#syntax

Today I had to explain the clause disjunction in class. The textbook calls a structure ‘clear’, but my annotation marks the complementizer as unergative whereas the footnote calls it ergative. I did the assignment, opened the grading sheet, and got only 60% for what I thought was a straight up mismatch. Felt like a hit to morale. Tried sending the explanation to the TA, got back ‘not enough depth’—in hindsight maybe I'm overreading the notation. It’s still in the syllabus, so is it me or the book? How do you flag a textbook error to the editor without sounding like a nervous linguist??