attention grammarians!

[nolly]

"This index will show you the number and percent of students that selected specific answer options."

OR

"This index will show you the number and percent of students who selected specific answer options."

OR

something else?

Comments

I think...

[the-ogre.livejournal.com]

..it would be "who have selected".

Re: I think...

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Ah, but that's shifting the tense, though, which may not be appropriate:

"Who selected" at a specific time. (Reference is to a specific past event when selection occurred);

"Who have selected" at any time in the past. (Reference is to their current state, i.e. the state of "having selected...")


- Johnny Come Lately, aka Interfering Wise-Guy, aka Paul B. =:o} (who should be on his way to work by now but can't resist a good grammatical challenge.)

Re: I think...

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

N.B. I'm arguing from "English English" usage. I've noticed that "American TV usage" (presumably Californian?) leans towards using "Who did" rather than "Who has done", etc. - e.g. "I already did that" rather than "I've already done that".

It's not clear to me whether this is due to a different understanding of the meaning of the two tenses, or just a different way of looking at situations, i.e. that Californians (or "American TeeVeans") are naturally more inclined to focus on the specific event, wheras English/Brits would focus more on the fact of "In the past"-ness.

Comments welcome, but I should probably be discussing this in my own LJ, shouldn't I? Hang on, I'll repost this there.

[SINGS "Come on along to my house... ]

[triptogn.livejournal.com]

yes, i concur. use the word "have"

[redbird]

You can get away with either--there's long precedent in English for using "that" to refer to humans. (One of E. B. White's New Yorker columns used the King James Bible as an example of this.)

That said, I like "who have selected" and I'd suggest changing "answer options" to "answers" unless it's clearly about ways of answering--say, X percent answered in English, Y percent in Spanish, Z percent in Quechua, and Q percent by drawing pictures.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

It's about a detailed breakdown of responses for a multiple choice test. The first wording is what's in the spec, but it doesn't read well to me, so I'm considering proposing alternative wording. However, I tend to avoid "that" in favor of "which" or "who" in general, so I wasn't sure if this was a real lack in the sentence or my personal quirk.

[redbird]

"That" or "who" is fine; "which" goes with an inanimate subject, so you'd be forcing the emphasis onto "number or percent" rather than "students", which may be what you want.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Except that the number or percent didn't do the selecting --- the students did, no?

[nolly.livejournal.com]

*nod* I wasn't considering "which" in this specific case; it's merely a general tendency. In fact, I think there may have been an a.p thread on it a couple of years ago, but I should be working, not googling old threads.

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I thought it would be "which", actually. Maybe I'm smoking crack, but I thought that "which" would refer back to "the number and percent" rather than "students" which is part of "of students".
The referring noun or direct object would be "the number and percent".

I used to learn this stuff by seeing if the sentence works without the prepositional phrase or indirect object. For example: "This index will show you the number and percent which selected specific answer options". I think "which have selected" is optimal, reading that.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

Both are technically correct. "Who" is *more* correct, stylistically.

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

You could also avoid the problem entirely by saying
"This index will show you the number and percent of students selecting specific answer options."

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Interesting... My initial assumption was as follows: It's definitely "that". Your subject is "the number and percentage (of whatever)". The nature of "whatever" is irrelevant to answering your question: Numbers and percentages are always "things".

But then I started working through an example contrasting this with the case where the subject is "people", and a number is used adjectively, and thus where "who" should be used... And twigged my parsing error! The construction of your sentence is:

"This index will show you the number and percent (of students who selected specific answer options)."

NOT:

"This index will show you the number and percent (of students) *that* selected specific answer options."

since the latter would imply that numbers and percentages can select options, which is clearly silly, and therefore the basis for a potentially rather interesting fantasy novel... =;o}

(You don't know me, by the way. I just snuck in here via rosefox's journal. =:o> )