fs

fused (or run-on) sentence

Watch out for the excessively complex sentence, which is likely to confuse your readers. Such a sentence presents a dreadful tangle of words. It hides "that" clauses within "that" clauses like a nest of Chinese boxes, it endlessly multiplies qualifications, it trips over its own punctuation, and it drags its slow length along to a conclusion readers cannot understand Ñ because they have forgotten the opening of the sentence. The following, quoted as an example in Orwell's Politics and the English Language, is relatively short but nevertheless unintelligible:

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter each year, more alien to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

In this particular conglomeration the double negative used for rhetorical effect ("not unlike," and so on) causes the chief difficulty. Other complex sentences go wrong for different reasons. You can avoid trouble by following a few guidelines:

• Use the opening "that" clause sparingly: "That this problem has been overlooked by previous analysts demonstrates ...."
• Use parenthetical interruptions judiciously and infrequently.
• Do not include a long quotation in mid-sentence. Readers will not remember the beginning of the sentence when they reach the end.
• Avoid strings of appositional phrases, as in "The king, a man who likes to travel, a man who likes to love, a fighter, a saint, a wealthy father, sits down."
• Avoid strings of nouns used as adjectives, as in "the Yale English Department Undergraduate Student Writing Subcommittee." This bureaucratic style is confusing. Is the committee made up of students or is it concerned with student writing?
• Avoid strings of prepositional phrases, as in "The opinion of the representative over the issue about the superintendent was heard." This sentence sounds like an income tax instruction.
• Use few elaborately modified gerunds, as in "the trooper's unconscionably harsh interrogating of the witness." (Remember that gerunds require a possessive: "trooper's.") This phrase seems stiff and needlessly difficult. Rewrite as "the unconscionably harsh interrogation of the witness by the trooper." Or much better, turn either the gerund "interrogating" or the noun "interrogation" into a verb: "The trooper brutally interrogated the witness."
• Be careful with the conjunction "as," which can mean both "at the same time as" and "because." "Since" is equally ambiguous, but less treacherous than the overworked "as."

See also comma splice.

Copyright 1996 Yale University. Revised on Monday, May 20, 1996