No Synergy in Synesis

If there were ever a thing about grammar I hate, it would be synesis. The fact that this error has been allowed to fester and suppurate is, in and of itself, a mistake. It's one thing if one want to say it in his everyday speech and informal writings, but it's another thing if HE want to say it in a high school or college paper. These papers are supposed to be formal articles of writing; they are meant to test your mettle and your knowledge so that the teacher or professor know that you understand not only the topic, but the syntagm of your sentences and paragraphs.

With that said, here's the definition of the word "synesis" with its etymology:

synesis: (noun) A construction wherein a form, such as a pronoun, differs in number, but agrees in meaning with the word governing it.

[Greek sunesis, union, understanding, from sunīenai, to understand, bring together : sun-, syn- + hīenai, to send, hurl; see yē- in Indo-European roots.]

An example of synesis is very simple to construct because it normally occurs in English whenever one may mention a compound noun that is singular, but acts as though it were plural in nature. For example:

The team was struggling, but they didn't give up.

Here, "team" is a collective noun, but, in American English, it normally takes a third person singular verb conjugation because it is representing the pronoun, "it". In the second clause, one can see that "they" is a pronoun that is representing a plural noun so this construction, while pragmatic, is not semantically or syntactically correct.

This construction can easily be avoided in English; simply change the sentence around like this:

The team players were struggling, but they didn't give up.

The team was struggling, but it didn't give up.

These constructions are much better than their predecessor. These constructions are synergized so that now the reader will know exactly what idea the writer is trying to convey. Please be advised that removing synesis can sound awkward and stilted in some situations such as in the example below, so it is always best that one steer clear of this one whenever possible:

Everyone is going to turn in his own English paper.

The above sentence is grammatically correct. "Everyone" is a collective pronoun that means "every single person" so it must take a singular possessive pronoun in this case. I'll explain this construction of neutered pronouns later on in another article. One might want to remove this from a stilted construction like the one above so that it sound more euphonious:

All students are going to turn in their own English papers.

As I have stated above, I shall discuss "neutered pronouns" in another article. The fact is that synesis and neutered pronouns seem to go hand in hand in some respects. My answer to this is plainly simple, though—whenever writing a formal paper, one should try to stay away from synesis construction of sentences. In normal speech, though, nobody really cares.