I’m having trouble with the fragment ‘makes it possible’ which appears in another sentence I’m trying to diagram, so I made the following sentence to help focus:
Sleep makes it possible to study more
I’m having trouble with making a diagram for this sentence too. Here is what I have so far:
I think it’s the pronoun ‘it’ that I am confused about, perhaps it’s an indirect object? The rest seems fine. Is there something basic I’m not getting?
Did you look up relevant words in the dictionary?
Is “make” an action verb or a linking verb?
Can there be an indirect object with a complement?
Did you do web searches? You can usually find some conventional analysis of topics like this, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/akuqfj/it_makes_us_possible_or_it_makes_it_possible_for/
If you look at some standard indirect object examples, can you find any differences between them and this case? What if you look at how to reword them more explicitly without an indirect object?
What if you take sentences with “make” and reword them to grammar that follows typical rules/patterns better? What changes are needed?
I practised typing for at least 15mins per day this week with a focus on going slower to improve accuracy. I think it has helped a little so far. I am keeping in mind what you said about problem solving and recognising that I’m not fully stuck and and being happy with that. I have been regularly bringing that to mind when I do have twinges of negative feeling around my progress, and I think it’s been changing how I feel about it.
60s monkeytype english 1k
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60s monkeytype english 500
56/98
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As part of my daily writing I wrote a summary of what I have done this week regarding scheduling.
A week ago I responded to a question from Elliot about how I schedule my day. I said that while scheduling weeks/months is okay, my daily scheduling is very vague. He recommended I add some more structure and organisation to my day to get a bit more control over my activities. He recommended I do some research into self-help books, and gave a suggestion for a technique to start with.
The technique he suggested was to set an alarm every two hours during free time, and use that opportunity to reflect on what my goals are for the day, and what I want to do in the next two hours. I did this for a couple of days, and I liked how it focused me on what I want to do in the next window of time. I didn’t continue this through the rest of the week but I did modify it slightly.
I decided I would schedule in some of my tutoring assignments in the mornings. That’s worked well, and I haven’t missed any assignments on any days for the last week: typing, writing, or baba is you.
Having this schedule has helped focus me on the time of the day, the time I have left in the day, and what I want to get done by the end of the day. Keeping these things close to the forefront of my mind has made me feel like I am acting more purposefully with my time. I think I’ve made some progress this week on the scheduling front and I’d like it to continue.
I did some quick research into self-help books, and skimmed a few kindle samples. Finding some might be harder than I thought, and I may have to just do some research and download a sample a day and see if I can find some promising ones. The book Atomic Habits by James Clear looks promising. I had heard about the book and the concept years ago on Sam Harris’ podcast, but I never got it. I had also seen some of Elliot’s comments on the book in the Self Help Books thread.
Baba is You:
I have 73 dandelions now, so I’ve gotten 23 more in the past 5 days. My play time is now 28.2 hours, double what it was 5 days ago. I’m enjoying my time spent playing game now, and am not feeling frustrated with it.
All in all I’m very happy with how the week has gone.
Yeah I did and I do often use a dictionary. It’s not something I hesitate to use.
It’s an action verb. So it can’t have a complement. It requires a subject, and can have an object, indirect-object, and modifiers.
Complements are for linking verbs, not action verbs. Indirect objects are for action verbs, not linking verbs. So can a verb have both an indirect object and a complement? Okay, so no, I don’t think so.
Yeah I did. The few things I found were hard to translate to my problem. I think that’s maybe due to the difference between the analysis styles? I was also maybe looking for something simple and quick. I didn’t have much time and wanted to post about something grammar related before I left the house. I’m thinking I should’ve just waited and put more time into the post now though. I feel bad when you ask me if I’ve tried x, y, z and I have but I didn’t mention it initially. I should be trying to communicate more about what I have already tried and what I think’s not working right?
Okay one example you use in your grammar article is, “I threw her the ball” In that ‘her’ is the indirect object. The more explicit version uses an adverbial prepositional phrase, and makes the indirect object the prepositional object. So ‘John threw the ball to her’.
So the indirect object receives the object of the action verb. Okay so I had some conceptual confusion about indirect objects. So for there to be an indirect object, there needs to be an object that that indirect object receives.
In “I make my customers cakes”, ‘customers’ are the indirect object, and ‘cakes’ are the object. The explicit version is “I make cakes for my customers”, where ‘customers’ is the prepositional object of ‘for’ and the prepositional phrase ‘for my customers’ is an adverbial prepositional phrase modifying ‘make’.
Diagramming that looks like this or this, with or without the implied preposition:
So, comparing to my tree for “Sleep makes it possible to study more”:
If ‘it’ is the indirect object, what is the object that it is receiving? My tree doesn’t have an object. So it doesn’t make sense for ‘it’ to be an indirect object. It also shouldn’t have a complement, because it’s an action verb, but that ‘complement’ isn’t the object I’m missing.
Hmm. So I’m sure that ‘sleep’ is the subject, and ‘makes’ is the finite verb.
‘it’ makes sense as an object, because it’s a pronoun.
A comment in the reddit post you linked above seems relevant:
With “It makes it possible for us to expand our business,” possible is modifying the it in bold, which serves as a dummy pronoun referring to “to expand our business” (it’s extraposition, in the same way “to expand our business is possible” would be rephrased to “it is possible to expand our business” to make the sentence easier to process). And finally, “for us” serves to specify the subject of the infinitive clause.
So ‘it’ is a dummy pronoun referring to “to study more”, and “possible” is modifying the ‘it’, and so also ‘to study’ by proxy. That would all make sense, except, that it seems unusual for the adjective to come after the pronoun ‘it’, but I suppose since it’s modifying ‘to study’ by proxy, that makes sense. Am I right that’s its unusual for an adjective to be to the right of its noun?
Okay, I think it wasn’t obvious to me what possible was modifying, and that’s part of the trouble I’ve had.
I guess what I’m not sure about now is what ‘to study’ is a child of in the tree, ‘it’ or ‘makes’. I’ll post this for now though.
There is a one word addition to make this more explicit, similar to the adjustments in the indirect object examples.
Hmm. Maybe the infinitive ‘be’? i.e:
Sleep makes it [be] possible to study more
It’s the only plausible thing I came up with. It feels clumsy though.
That’s correct.
So there are two basic ways you can deal with the sentence and many others.
A. You can add an implied word.
B. You can interpret the verb as taking 2 complements and/or objects as inputs instead of the usual 0 or 1.
Verbs take 1 subject, any number of modifiers, and usually 0-1 objects/complements but sometimes 2 which is a special case that you can either model directly (option B) or remove by making things more explicit with an implied word (option A).
With option B, you don’t need to name the inputs with terminology like “indirect object”. Don’t focus on terminology. There are multiple versions of (2) with different names but the general concept is simple: some verbs can take an extra input. Your intuition already knows which verbs do it and how to interpret the meaning of the inputs, and your readers know that too, automatically, without thinking about it. You can throw something to someone without the word “to”. You can make something be something without the word “be”. These look potentially like shortcuts where a word is omitted but I don’t know their actual origins.
Note that the order of siblings is more important when using option B.
In general, there are two good options for ordering siblings in grammar trees:
Or
Other orderings are often only mildly confusing because English generally isn’t very sensitive to the order of siblings. However, subject and object are distinguished by order, so putting an object before a subject would be really confusing.
If a verb has two objects/complements, ordering them is also really important. Readers use their order in the sentence to understand their meaning.
Okay cool. I understand the idea that some verbs can take extra inputs. But I’m not sure about the complements/objects part. Action verbs still can’t take complements, even if it already has an object, right? So this sentence of mine (with option B) can’t have ‘it’ as an object plus a complement; the sentence has to have 2 objects. Is that right?
I still am unsure how to diagram this. I feel a bit confused and like I can only guess. So I think there is still something I don’t understand.
Just ignore that rule with a second object or complement input.
There are two diagram options. In one you have a “[be]” node. In the other, the verb has a subject, two object or complement nodes, plus modifiers. Can you try both?
Oh okay, great. That clears some things up. I had attempted to make the two diagrams but I stumbled on this problem.
Here is a new attempt:
So what are you working on? Do you need more assignments?
Two of the things coming up next are paragraph trees and short writing exercises. Do you have any preference about which to do first?
Apart from the other non-grammar activities, I’ve been just working through these problems that have come up with grammar (also I’ve read the commas article; I forgot to mention). There were a lot of Rand sentences with restatements that I found so I worked through them as practise and a few things came up that were helpful. That last problem was to help with me with the following sentence that uses restatements again. I just finished it now:
From Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Whether they are held consciously or subconsciously—in the explicit form of a philosopher’s treatise or in the implicit chaos of its echoes in an average man’s feelings—these theories make it possible for a man to believe that the good is independent of man’s mind and can be achieved by physical force.
Tree:
More assignments would be good yes. I think I would prefer paragraph trees next. I’ve done some of them in the past and would be good to refresh.
Why do you think “an” modifies “feelings”?
OK the goal of paragraph trees is to express the relationships between sentences or clauses. Put relationship nodes in between the sentence/clause nodes. You can find some info about this and examples in the Max tutoring videos.
The more a clause seems like a separate point, the more you think of putting it in its own node. Whereas if a clause seems more like a modifier providing some extra detail, and that detail isn’t crucial to your analysis, then it may not need its own node.
Try a couple with some easier text than these Rand sentences you’ve been using.
Oh, no I don’t that’s a mistake. It’s a determiner that modifies “man’s”.
From Ludwig von Mises Profit and Loss (LvMI) (p. 7). Kindle Edition.
In the capitalist system of society’s economic organization the entrepreneurs determine the course of production. In the performance of this function they are unconditionally and totally subject to the sovereignty of the buying public, the consumers. If they fail to produce in the cheapest and best possible way those commodities which the consumers are asking for most urgently, they suffer losses and are finally eliminated from their entrepreneurial position. Other men who know better how to serve the consumers replace them.
Okay so firstly, I gave the sentences their own nodes (I could’ve also split sentence 3 up into it’s two clauses and had the second clause of [3] and the sentence [4] as consequences of the first clause of [3])
I then simplified the sentences, and made a tree with the simplified sentences:
I got most relationships shortly; but I wasn’t happy with the initial relationship i put there between [1] and [2]. I was having trouble with describing the relationship between the first and second sentence; so I simplified that further:
Some brainstorming for the connection:
It seems like a detail, or a part, or further info. I’m not sure though. I remember from doing paragraph trees previously that i’ve had difficulty coming up with naming some connections.
First attempt:
I think words like “a” and “about” are usually unnecessary. You could just write “detail”, “elaboration” or “more information”. But I don’t think “part” is correct here.
Similarly, “a consequence being that” is OK but “then” would work too.
Yeah I was mainly trying to brainstorm things to try and get unstuck, and these are what just came to me. For whatever reason, using more words even if unnecessary just helped me get some ideas out.
yeah I agree actually
