User talk:Minturn

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Antietam casualties
Hi, CWenger, This is about my noting the ambiguity in the Battle of Antietam casualty count. I run into this issue frequently when discussing casualty counts with people who are not U.S. Civil War history types. USCWHT's like to include both sides in casualty counts, but only for this war. Others, especially Europeans, are flabbergasted that this happens, particularly when comparing casualty counts from battles in different wars (e.g., Ken Burns' comparing Shiloh with Waterloo). I have found that you have to be REALLY clear--almost painfully obvious--or they don't get it. That's why I made the edit I did. Minturn (talk) 18:54, 17 January 2024 (UTC)


 * @Minturn: Thanks for the message. It already says "a combined tally of 22,727 dead, wounded, or missing", so I'm not sure what else "combined" would mean, unless it means dead + wounded + missing, but that's implied because it's only a single number. Maybe you can rewrite it to be more clear without the parenthetical? –CWenger ( ^ •  @ ) 19:28, 17 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Dead + wounded + missing was just what I thought "combined" could be taken to mean. I'll cogitate on a clearer way to put it. Minturn (talk) 19:44, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

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Parallelism and compounds
@RecycledPixels: You reverted my edit to Paradise Airlines Flight 901A to read: "That crew said that they had encountered icing conditions at 12000 ft, snow showers over Lake Tahoe, and that clouds had obscured the tops of mountains in the vicinity." That sentence contains a misuse of parallelism, arising from a compound object within a compound object. The crew "encountered" "icing" and "snow showers" and "reported" this encounter and also that "clouds had obscured the tops of mountains". The three objects are thus not all equal (parallel). Displayed hierarchically, you get:

"That crew said
 * [1] that they had encountered
 * [a] icing conditions at 12000 ft,
 * [b] snow showers over Lake Tahoe,
 * [2] and that clouds had obscured the tops of mountains in the vicinity."

Because [a] and [b] are the only two parts of the compound object of "encountered", they should be connected by an "and". A second "and" is needed to connect [1] and [2], the two parts of the compound object of "said". The alternative would be to rewrite the sentence to read something like: "That crew said that they had encountered icing conditions at 12000 ft, that there were snow showers over Lake Tahoe, and that clouds had obscured the tops of mountains in the vicinity."

Compound-compounds and the related parallelism are among the hardest things to learn about English. My students got 'em wrong all the time. Minturn (talk) 17:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Good suggestion. I have changed it to the wording you suggested.  RecycledPixels (talk) 18:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Minturn (talk) 20:10, 4 March 2024 (UTC)