There is an amusing sentence in a current Celebrex television commercial.  It is part of that scary warning section that warns the viewer/listener about all the side effects of the medication. The same sentence appears in the warning section on the company's website:

 Patients taking aspirin and the elderly are at increased risk for stomach bleeding and ulcers. 

 What is that again? It sounds as if both ASPIRIN and THE ELDERLY are objects of the present participle (ING word) TAKING.  That would imply that PATIENTS take both things–ASPIRIN and THE ELDERLY–which, of course, does not make sense. Only the words TAKING ASPIRIN refer to PATIENTS. THE ELDERLY is a separate category.

 The way to fix this sentence is to reverse the descriptions so that THE ELDERLY are not lumped with the ASPIRIN! It should be worded this way:

The elderly and patients taking aspirin are at increased risk for stomach bleeding and ulcers.

Tags: Celebrex, sentence structure, using ING forms

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Grammar, using ING forms, wording. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.