What is better style?
1) Children are affected most.
-or-
2) Children are most affected.
donald remero
[ Moderator ]
Boy, I am not aware or any body of opinion or even a general set of guidelines that would provide any reasonable guidance on this.
I think this is a very good example of a set of alternatives that are perfectly equal in acceptability, common use, and preference.
You might spur some interesting debate from minimalists by asking which is better:
Children are affected the most.
—or—
Children are affected most.
Most is one of those words that can be used as an adjective (as in most people), an adverb (most affected), or as a noun (it is the most).
In the above example, a minimalist might pat himself on the back by recommending that you eliminate the word "the." But generally, minimalists are by principle against adverbs. But even here, I'm really straining at finding any potential controversy.
So, feel free to choose chocolate or vanilla flavoring for this. Some do the one. Some do the other. Some do only the one, and some switch back and forth.
NN comments
markus
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Thanks for the reassurance. I also thought that both examples are equivalent. However, I somehow prefer the first version ‘affected most’. Maybe my intuition plays a trick on me but does ‘affected most’ put more stress on ‘most’ than the second version?
donald remero
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I don’t think I could disagree with that. You know, when you are talking about word position, the last word is “the last word” and it gets a little punctuation mark as an anchor or a graphical badge. These are legitimate items of consideration, definitely, but it is worth recognizing that we are making some pretty fine distinctions. We’re close to leaving the land of prose and entering the land of poetry (if we haven’t already done so), but that is the fun of language for a lot of us as well. =)