Revising a Sentence Without Changing Its Meaning
A student drafts this sentence for an essay: "The committee reviewed the proposal carefully, they decided to postpone the vote until more data was available." Her teacher marks two problems: a comma splice and a subject-verb agreement issue with "data." The student wants to fix both while keeping the sentence's meaning and formal tone. She considers four revisions: (A) "The committee reviewed the proposal carefully, they decided to postpone the vote until more data were available." (B) "The committee reviewed the proposal carefully; they decided to postpone the vote until more data were available." (C) "Reviewing the proposal carefully, the vote was postponed until more data was available." (D) "The committee reviewed the proposal carefully and decided to postpone the vote until more data were available."
1. Evaluate each revision. Which fixes both problems, and which introduce new errors?
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Option A still has a comma splice: two independent clauses joined only by a comma. It fixes agreement ("data were") but not punctuation, so it fails.
Option B replaces the comma with a semicolon, correctly joining two independent clauses, and uses "data were," treating data as plural. Both problems are fixed, though the sentence remains two clauses rather than one.
Option C creates a dangling modifier. "Reviewing the proposal carefully" should describe the committee, but the subject of the main clause is "the vote," which cannot review anything. It also keeps "data was." This option is worse than the original.
Option D combines the ideas into one clause with "and," eliminating the splice, and uses "data were." It reads smoothly and preserves meaning. Both B and D are grammatically sound; D is often preferred for concision.
2. Suppose the writer's style guide treats "data" as a singular mass noun. How should that change the analysis, and what principle governs the choice?
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If the style guide treats "data" as singular, then "data was" is acceptable and the agreement problem disappears. The remaining issue is only the comma splice, so options B and D still work, and A would now be wrong solely because of the splice.
The governing principle is consistency with the audience and the style guide, not a single universal rule. In formal academic writing, many editors still treat data as plural ("the data were"), especially in scientific contexts. In general-purpose journalism, singular treatment is common. A test-taker should apply the convention the prompt or course establishes, and should avoid mixing conventions within one document. The key judgment is recognizing that grammar choices can be register-dependent while punctuation errors like the comma splice remain errors regardless.