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Consider the two sentences:

The students studied for the test. Their grades were great.

If joined by the correlative conjunction pair (neither, nor), where neither starts the sentence, should we invert the subject and the verb like this?

Neither did the students study for the test nor were their grades great.

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  • Yes, that is correct.
    – Anton Sherwood
    Commented Dec 11 at 23:20
  • 1
    Your negations are grammatically correct, but few people would actually say something like this, it's very cumbersome. "The students didn't study for the test, so their grades weren't great."
    – Barmar
    Commented Dec 12 at 0:19
  • Right or wrong, that is an extremely unidiomatic utterance.
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Dec 12 at 2:06
  • @Barmar Why do you assume that this is meant for casual spoken conversations rather than for educated written English, even literary English? Expectations change in different contexts.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Dec 12 at 2:27
  • Related and possible duplicates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and many more besides.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Dec 12 at 2:43

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It's correct. It's an example of negative inversion.

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