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Why is the following sentence grammatically incorrect?
We hope you will find our Qualifications to be well-organized, concise, and most of all, to exceed your expectations.
I've asked three grammar whiz friends and they have all told me "it just isn't right." I need reasons and rules! I wrote this sentence as a closing to a cover letter....
If you delete the most of all and rewrite it as a bulletted list, the problem becomes clear:
We hope you will find our Qualifications to be:
- well-organized
- concise
- to exceed your expectations
Your sentence treats well-organized, concise and to exceed your expectations as being in the same grammatical category. well-organized and concise are adjectives, but to exceed your expectations is an infinitive. to be to exceed your expectations is just wrong.
It was harder to spot before, because the most of all confused matters.
Also, qualifications should probably not be capitalized (although that depends on context).
Based on context, Qualifications would have to be taken to be some kind of written document, but none of the senses of the noun "qualification" in e.g. Merriam-Webster could be construed to refer to a document. So either it's some kind of jargon, or it's a wrong use of the word "qualification." If it's some kind of jargon, that would need to be explained for this general audience to understand. Otherwise, you need to say something like "qualification document" or whatever it is you mean by "Qualifications." Also, why is it capitalized?
Furthermore, many editors or grammar nitpickers would object to the unparallel structure of the list—adjective, adjective, infinitive clause—but I don't think this makes it ungrammatical, just clunky.
It is an example of anacoluthon: a sentence which starts using one grammatical construction and ending with a different one. (Just like that.)
... find our qualifications to be... to exceed your expectations.
A simple grammatical fix is:
We hope you will find our qualifications to be well-organized and concise, and most of all, to exceed your expectations.
But I'm not at all sure what "our qualifications are concise" is supposed to mean. "Concise" refers to a piece of writing; a qualification is a status awarded for, e.g., passing a set of exams.
'We hope you will find our qualifications to be well-organized, concise, and most of all, to exceed your expectations.'
This sentence is not strictly ungrammatical, but it does have its difficulties. The problem is that the first and third of your descriptors are autonomous infinitive clauses, while the second depends upon the first.
The first one, 'to be well-organized', is fine. The second one, 'concise', essentially piggy-backs upon the first, which is to say that there is an implied to be before it. However, the third, 'to exceed your expectations', breaks the sequence by replacing the implied to be with 'to exceed'.
Thus, if we extrapolate the sentence to include the implied information, we get the following: 'We hope you will find our qualifications to be well-organized, to be concise, and most of all, to exceed your expectations.' There is nothing particularly objectionable about this sentence, because, with the addition of the previously-implied to be, the reader no longer expects to be to precede the third descriptor.
Another way to improve the sentence is to replace the third descriptor with a prepositional phrase: 'We hope you will find our qualifications to be well-organized, concise, and beyond your expectations.' This works because the phrase 'to be beyond your expectations' is relatively smooth, whereas 'to be to exceed your expectations' is quite clunky.
Hopefully that makes sense. Post a comment if anything is unclear.
Usually will is not used with hope and Qualifications need not be capitalized.
It can be rephrased as We hope you find our qualifications mentioned if it is a written application for the job detailing your qualifications.
And the part, to be well-organized and concise, and most of all exceed your expectations. doesn't go together as the last bit is a to infinitive.
It can be revised as__ are well- organized and concise and meet your expectations.
When i put together the parts, it becomes
We hope you find our qualifications mentioned are well-organized and concise and meet your expectations.
As corrections, how about:
"We hope you (will) find our Qualifications to be well-organized, concise, and most of all, exceeding your expectations."
or
"We hope you (will) find our Qualifications to be well-organized, concise, and most of all, that they will exceed your expectations."
The parenthesized "(will)" above means that you can (and probably should, as mentioned in other answers) drop the future tense there.
