I came across a sentence when I read the summary of the book RICH DAD'S GUIDE TO BECOMING RICH written by a native speaker. There is a sentence in his summary, which goes like this:
The problem with your grade is, you are the person who can fix it.
But in the book, the sentence structure is like this:
The problem with your financial problems is that only one person can
fix those problems, and that person is you.
I can understand the first sentence, but I'm not sure whether it's correct or not. From what I was taught in China, 'you are the person who can fix it' is a predicative clause, so there should be used a pronoun that , but sometimes that could be omitted. What confused me is that the usage of the comma here, why it was here? Or this is a kind of informal usage?
PS: I've checked Corpus of Contemporary American English, and found that there are 40 records of "the problem is, ……." structure. It seems that this type of usage is acceptable, but what's the rule of it?
Best Answer
You are correct in that your example sentence 'The problem with your grade is, you are the person who can fix it.' is not proper English; it should be instead something like 'The problem with your grade is that you are the (only) person who can fix it.'
There are many sentences in English like this where popular or common usage (usually spoken) English will vary from the 'proper rules' of English; this is one of them. The phrase "The problem [with XX] is, ...' is commonly used and quite often omits an implied 'that' following the 'is'.