Answers for self-assessment on connectives and logic

• The connective so is not well chosen here. The logic is fine, but so is very awkward grammatically when followed by a non-finite clause (so changing his opinion); it would have been much better to write “so he had changed his opinion”.
• The connective presently is not appropriate here. Within the story being discussed it means ‘soon afterwards’, but it does not relate to any previous incident in the essay. It would have been better simply to omit it from the quotation.
• The connective then is not appropriate here. It appears to relate the description in the story to some earlier passage, but this earlier passage is missing so it does no work.
• The connective as is not appropriate here because of its grammar. The subordinate clause “as earth has a stronger gravitational pull” is meant to modify the noun painfulness, but it can’t be used in that way. (Think of “His anger as he had missed the bus couldn’t be concealed”.) It would have been better to use because: “the painfulness because earth has a stronger gravitational pull”. You will have noticed two other weak points about this phrase:
• The noun painfulness does not exist, but it could do, and is actually needed in this context – the simple noun pain doesn’t give quite the right meaning.
  • This noun phrase is contained within a larger one:
  • their difficulty to move or breathe due to the painfulness …
  • This repeats the same logic as the smaller one:
  • difficulty [caused by] the painfulness [caused by] the gravitational pull.
  • The result is very clumsy and could have been improved greatly by major rewording:
  • He also says how difficult it was for them to move or breathe because earth’s stronger gravitational pull made it painful.