Easy To Read, Difficult To Understand
Sep 11th 2011 17:31
to-infinitive
(A) This book is easy to read, but difficult to understand.
(B) This book is easy to read, but it's difficult to understand.
(C) This book is easy to read, but it's difficult to understand it.
I think (A) is correct.
But I'm not sure (B) and (C) are,
because in (B) it is unclear whether the "it" means "this book" or is a formal subject,
and (C) has no problem with that point but I suspect the sentence feels a little redundant.
What do you think of them?
Thank you in advance!!
(B) This book is easy to read, but it's difficult to understand.
(C) This book is easy to read, but it's difficult to understand it.
I think (A) is correct.
But I'm not sure (B) and (C) are,
because in (B) it is unclear whether the "it" means "this book" or is a formal subject,
and (C) has no problem with that point but I suspect the sentence feels a little redundant.
What do you think of them?
Thank you in advance!!
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and (C) has no problem with that point but I think the sentence feels a little redundant. ["I doubt X" = "I don't think X is true". But here you do think it's true that the sentence feels a little redundant.]
Ah, how careless I was to make that mistake!
Thank you very much for your comment =)
(A') My friends are wonderful, but hard to understand sometimes.
(B') My friends are wonderful, but they are hard to understand sometimes.
(C') My friends are wonderful, but it's hard to understand them sometimes.
(C') sounds acceptable to me, although it has exactly the same structure as (C). The only relevant difference is that there is no possibility of interpreting "it" as referring to "friends," both because they are people, and because "friends" is a plural noun.
(A) This book is easy to read but difficult to understand. (There is no valid grammatical reason for the comma in this sentence.)
(B) This book is easy to read, but it's difficult to understand. (Correct. In this sentence the comma is required, because the word "but" by itself is not strong enough to join two complete independent clauses and form a compound sentence.)
For this reason A and B are more clear and therefore better.
Because the sentence is short, a native speaker can probably read C and resolve the confusion very quickly, subconsciously, not even realizing why it briefly confused him, but the other two are still better style.
Sentence B (with my correction to the punctuation) is no problem. The "it" obviously refers to the book there, and I don't see how any native speaker could imagine otherwise, even briefly.