Wed, 09 Jul 2025 12:31:13 EDT
Consider This Sentence
The following sentence occurs in Reuters on Apple News. “The death toll from the July Fourth flash flood that ravaged a swath of central Texas Hill Country rose on Tuesday to at least 109, many of them children, as search teams pressed on through mounds of mud-encrusted debris looking for scores of people still missing.”
The error that caught my attention in this run-on sentence is the phrase, many of them children. The pronoun, them, has no antecedent.
My rewrite: “On Tuesday, the death toll from Friday’s flash flood in Texas rose to 109 people, many of them children. Search teams continue to search through mud-encrusted debris for the missing.”