Right, guys, tell me what's going on in this sentence.
Our service can help you save time, money, and for the future.
I'll give you a hint: it's not verb-D.O. agreement.
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Excellent work, everybody who commented and tried to come up with a way to solve a screwy sentence structure. Except for Sage and Kim; they get whipped cream pies in the face.
With love.
However, all y'all fail because I didn't ask how to fix it. I asked what was wrong with it. =D So let's jump into this sucker.
Fortunately everyone picked up on the weirdness, so I won't bore you with that. So what we've got here, then, is a sentence that feels like a fragment but isn't technically a fragment, and so everyone's brain initially goes poopie. (Including mine; I had to think for a minute while I was driving home yesterday.) So to help our poor head figure things out, first thing we do is break down to the simple stuff: what is this structure?
Beth got the closest. It's a list; specifically, it's an implied infinitive verb with a list of direct objects.
"...help you [to] save time, money, and for the future.
So because it's the list part that feels wrong, treat it the same way you'd treat pronoun tenses in cases like "my mother and I" versus "me and my mother".
- To save time
- To save money
- To save for the future
That's almost what Beth did, except she didn't quite carry through to the third one. And now that we can see this, we're again confused because none of these are technically wrong by themselves. (And yes, Beth, you can save for the future; it's implied you're saving money for the future, so we also now have a secondary redundancy factor. But I'll touch that later.)
I said in the hint this wasn't verb-D.O. agreement, which is what we just concluded now. But it is an agreement problem, and what it is is a list agreement. Check the format.
- To save [noun]
- To save [noun]
- To save [prepositional phrase] (here the noun is implied as money)
When you have a list, all of the items have to be the same type as each other. So you can save time, money, and effort, and you can save [money] for yourself, [save money] for your children, and [save money] for the future. But you can't mix those two concepts up. The first is a list of nouns. You're listing what you're saving. The second is a list of actions, and because the verb [to save] is the same, you can truncate it from everything after the first item so you don't sound retarded.
I supposed you can look at it as what you are saving versus how you are saving, in retrospect. But anyway.
So to fix this, we can't just say "...help you save time and money for the future," because then we're also saving time for the future and that doesn't work, either with the original meaning of the sentence or with reality itself; you can't save time for a future time, it's impossible. =P
This isn't necessarily a one-sentence fix. You have a list of items saved and you have an implied list of ways to save a particular item: saving money now and saving money for the future. The closest [i.e., least wordy] we could get if we kept one sentence would be:
"Our time-saving service can help you save money, both right now and for the future."
That's structurally sound, but now we run into excess verbiage with a time-saving service that saves you money—which the original list eliminated.
So now that you're armed with this knowledge, see what you can come up with!
