nt associations do not agree with the report |
|made by the commission. |

And sometimes one finds a plural verb wrongly used after the correlative
terms _either ... or_ and _neither ... nor_, as in the following:

|Neither the mother of the children nor the aunt were|
|held responsible for the accident. |

Finally, one often finds reporters consistently using a singular verb
after the expletive _there_. In fifty per cent of the cases the writers
are wrong. Thus:

|The briefest glance at the yard and premises would |
|have shown that there was more than one in the |
|conspiracy. |

Here _was_ should be _were_.

=154. Cooerdination and Subordination.=--The third error in grammatical
construction, failure to cooerdinate or subordinate sentences and parts
of sentences properly, cannot be treated with so much sureness as the
two preceding faults; yet certain definite instruction may be given.
_And_, _but_, _for_, _or_, and _nor_ are called cooerdinating
conjunctions; that is, they are used to connect words, phrases, and
clauses of equal rank. If one uses _and_ to connect a noun with a verb,
or a past participle with a present participle, or a verb in the
indicative mood with one in the subjunctive, he perverts the conjunction
and produces a consequent effect of awkwardness or lack of clearness in
the sentence. Look at the following:

|The sister residing in Albany, and who is said to |
|have struck one of the visiting sisters, followed |
|them into the sick room. |

In this sentence _and_ is used to connect the participle _residing_ with
the pronoun _who_, and the consequent awkwardness results. This is the
much condemned _and who_ construction. Likewise, in the next sentence:

|Five hundred persons saw two boys washed from the |
|end of Winter's pier and drowning in twenty feet of |
|water at noon to-day. |

_And_ is here used to connect the past participle _washed_ with the
present participle _drowning_, and the sentence is thereby rendered
clumsy.

=155. Clauses Unequal in Thought.=--An equally great inaccuracy is the
attempt to connect with a cooerdinate conjunction clauses equivalent in
grammatical construction, but unequal in thought value. Other things
being equal, the ideas of greatest value should be pu