Would the following sentence be idiomatic and correct?
At the conference, she became acquainted with more than 20 scholars,
exhibiting excellent networking skills.
I was thinking saying something like "connected to more than X scholars". I'm just not sure which expression better conveys the meaning that she took the initiative to approach those scholars and got to know them.
Best Answer
I don't think that connected to is an appropriate synonym for became acquainted with: It's too informal and has connotations that cast aspersions on "her" character. I want to ask "How did she become connected to these scholars? Did she sleep with them? Did she marry one of them? Was she hired by one them? Did one of their universities hire her?"
The syntax of this sentence is strange, I think. Rather than
it should probably be
Tacking "exhibiting excellent networking skills" to the end of the sentence is not good style, IMHO. It modifies nothing. Were it the introductory clause followed by "she became acquainted with... at the conference", then it would modify the following clause. Tacked on to the end of the sentence, though, it just seems ungrammatical to me. I know it's a popular construction for academic writers, because all my Taiwanese biomedical authors constantly use it in sentences that run something like this: "IL-6 levels were higher in group A than in group B, suggesting...." and I always change it to "which suggested that...." Okay, maybe it's just a pet peeve, but it seems to me to be a comma splice.
It'd be different in this sentence: "At the conference, she, exhibiting her excellent networking skills, became acquainted with more than twenty scholars". I still don't like it. The sentence is clunky. It reads poorly to my ears.