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Timothy Trese replies: <<Respectfully, Geoff, I think you're mistaken on the
grammar below: "I'm more familiar and comfortable with what you call the
"gerund phrase" approach, though strictly speaking, this approach uses a
present participle, not a gerund.">>
Tim's right, of course. I was misled by the fact that applying the adverb
test suggested that "creating" was functioning as a verb ("gleefully
creating a new document"), forgetting for the moment that this structure is
actually what's known as a "participial adjective"; thanks to Jane Lyle,
grammarian extraordinaire for providing the necessary jargon. Put a little
more plainly, "creating" fills the role of "the creation of" or "the act of
creating", and thus clearly serves as a noun phrase--and that's what makes
it part of the gerund family. Jane also noted that formally, this structure
used to be called a "gerundive", because the modifier is an adverb rather
than (as is more commonly the case with nouns) an adjective. That's getting
way beyond my level of grammatical expertise, and well astray from
techwr-l-legal topics, so I'll leave it at that. Further enlightenment
welcomed, but privately rather than on the list.
In any event, I think the rest of my response remains valid and relevant to
techwr-l: I don't think it matters whether you use "creating" or "create" as
the heading, though "creating" is more familiar. Perhaps a compromise might
be "To create a new document"? That works well from the reader's viewpoint,
and is a structure I've seen often enough to consider it familiar to many
readers.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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