Student Services and Development

ACADEMIC SKILLS PROGRAM STUDENT SERVICES AND DEVELOPMENT

MIXED CONSTRUCTION

Revise the mixed constructions below; some sentences may be correct.

1. Because television’s first large-scale transmissions included news programs quickly became popular with the public. 2. By increasing the time allotment for network news to thirty minutes increased the prestige of network news programs. 3. Lloyd Robertson’s outstanding characteristic is credible as a newscaster. 4. A disaster is when television news shows get some of their highest ratings. 5. One reason television news captured widespread attention is because it covered the Vietnam war so thoroughly. 6. In 1937, under the sponsorship of Lord Tweedsmuir, who was the Governor General at the time, sponsored the launching of the Governor General’s Literary Awards. 7. The reason that Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir is better known in some quarters as John Buchan is because under that name he wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, a spy novel that was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. 8. The Governor General’s Awards that he helped establish have become the greatest desirability of any literary awards in Canada, and as a result, the categories of works for which they are awarded have undergone frequent expansion and revision. 9. The fact that at first, only books in English were eligible for the awards, a situation that many believed to be a serious oversight. 10. The solution to this problem was remedied in 1959, when the Canada Council began to administer the awards and established an identical set of Governor General’s Awards for works in French. 11. A controversial episode was when the refusal of an award in 1968, when Leonard Cohen declined the prize for his Selected Poems, 1956-1968 and said, “Much in me strives for this honour, but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely.” 12. About the same time, a less enigmatic explanation for refusing the award was given by several nationalist Quebec writers announced they were rejecting it for political reasons. 13. However, in 1992 Cohen accepted the newly instituted Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, so apparently his songs, unlike his poems, did permit that honour. 14. Although the judgement and taste of the awards’ juries have sometimes been questioned, but we can note in their favour that recipients have included important writers such as Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, Alice Munroe, Mavis Gallant, and Robertson Davies. 15. When we examine this list of writers stands up well against the winners of any literary award. 16. Every year, a gala ceremony is where the current Governor General presents the literary prizes first awarded by Lord Tweedsmuir, the writer of suspense stories who became the monarch’s representative in Canada.