Ask the English Teacher

Report or Reporting

Flora asks:
Hope that you can help with a burning question. Is the following sentence grammatically correct:

"As a rule, we at Time Inc., publisher of this and many other magazines, believe that we should report the news instead of making it."

In particular, should "making" be changed to "make"? Or "report" changed to "be reporting"? Or is the sentence acceptable as is?

The sentence is colloquially acceptable, but for strict parallelism—keeping parts of speech consistent—it should read: "we...believe that we should report the news instead of make it."

On style grounds, however, I find the "correct version" a little stiff. Most readers would pause and re-read it just because it doesn't sound quite right. And anything that slows readers down should be revised. So I might write:

"we...believe that we should report the news, not make the news."

More are? More is?

George asks:
Hoping you can help with the following sentence:

More than one out of five Greater Clevelanders are affected by services funded by United Way.

OR

More than one out of five Greater Clevelanders is affected by services funded by United Way.

Interesting point! "More" is one of those words that can be either singular or plural: "More is coming. More are coming." Another is "all," which means you can write "All is lost! All are lost!" and be correct both times.

The expression "one out of..." ought to be singular ("One out of three players is a local boy"). In practice, the media tend to treat the expression as plural ("One out of three players are local boys"). I wish they wouldn't.

In George's case, however, I'd use "are" because the phrase after all specifies more than one. I could also write: "More than a fifth of Greater Clevelanders are affected..."