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Wed 25 Jul, 2007 03:46 am
1) To respect your peers is to respect yourself.
2) To respect your peers is respecting yourself.
3) Respecting your peers is respecting yourself.
Which one do you like best? (I prefer the second one somehow, but I sense this feeling might be wrong.)
Or how would you native speakers of English reword it?
Thanks for your comments in advance!
I like either the 1st or 3rd one better, actually. It makes sense to me to keep the same phrasing on either end. The 1st one sounds best.
sozobe wrote:I like either the 1st or 3rd one better, actually. It makes sense to me to keep the same phrasing on either end. The 1st one sounds best.
Thank you Sozobe, for sharing your feeling of the English language.
It helps me much!!
Bules
Don't give me too much credence on this one (in other words, don't pay too much attention to me), I answered in terms of what sounds better to me but I'm not certain that the first one is actually the best in terms of English grammar.
If you're presenting a proverb-like bit of wisdom, I'd go with, "To respect your peers is to respect yourself."
I agree with Soz about #2. Parallelism (two infinitives or two "ing" constructions (I forget the grammatical terminology) are more effective than the mixture. The "wisdom" of the observation grows with repetition.
"Respecting your peers is respecting yourself" is less formal, less stilted than the Proverbial Presentation and would be useful for talking with children about behavior and attitudes.
sozobe wrote:...I answered in terms of what sounds better to me........
Hi, you native speaker's preference -even a very personal one- can help me to form a stereo concept of the language better than a dreary grammar book.
Blues
Noddy24 wrote:If you're presenting a proverb-like bit of wisdom, I'd go with, "To respect your peers is to respect yourself."
I agree with Soz about #2. Parallelism (two infinitives or two "ing" constructions (I forget the grammatical terminology) are more effective than the mixture. The "wisdom" of the observation grows with repetition.
"Respecting your peers is respecting yourself" is less formal, less stilted than the Proverbial Presentation and would be useful for talking with children about behavior and attitudes.
Received!
Sounds very reasonable. Thank you!
Blues
Yes, both 1 and 3 follow parallel sentence structure.
To respect your peers
The first and third are equally good; number 2 is awkward, because the two verbs do not match. It's not exactly wrong, but it isn't the most elegant phrasing.
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