English question (details inside)

About your friend’s resume….That’s a puzzler!

I think, “To draw a line you should have start and close points,” is okay.

In the second one, you need the articles. Otherwise, you are describing a single point as “start and close”.

The first is incorrect – you can solve this by (a) changing the structure to something like:

I am sending the resume of one of my friends. (This is a little awkward.)

or (b) rewording to something like:

I am sending a friend’s resume. (This allows that you have more than one friend, and only one of them is sending a resume. I like this better.)

As to the second, I think they are all acceptable (not entirely sure about the last one). However, I would not choose “start” and “close” because they are not really opposites. You would be better off using “start” with “end” or “open” with “close”. Further, it might be better to say “starting” instead of “start”, and so on.

@dappled_leaves I agree.

I would say, “I am sending a friend’s resume.”

And for the second, “In order to draw a line, you must have a starting and an ending point.”

It’s easy to change the first one to make it work. But that’s not what OP asked for help with. It’s a very interesting problem.

You could say, “I am sending a resume from one of my friends.” If the supplied sentence is this one with “from” implied, there should be no apostrophe.

However, you could also say, “I am sending the resume of one of my friends.” Which seems to me to be possessive, and so would require an apostrophe.

You would also write, “I am sending my friend’s resume.” If “one of” referred to how many resumes were being sent, clearly the apostrophe would be required in the original.

I think the apostrophe is required (“friend’s”) in the original sentence, but I’m not so sure I’d correct it if someone else write it differently.

__Why isn’t Gail climbing up my ass when I need her?__

The first sentence is awkward, but not incorrect. one of my friends relates to one of many friends you have. one of my friends’ relates to something belonging to one of your friends. The fact that you have more than one friend or, more awkwardly, that your friend has more than one resume (as it is unclear as to which you are referring to) is absolutely not relevant here so avoid awkwardness and just get to the point. ‘I am sending a friend’s resume.’

To draw a line, you should have a start-point and a close-point. (but that seems awkward…) So, I would rephrase that one too. ‘In order to draw a line, you must have a starting and an ending point.’ Just as @janbb suggests.

I would change it to “I am sending one of my friends’ resumes to you.”

Given the noun phrase one of my friends, might the possessive form be one of my friends’s ? Highly awkward, admittedly, but we normally add ‘s to the end of singular nouns that end in s (e.g., “Chris’s dog”), which is the case here.

@gasman that’s why I would reword the sentence. The locution and trying to form the correct possessive in that situation is too cumbersome and unwieldy. It just doesn’t work.

The difficulty, as @cazzie points out, is that it’s impossible to tell whether it is many friends, or many resumes, or both. The sentence doesn’t communicate any of what it’s trying to communicate. I think the apostrophe is technically correct (though not good), but “resume” should be plural, whatever the meaning (and that makes it even more awkward).

Gee, I assumed it is only one resume and it is from one of his friends. Clearly the sentence doesn’t work because of the ambiguity as well as the grammatical issues.

I immediately assumed it was one resume from one of his several friends because he put the apostrophe at the end ie: friends’ showing plural possession, and then didn’t pluralise ‘resume’. But then someone switched it around a bit and I saw how else it could be taken, with the apostrophe in the other place for singular possession, ‘friend’s’ and then pluralise ‘resumes’. It could be tidy, but someone would still be left thinking if you had misplaced an apostrophe and pluralised when singular was called for. Nothing worse than creating a mixed possession.

Welcome to Fluther.

Based on your questions, I think your English is already generally excellent. You ask good questions, and you ask them well.

Regarding the first sentence, while technically correct, “one of my friends’ resumes”, it is awkward. “I’m sending a friend’s resume,” works fine, or “I’m sending my friend’s resume” also works – and it’s immaterial to the reader how many friends you may have.

Drawing a line requires at least two points (but technically, and here I’m relying on high school geometry, it’s only a “line segment” if you have start and stop points, but that’s quibbling). “Two points are required to draw a line: start and end.” “One requires a starting point and an ending point in order to draw a line – and they can be the same point.” The point of this clarification (pun intended) is that you do need two points, but they can share the same location.

@CWOTUS “One requires a starting point and an ending point in order to draw a line – and they can be the same point.”

You can’t draw a line if both points have the same position. An infinite number of lines could pass through two points in the same position; if the points have different positions, only one line can pass through them.

You’re correct in the nitpicking sense that I had used myself, @dappled_leaves. (I have no problem with nitpicking; I’ve made a living at it from time to time.)

That is, in the sense that “a line” is a geometrical construct that passes between two points and stretches to infinity at either end, the start and end points cannot be the same. But in the sense that we draw lines on Earth, such as a race course, for example, the start / end points can be the same and the line is “circuitous” (if not circular, ovoid, etc.), but in any case “continuous”.

@CWOTUS I really don’t mean to be nit-picky, but that is not correct. The only thing you can draw if you have two points, both at the same location, is a point. To define a line, you must have at least two distinct points. If you have two points in the same position, I guess you could draw a line of your choosing (just as you could through a single point), but it is only one of an infinite number of lines that can go through those points (and no, I’m not talking about one line of “infinite” distance around the Earth).

Hey, guys arguing about geometry… that was not the posters questions. They are still wondering about sentence structure and use of ‘a’ or ‘an’ in front of each noun. hello….