Soliciting biased, professional opinions

[Deb Bieler <dbieler@beacon.eastern.edu>]

Colleagues,

My beloved father prefaces most of his comments with, "In my biased,
unprofessional, unsolicited opinion...."  In a variation on that theme, I'd
like to solicit YOUR biased, professional opinions on an unresolved
subject/verb agreement question that surfaced in my Writing Assistant
training course yesterday.
-------------------------------------------------
Which is correct and why?

In this part of the Ukraine, neither children nor adults THINKS/THINK that
education is necessary.
-------------------------------------------------
We know the rules that 1) "neither" is a singular indefinite pronoun and 2)
if "neither/nor" joins a singular AND a plural verb, the verb agrees with
whichever subject is nearer to it.  All of the grammar texts we checked are
silent about what happens when "neither/nor" joins two plural verbs.

In MY biased, professional opinion, it's just easier to rewrite the
sentence as "...BOTH children and adults THINK education is UNnecessary,"
but we'd still like to hear your opinions on the original sentence since it
has us stumped!

Many thanks!
___________________________________________________________________________
Deb Bieler, Writing Specialist		Appointments	610-341-5837
Eastern College				Office		610-341-1453
1300 Eagle Road				Fax		610-341-1705
St. Davids, PA  19087-3696			Email		dbieler@eastern.edu