Daughters of the American Revolution

[jnelson0612]

Hey guys,

So what threw me off here, with regards to plurality, was the fact that I assumed that the modifier " a volunteer service organization" was only modifying "American Revolution"

Here is an analogous statement

"The kids of North Valley High School, California's top ranked school, are very smart

Looking back I guess, I can sort of bring in the "meaning" aspect to the original question. "American Revolution" by itself cant be a volunteer service organization

Besides the meaning aspect though, was I wrong grammatically with my assumption in any ways?

Thanks

Here's the difference. "The Daughters of the American Revolution" is a particular organization and DAR is its name; thus, the prepositional phrase is part of the name. "The kids of North Valley High School" is not a particular named organization, and because of that the appositive, "California's top-ranked school", is referring back to "kids", the main noun. Does this make sense?

[shaw.s.li]

Just to make it clear, you can't write

"The kids of North Valley High School, California's top ranked school, are very smart."

As the instructor pointed out, California's top ranked school is modifying the subject, which in this case is "the kids."

[njoshi023]

Oh hmm interesting. That makes sense although I would have put my money on my high school example being grammatically correct.

Thanks guys

[njoshi023]

So what would be the grammatically correct version of this sentence then (with minimal changes I suppose)

"The kids of North Valley High School, California's top ranked school, are very smart"

Thanks again!

[tim]

The appositive is referring to the school itself. The sentence is grammatically correct. As Jamie said, this is because "kids" is the subject, not some organization called "Kids of North Valley High School". If there were such an organization (in which "kids" would be capitalized), the correct verb would be "is". This is what is happening in the original..

[divineacclivity]

OA is A
(The OA is not very clearly mentioned in the earlier posts, so for everyone's ease I've mentioned it here explicitly)

[jlucero]

Good point.