"Falconburg conveyed an apology, but Mr. Mooney has declined the offer for an in-person meeting."
The tense issues kind of rub me the wrong way, too, although I don't know if that counts as an error. I think it should all be simple past, though, especially given the previous sentence.
There's a lively discussion in the comments to that post about what really happened. There's a video associated with the arrest, but the video apparently doesn't tell the whole story. The police supposedly came to break up a gathering of 12-15 people, and Mooney might not have been part of that group, but the police may have thought he had been.
Now that I look at the sentence a second time, I think that there may indeed be a tense-control issue. Your suggestion to make it all simple-past tense works for me, although it's possible to defend the present-perfect if we think of Mooney's declining the offer of a personal apology as having ripples that go up to the present moment. But that may be a bit of a stretch, and ultimately, I agree with you.
Anyway, the two errors I saw were fairly easy to catch:
1. conjunctive adverb: there ought to be a semicolon after "apology." 2. punctuation: it should be "an in-person meeting." (hyphenate phrasal adj.)
The "too" you wrote—in the phrase "rubs me the wrong way, too"—seems to imply that you wrote a comment before this one. Did you? If so, I didn't see it. Or were you saying "too" in the sense of "in addition to the two easily visible errors"?
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"Falconburg conveyed an apology, but Mr. Mooney has declined the offer for an in-person meeting."
ReplyDeleteThe tense issues kind of rub me the wrong way, too, although I don't know if that counts as an error. I think it should all be simple past, though, especially given the previous sentence.
Also, what the hell is wrong with the police?
There's a lively discussion in the comments to that post about what really happened. There's a video associated with the arrest, but the video apparently doesn't tell the whole story. The police supposedly came to break up a gathering of 12-15 people, and Mooney might not have been part of that group, but the police may have thought he had been.
ReplyDeleteNow that I look at the sentence a second time, I think that there may indeed be a tense-control issue. Your suggestion to make it all simple-past tense works for me, although it's possible to defend the present-perfect if we think of Mooney's declining the offer of a personal apology as having ripples that go up to the present moment. But that may be a bit of a stretch, and ultimately, I agree with you.
Anyway, the two errors I saw were fairly easy to catch:
1. conjunctive adverb: there ought to be a semicolon after "apology."
2. punctuation: it should be "an in-person meeting." (hyphenate phrasal adj.)
The "too" you wrote—in the phrase "rubs me the wrong way, too"—seems to imply that you wrote a comment before this one. Did you? If so, I didn't see it. Or were you saying "too" in the sense of "in addition to the two easily visible errors"?