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I got a sentence correction question, and I am having a hard time trying to figure out what and why exactly the error lies in the "as both are quite unpleasant experiences" part of the following sentence.

You must avoid riding in a crowded bus / or travelling in a metro / during rush hour / as both are quite unpleasant experiences.

(it's one complete sentence; slashes indicate parts of the sentence)

The answer (error) is in the last part i.e. "as both are quite unpleasant experiences", but I don't know why.

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  • Also I'm interested to know if this question has an actual answer. I keep looking at that sentence and thinking that it's totally coherent. If I was nitpicking, I'd say that they forgot a full stop. But otherwise I don't think I can answer this and English is my first language; you'd need to ask an English teacher I think.
    – AnonFNV
    Sep 9, 2021 at 8:47
  • Another native English speaker here: Nothing about the last segment seems wrong to me. There could be some nonsensical prescriptivist rule being violated that should be tossed out of the rulebook. If I saw this sentence, I'd go with FumbleFingers and mark the "in a metro" segment wrong, but even that bit isn't so wrong as to hurt the meaning in any way.
    – Richard Winters
    Sep 10, 2021 at 1:06

1 Answer 1

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Some people might think "both" doesn't correspond to "or", and thus say that you should change "or" to "and"... or change "both are.." to "either is an...".

It's not really a grammatical error.

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