of one kind and his associates’ excuses of another: he, for example, might have said that the item was late in being delivered, and his associates might have said the item had never been ordered. Both, in other words, had different excuses, and we can rightly infer this because both possessors are shown in the possessive case. If, however, both he and his associates had the one same excuse, then the grammar would read he and his associates’ excuses are not convincing, keeping the first pronoun in the nominative case. The former is called individual possession, the latter, joint possession.
Sometimes, then, revision follows a very simple rule: just reword it.
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