Even the University Gets it Wrong Sometimes

This article was first published on the 21st of April, 2021 by Patrick Carpen.

If you make a mistake in your English writing and speaking sometimes, don’t beat yourself up in the head about it. Even the University gets it wrong sometimes!

That’s because the English language is so extremely complicated and hard to master with all its rules and exceptions to the rules, its complicated spelling, and its borrowing from other languages.

So, if you haven’t managed to master the English language, don’t beat yourself up in the head about it. You’re not alone.

A few days ago, I was studying an English Grammar Course administered by a US University on coursera.org. I forgot the name of the University, but I’ll tell you later. The course was a four-week course in conjunctions, adverbials etc.

Look at this question, as you can see from the picture above, that they gave to me during one of their videos.

Which sentence below is the correct way to reduce the adverb clause in this sentence.

Sentence: Because Molly stayed up late last night, she has been tired all day today.

Option 1: Staying up late last night, Molly has been tired all day today.

Option 2: Because staying up late last night, Molly has been tired all day today.

Now option 2 is obviously wrong because of bad wording. However, is option 1 really correct? I submitted it, and they said it was! But it isn’t!

Look carefully at the sentence again:

Staying up late last night, Molly has been tired all day today.

Does that make sense to you?

The independent clause, “staying up late last night” is referring to an action which happened in the past. So how can you use a present participle to refer to an action which happened in the past? That is, since last night!

Let’s look at the original sentence again:

Because Molly stayed up late last night, she has been tired all day today.

The verb in the independent clause of the original sentence is “stayed” which is past tense.

So the correct reduction of this adverb clause to a participial phrase should be:

Having stayed up late last night, Molly has been tired all day today.