"People" Reporter Creates Sentence Fragment

The "People" section of my local newspaper carried a nice article this morning about the WQED studio in Pittsburgh where Fred Rogers visited the Neighborhood of Make-Believe weekday afternoons until about ten years ago. The studio, which is being renamed for Rogers, will be brought back to life and opened to the public this weekend.

Unfortunately, the reporter who put this story together moved some material around and did not go back and proofread. The result was the following rather long sentence fragment:

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe is being rebuilt and opened to the public Saturday and Sunday, giving generations of Americans who grew up with Fred Rogers.

This sentence proves my point that you can put a capital letter at the beginning, a period at the end, and make it four lines long, but it STILL is not necessarily a sentence if it doesn't have a subject and a verb combination that work clearly together. In this sentence, the first part qualifies. In fact, you could put a period after "Sunday" and have a fine sentence for that part. However, "giving" is not enough of a verb by itself to make the last part of the sentence work.

The reader gets to the period at the end and asks, "Wait a minute. Giving these generations what?" Put together as it is written, the sentence makes no sense. I would suggest finishing the idea as follows:

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe is being rebuilt and opened to the public Saturday and Sunday, giving generations of Americans who grew up with Fred Rogers an opportunity to relive their childhood memories.

If you happen to be in Pittsburgh this weekend and happen to have grown up with Fred Rogers the way my older son did, then stop by WQED and check out the Rogers studio.

By the way, I'd like to welcome any new readers of this blog who found their way here after our workshops in Montgomery this past week. You were all great to work with, and I hope you enjoy the grammar glitches you find here each week.