Grammar Pros Please Check This Prose

April 3, 2023 6:20 AM

"Grant Wood's best known painting American Gothic is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon." Is this sentence punctuated correctly, even if using commas around American Gothic would probably be more ideal? I've been debating some other SAT tutors about this, and it's driving me a bit batty.

This is all based on a question from an SAT textbook that looks as follows:

Grant Wood's best known _______ one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.

A) painting, American Gothic, is
B) painting American Gothic is
C) painting American Gothic, is
D) painting, American Gothic is

The answer key says A, and I agree that that is grammatically correct. However, I would also argue that D is correct. That makes me wonder whether B is also grammatically correct, if not ideal.

posted by matkline to Writing & Language (32 answers total)

From the SAT's perspective, this is an open and shut question. "American Gothic" is non-essential (because Wood has only one BEST known painting), so must be surrounded by two commas as in answer "A".
posted by Jon44 at 6:23 AM on April 3, 2023 [17 favorites]

Is this sentence punctuated correctly

Shouldn't the compound modifiers "best known X" and "universally recognized Y" be hyphenated?
posted by Klipspringer at 6:27 AM on April 3, 2023 [8 favorites]

A is grammatically correct.

B is perfectly acceptable outside of an exam (primarily because with the italics in place it's entirely clear what is being referred to), although technically incorrect.

C and D are both wrong.
posted by underclocked at 6:28 AM on April 3, 2023 [16 favorites]

I am also an SAT tutor, and the SAT enforces certain rules, like the one about surrounding this with two commas, that are not followed so closely even in fancy professional publications like The New York Times. Jon44 is right about this.

As a writer, I would use B. Depending on who I was writing for, an editor might change it.

Neither C or D can be right—I tell my students, a nonrestrictive element like that has to have matching punctuation on both sides. It can be commas, less often dashes, less often parentheses, but they both have to be there and they have to match.
posted by Well I never at 6:31 AM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

D isn't wrong. "American Gothic" is the subject of the sentence, and "Grant Wood's best known painting" is an appositive modifying it, no different than A. You could flip it so that the appositive comes after the subject, like in A ("American Gothic, Grant Wood's best known painting, is one of the few..."), but grammatically it's the same.

I don't love the construction in B, but I think you could make a case that it works.

C is the one that's obviously wrong.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:34 AM on April 3, 2023 [19 favorites]

@kevinbelt — D is absolutely incorrect. You're right that American Gothic is an appositive, and that's why A has two commas separating it from the body of the sentence. D does not. D just makes my brain hurt because it's one of those "I'm going to place a random comma here" sentences.
posted by jdroth at 6:37 AM on April 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

I disagree that D is no different than A, but D could absolutely be valid in context, if “American Gothic” has been introduced previously and this sentence is providing more information about it. As a standalone statement, yes, it’s wrong.
posted by staggernation at 6:51 AM on April 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Professional copy editor here. There is no possible context in which D is correct.
posted by FencingGal at 6:57 AM on April 3, 2023 [16 favorites]

This is apposition, and only A is correct.
posted by dis_integration at 6:58 AM on April 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: I think many commenters are under a misapprehension. There's no reason that "Grant Wood's best known painting" can't be the appositive here.

To my thinking, the following sentences are both correct and quite similar in meaning:

1. American Gothic, Grant Wood's best known painting, is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.

2. Grant Wood's best known painting, American Gothic is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.
posted by matkline at 7:01 AM on April 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

Bob walked in.

My least favorite ____ not the man I wanted to see right now.

A. uncle, Bob, was
B. uncle Bob was
C. uncle Bob, was
D. uncle, Bob was
posted by staggernation at 7:01 AM on April 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

D is deceptively wrong because it matches how news anchors talk.

"Grant's best-known painting, American Gothic is..." (works well when read with the "evening news" tone and timing. )
posted by dum spiro spero at 7:05 AM on April 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

An example that illustrates why the SAT's approach is correct and results in clear writing is if you have two sisters, you would write "I'm going to the movies this Friday with my sister Anne." If Anne was your only sister, you'd write "I'm going to the movies this Friday with my sister, Anne."
You can "hear" in the first sentence, when there's no pause after "sister" that "Anne" is adding crucial information (i.e., which of your sisters) while in the second sentence, the pause caused by the comma indicates that "Anne" is a parenthetical aside.
posted by Jon44 at 7:12 AM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, (d) is stylistically unusual and subtly different in emphasis (would require prior reference to the painting), but could be correct. However, in 95% of usage, and thus for the SAT's purposes, (a) is it. (b) is wrong.
posted by praemunire at 7:20 AM on April 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

(The most familiar usage of (d) would be, I think, in obituaries. "The eldest of 10 children, Bob Smith attended the Wayside School...")
posted by praemunire at 7:22 AM on April 3, 2023 [13 favorites]

Another professional editor here, confirming: A is most-correct, B would be informally perfectly fine, and the others are simply incorrect in any context.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:23 AM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

No one who knows enough about grammar and punctuation to have an opinion on this is going to have their mind changed by a declaration of correctness.

A, B, and D are all clear and conform to some version of "proper" punctuation. C is still pretty clear, but doesn't conform to any such version.

Part of the problem is that I don't know what new information this sentence has to impart -- has American Gothic already been introduced? Has Grant Wood? Is it absolutely necessary for this particular sentence to cram in that Grant Wood painted American Gothic, that it is his best-known work, and that it has achieved iconic status?

The answer to "Is this punctuation correct?" is often "That sentence could stand to be rewritten."
posted by Etrigan at 7:26 AM on April 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

As other have noted, there are several contexts in which a person would hear a respectable person use, essentially, punctuation D. The mistake is in assuming that because you hear it often, it is correct! In fact we are very used to hearing things in public discourse and reading things in mass media that are incorrect from a grammatical standpoint.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:28 AM on April 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Shouldn't the compound modifiers "best known X" and "universally recognized Y" be hyphenated?

"Best known X" should be hyphenated, but it's considered acceptable to not do so. I fight the good fight for hyphenating compound modifiers at my job.

Modifiers ending in "ly" are not hyphenated.
posted by jgirl at 7:30 AM on April 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: My former copyeditor just got back to me on this.

He says that A and D are both correct, but that B is not. According to him, "'Grant Wood's best-known painting' is fully specified, so 'American Gothic' can't be part of the same phrase. Some punctuation is required."
posted by matkline at 7:56 AM on April 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

The subject in A is Grant Wood's best known painting whereas the subject in D is American Gothic. This seems to be the source of confusion.

For A, keep the subject GWBKP, take out the parenthetical American Gothic, and the sentence is fine:
Grant Wood's best known painting is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.

For D, as @matkline and @kevinbelt already pointed out, Grant Wood's best known painting is an appositive. It can come before or after the subject (American Gothic). You can toss out GWBKP in both cases.

Grant Wood's best known painting, American Gothic is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.
American Gothic, Grant Wood's best known painting, is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.
American Gothic is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.


B isn't wrong either. It just sounds super awkward because the subject clause goes on forever.
Grant Wood's best known painting American Gothic is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.

Only C is wrong.
posted by pendrift at 8:02 AM on April 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: In fact we are very used to hearing things in public discourse and reading things in mass media that are incorrect from a grammatical standpoint.

This may be true, depending on your degree of prescriptivism, but there's no rule against starting a sentence with an appositive phrase, in which case it is literally impossible to set that phrase off with two commas. It feels slightly odd because it's uncommon in English to have a consequent precede a referent, which is why people have mentioned it would arise naturally only in a situation where the referent has been identified in a prior sentence, but it's not prohibited.
posted by praemunire at 8:28 AM on April 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

Klipspringer, compound modifiers with an adverb ending in -ly do not customarily require a hyphen because ambiguity is basically impossible.

In your other example, the superlative adjective "best" modifies "known", so no hyphen is necessary, although some style manuals suggest hyphenating superlative compound modifiers when the meaning is possibly ambiguous. In this case, I think there's a good argument for hyphenation to make clear that it is Wood's most known painting, not his best painting that has been discovered so far.

P.S. The only correct answer here is A, and I feel like it's doing the SAT students a disservice to muddy the waters with technicalities. In this case, there is only one acceptable answer, no matter how many of the choices may be acceptable in conversational English.
posted by easy, lucky, free at 8:35 AM on April 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think everyone would be a lot more chill here if they changed "punctuated correctly" to "correct in the eyes of the SAT".
The SAT is in some sense infallible. They make the rules they enforce. They can't be the wrong rules because they are the only rules in that specialized universe of discourse. As noted, plenty of professional editors and style guides would allow other forms in other contexts. But A) is all the SAT cares to consider correct, and lo, by power of authority, it is so.

In the real world, linguistics is a descriptive science, and the the only things that are generally ungrammatical are those that are unintelligible. But when you want to punctuate (or spell) correctly, the only meaningful notion of "correct" is "correct in the eyes of the current publisher/editor/style guide the writer is currently beholden to."

Good, convincing, and reasonable cases can be made for lots of things the SAT would call incorrect. But the students aren't being tested on their ability to reason here, they are being tested on their ability to apply fiat rules granted from on high, even if they are demonstrably arbitrary and capricious on occasion.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:30 AM on April 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: @SaltySalticid That's not true. This is from a textbook designed to help students tackle the SAT, not an official SAT test. On the real SAT, wrong answers are unambiguously wrong, aside from the handful of mistakes that have occurred over the years.
posted by matkline at 9:34 AM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another language professional here. My take is that B and C are incorrect (I would not be surprised to see B in print but I am less tolerant of it than are others here) while A and D are correct. D does suggest that the topic of American Gothic has already been raised in one or more preceding sentences.

In the interest of bringing in some outside authority, here is the Purdue OWL on the subject. Note that they endorse "The first state to ratify the U. S. Constitution, Delaware is rich in history" and a couple of other similarly constructed sentences. Their discussion generally supports praemunire's comments above.

To your point, matkline, I do find that questions in SAT prep books are often less clear-cut than questions on the test itself. If you are helping a student prepare for the SAT, I would suggest omitting this question from the discussion entirely.
posted by the charms of plurality at 10:35 AM on April 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

The wrong answers in this example are unambiguously wrong.
posted by easy, lucky, free at 11:17 AM on April 3, 2023

It would be good to have a prescriptivist explain why possibilities B and D are wrong, not from authority, but responding to the comments made by kevinbelt and praemunire, among others.
posted by bullatony at 12:15 PM on April 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Forget about correctness. The "marked as correct" answer is about conventions.

D is not incorrect, but that is not sufficient to establish confidence that it's the preferred construction. A is clearly much closer to conventional construction; its status as preferred is not really debatable.

Put another way...A is what you'd expect in a professionally-edited journal read by SAT people, while D is what you'd expect in a blog.
posted by Caxton1476 at 5:47 PM on April 3, 2023

"Tall, lean, loosely and feebly put together, he had an ugly, sickly, witty, charming face, furnished, but by no means decorated, with a straggling moustache and whisker."

Henry James, noted blogger.
posted by praemunire at 7:42 PM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Total layperson here, but reading all this with interest. I’d have chosen B, but only because it has fewer commas in the sentence and, to my internal voice, seems to flow better. The italics do the heavy lifting of separating subject from your “apposite clause”.

What if the sentence simply read “Grant Wood's painting American Gothic is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon.”? Would the commas before and after the title still be needed? Is it just because “best known” fully specifies the painting that the commas become necessary?
posted by mapinact at 3:28 AM on April 4, 2023

D is a (perfectly grammatical, imo) Jeopardy! answer construction.

"Grant Wood's best known painting, this work is one of the few images to reach the status of universally recognized cultural icon."
posted by Gadarene at 5:22 AM on April 4, 2023 [2 favorites]