WHEN I WAS LEARNING TO DRIVE, some 25-odd years ago, I had a driving instructor called Tony Agate. Mr Agate – or ‘Old Agate’, as he called himself – was a philosophical fellow. His small, diesel-powered Citroën ponged gently of the many cigarettes he smoked and of the powerful mints he sucked in the vain hopes of concealing his smoking from Mrs Agate. Being an extremely slow pupil, I spent many hours in that car with Old Agate.
He had certain themes in his conversation – other than the predictable ‘Help!’ and ‘Yikes!’ and ‘We’re both going to die!’ One was the observation that there was ‘a lot of erraticism’ in my driving. Was it something about the way I handled the gearstick? Anyway I took it as a compliment.
The other was that even the best drivers have on days and off days. Sometimes, he’d say to me, shaking his head, ‘As I was driving over to your house this morning, I nearly hit another car. I thought: “Agate: you should not be on the road this morning.” Anyway, mirror, signal, manoeuvre …’
What Agate said of driving is true of English prose. Everyone writes duff sentences or clumsy paragraphs. The main difference between a good writer and a bad one is that a good writer writes bad sentences less often. It’s a matter of keeping your batting average up and your erraticism down.
In my day job as a literary journalist I’m occasionally asked to judge book prizes. In the judging meetings for such things, one of the easiest and cheapest ways to shoot down a book is to cherrypick a handful of inept or clichéd sentences, and read them out from your notes in a tone of scorn or, better, solicitous regret. There are few if any books of 80,000 words that won’t furnish a big enough handful to make this possible. Unless a very large-spirited defence is mounted by the other judges – who will by now be on the back foot, reluctant to look as if their ear for the language is defective – that will usually do the trick.
As with driving, the two things that make a difference are getting as much practice as possible, and paying proper attention to what you are doing. The first is a service to yourself; the second is a service to your readers. If you can avoid lighting a fag and/or unwrapping a mint while overtaking on the approach to a roundabout, so much the better.
I don’t doubt that an attentive reader of this book will find many howlers, clunkers and places in which I contradict my own advice. Filleting style guides for contradictions or mistakes is part of the fun. I mean this acknowledgement to serve as encouragement rather than otherwise: you’ll never get it right all the time, and nor will anybody else.
One of the ways to keep your erraticism under control is to go back and edit yourself. Reading aloud, as I’ve said before, can help you identify awkward bits. Simple rules-of-thumb, too, can help. Are any of these sentences crazily long? Are the subject and verb clear – and, all other things being equal, are they close to each other and close to the start of the sentence?
There are two main ways in which sentences get out of hand.
Parataxis – ‘para’ meaning alongside in Greek – is a way of forming sentences by adding extra bits on with conjunctions such as ‘and’ or ‘but’. A paratactic sentence is built like a string of sausages:
The cat, but not the pig and the duck or the chicken, came into the room and looked around to see what would be the best place to sit, then circled it three times, kneaded the mat in the middle with its paws and sat down on the mat.
Parataxis makes a mouthful, but it’s fairly easily dealt with: you just cut the sentence up into different sentences. In the above, for instance, the subject (cat) has five verbs to get through – came, looked, circled, kneaded and only then finally sat:
The cat came into the room. The pig, duck and chicken stayed outside. The cat looked for a good spot. It circled the mat three times, kneaded it with its paws, and sat down.
Hypotaxis is a hierarchical construction. Your main clause becomes the kernel of a sort of Russian doll, and the central meaning gets swamped by subordinate clauses.
The cat, which is to say an individual of the species – originally descended from Felis silvestris – Felis catus, in this case a blue-furred Persian four years of age whose eyes gleamed red-gold in the light from the lamp in the corner, sat, being by this stage tired of standing up, on the mat which was in the middle of the floor of the room.
These can be trickier to unpack. You need to decide, when you split the sentence up, what comes first. So you could do it like this:
The cat sat on the mat in the middle of the room. Cats are of the species Felis catus. They are descended from Felis silvestris. This one was a four-year-old Persian with blue fur. Its eyes gleamed red-gold in the light from the lamp in the corner.
Now, depending on what you want to emphasise you could parcel those thoughts up differently. Is the cat’s position on the mat what you want up front? Or is it the individual cat’s looks? Or are you introducing a lecture on feline genetics? You’ll slice and dice it differently each time. But my original version has 40 words between subject and verb: that’s a huge problem for the reader.
You also want to keep an eye on parentheses – brackets or dashes and whatnot – because they interrupt the flow of a sentence. I had a teacher who insisted you should never use them at all. I think that’s nonsense. But when you’re rereading yourself and you find one, always at least run through the exercise of seeing if you can dispense with it or put it in another sentence.
In this section I want to look at some sentences or paragraphs that present problems to the reader, and talk through how as an editor I might go about tackling them. All of them are by people writing in a professional context, and most of them are by professional writers. Many of the ‘edits’ I make are tentative: they are one possibility among many. But as I said in an earlier chapter, the plain style is what everything else builds on. You need to be able to strip even the most complex sentence down like a gun, and lay its parts on the table – see what does what, and which parts need oil – before you reassemble it.
The discussions may look dauntingly long by comparison with the texts that prompt them. But that’s exactly what I mean when I say that paying attention – close attention – is the way to get to the heart of how a bit of prose is working. And if my style seems informal, that’s also a deliberate decision: I want this to be as close as possible to a seminar-room conversation. I’m trying to talk to you; to follow a process of thought. And the careful editor is, or should be, alive to the different possibilities any given sentence offers. You can be precise about your ambiguities.
The Plain English Campaign likes to give prizes each year to particularly hopeless pieces of gibberish. One of these coveted awards went, in 2012, to the following announcement from the NHS Litigation Authority:
The Committee concluded, having regard to the totality of the factors considered above that choice could not be given significant weight and that there was not currently a gap on the spectrum of adequacy sufficient to conclude that the provision of pharmaceutical services is not currently secured to the standard of adequacy. Accordingly the Committee concluded: The application was neither necessary nor expedient to secure the adequate provision of services in the neighbourhood, and therefore dismissed the appeal in this respect.
In case it’s not instantly clear, they were rejecting an application to open a chemist.
Let’s look at the first sentence. There’s a missing comma after ‘above’, by the way – the phrase ‘having regard to the totality of the factors considered above’ is in parenthesis. As ever, the first task is to identify the spine of the sentence. The subject and the main verb are right up front: ‘the committee’ and ‘concluded’. It’s exemplary for those first three words – though ‘we decided’ would have been more direct. What did the committee conclude? We have to wait until after that swamp of a parenthesis to find out.
The parenthesis is a mess in two ways. One is that it’s full of cotton-wool officialese: ‘having regard to’ is a pompous way of saying ‘in light of’ or ‘considering’; and ‘the totality of’ is a pompous way of saying ‘all’. The other is the way in which those phrases get so cotton-woolly. They add a level of abstraction. The first nominalises the verb ‘regard’ – forcing the phrase’s emphasis onto the all-purpose auxiliary verb ‘having’ rather than the operative word, ‘regarding’. The second turns the nice straightforward determiner ‘all’ into an abstract noun. And by ‘the factors considered above’, we can assume the writer meant the evidence that had been presented and discussed earlier in the same document. You could recast the first 13 words of that sentence as follows:
In light of this evidence, we decided …
or
We looked at the evidence and decided …
Decided what? That ‘choice could not be given significant weight’. That’s a clumsy way of saying, or implying, that choice is one of the things that was considered in making the decision but that it did not carry the day. Again, here is the tug towards abstraction: a passive construction (‘could not be given’) coupled with another tricky expression (‘given weight’), where the verb is weakly shoring up this abstract idea of weight. And do we care? If ‘choice’ isn’t ‘significant’ we could, arguably, leave the whole phrase out.
So to the second half of the sentence. Here is, or rather isn’t, another missing comma – this time after ‘weight’. This is our old pal the compound sentence. When you join two main clauses, both alike in dignity, with a coordinating conjunction* you generally put a comma before the conjunction. That is not an iron rule – but in anything but the shortest sentences it is good style. And God knows you need a breather before tackling what comes next:
and that there was not currently a gap on the spectrum of adequacy sufficient to conclude that the provision of pharmaceutical services is not currently secured to the standard of adequacy.
By the time we hit that full stop we’ve had ‘conclude’, ‘adequacy’ and ‘currently’ twice each in a single sentence, swirled in with a double-negative: ‘not … not’. Every chance to turn out an abstract noun-phrase, or tack one onto a verb, is taken – ‘a gap on the spectrum of adequacy’; ‘the provision of pharmaceutical services’; ‘is secured to the standard of adequacy’ … All this acts on the poor reader like chaff on a radar-operator.
If you puzzle it out, it’s saying – I paraphrase as clearly as I can, but even in paraphrase it’s a mess – that there’s not enough of a lack of chemists in the area to conclude that there aren’t enough chemists in the area.
Hold that thought. Now look at the second sentence:
Accordingly the Committee concluded: The application was neither necessary nor expedient to secure the adequate provision of services in the neighbourhood, and therefore dismissed the appeal in this respect.
Both ends of that are redundant. ‘Accordingly’ and ‘in this respect’ are pure verbal throat-clearing; you could substitute ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ for ‘accordingly’ if you wanted, but there’s no special need. Again, we’ve heard twice what the committee concluded, or didn’t. The whole idea of the document is to tell us what the committee concluded. So that can be taken as read. And – give us strength – here come ‘adequate’, ‘provision’ and ‘services’ yet again, bolted together in a fresh and equally brain-frying combination – along with the innovation of the grand-sounding syntheton ‘neither necessary nor expedient’. Boiled down, it says: ‘There’s no need for another chemist in the area. They have pile cream, Andrews Salts and adult nappies coming out of their damn ears. Couldn’t you just open a Caffè Nero instead?’
So you could recast those 81 words, without great loss, to say something like:
We looked at the evidence and decided that the neighbourhood has enough chemists. We rejected the appeal.
That isn’t to say that this is the only way of doing it. You could cast it in the third person – ‘The committee concluded’ – if that’s the style. But if you can get hold of what you actually mean in the simplest terms possible, and keep hold of it, you’re much less likely to get lost in the woods.
Not long ago, I was sent to review a biography of a well-known novelist by a literary academic, and one bit struck me. It ran as follows:
Experimental writing, by its nature, always needed an established cultural behemoth against which to pit itself and this obsession with reaction and reinvention has enabled modernists to obfuscate embarrassing inconveniences such as the essential quality of a prose passage. If the emphasis is upon the dynamic remaking of literary models then the notion of good or bad writing can be dismissed as contingent and relative. Pure modernism is among other things an escape route for the stylistically untalented or aesthetically apathetic. If you are concerned exclusively with eschewing conventional writing then the pure demonstration of radicalism sidelines any attendance upon questions of whether a sentence or paragraph is elegantly crafted.
Leaving aside its slightly rococo phrasing – does one pit oneself against a behemoth? – that first sentence isn’t too hard to understand. Modernists are pitting themselves against the establishment; and the obsession with reinvention means they can ignore ‘the essential quality’ of their prose.* Roughly, it’s saying that experimental writers get so hellbent on writing differently, that they stop paying attention to whether they’re writing well.
The second sentence, too, isn’t that hard to understand: if the emphasis is on remaking literary models, says our author, the notion of good or bad writing can be dismissed. In other words, experimental writers get so hellbent on writing differently, that they stop paying attention to whether they’re writing well.
The third sentence says that pure modernism – i.e. an experimental interest in disrupting established forms – is a get-out for the stylistically untalented. Or, as you could put it: experimental writers get so hellbent on writing differently, that they stop paying attention to whether they’re writing well.
The fourth sentence argues that if you are concerned exclusively with eschewing conventional writing – pitting yourself against a behemoth, you might say – you don’t have to worry too much whether a sentence or paragraph is elegantly crafted. Which is as much as to say … but I see you’re ahead of me here.
As the Talking Heads put it: ‘Say something once, why say it again?’ When you’re rereading your work, keep an eye out for this. It can afflict even well-regarded professional writers. If two or more consecutive sentences express exactly the same thought, you’re publishing a draft rather than a finished piece. You need to turn them into one sentence that will express in a crystalline manner what you’re getting at. And the clearer those sentences are in the first place – no behemoth-pitting, if you please – the easier it will be to notice that they’re dancing round the same maypole.
Here’s a sentence – from an otherwise respectable and interesting recent literary biography – that I had to read three or four times before I even began to understand it. See how you get on:
And because portraying the disappointment of expectations required him to draw on his own experience to imagine how those expectations would feel to those who held them, the shuttling back and forth between expectation and disappointment, between belief and its betrayal, or simply between different points of view in turn animated the characters he created, pulling them into relief by virtue of the difference between their views and those of their counterparts.
As ever: where’s the subject? In this case it is a noun cleverly camouflaged as a verb: ‘the shuttling’. This is a gerund – a noun made of a verb in its present participle form. And in this case it is embedded in a colossal appositive fugue: ‘the shuttling back and forth between expectation and disappointment, between belief and its betrayal, or simply between different points of view in turn’. What did that ‘shuttling back and forth’, etc. do? It animated. Animated is the main verb. And ‘the characters’ is the object. Main clause, stripped bare:
The shuttling animated the characters.
Before we even get that main clause, though, we have to fight through the long subordinate clause that sets it up: ‘Because portraying the disappointment of expectations required him to draw on his own experience to imagine how those expectations would feel to those who held them’. The moment we hear ‘because’ we’re hanging in the air: because all this … then what? That could be simplified and made into a main clause. For example:
He had to draw on his own experience to understand how others would feel about their disappointments.
That could be a sentence in itself, or – to maintain the linkage his original sets up with ‘because’ – the first part of a compound sentence. Instead of ‘because’ dangling at the front, you could put ‘, so …’
He had to draw on his own experience to understand how others would feel about their disappointment, so the shuttling back and forth between expectation and disappointment, between belief and its betrayal, or simply between different points of view in turn animated the characters he created
But that’s still unwieldy: you still have the problem of that huge chunk of material between the shuttling and the animating. In effect, the subject of the verb ‘animated’ is that whole section.
Here is a good example of where the passive voice might actually make life easier. By using the passive, you can make the second part of the sentence right-branching.
He had to draw on his own experience to understand how others would feel about their disappointment, so the characters he created were animated by the shuttling back and forth between expectation and disappointment, between belief and its betrayal, or simply between different points of view in turn …
It’s not perfect – it’s still what a teenager might call a fugly, fugly piece of writing – but it’s much better.
Still, we have the loose caboose to address. The original sentence ends:
, pulling them into relief by virtue of the difference between their views and those of their counterparts.
In flipping ‘characters’ forward in the sentence, I’ve solved one problem and created another: where does this bit now fit in? You could keep it in place, and make it passive – ‘and pulled them into relief …’ but the reader will still be struggling. So why not make it a new sentence? ‘They were pulled into relief by virtue of the difference between their views and those of their counterparts.’
So the whole thing would read:
He had to draw on his own experience to understand how others would feel about their disappointment, so the characters he created were animated by the shuttling back and forth between expectation and disappointment, between belief and its betrayal, or simply between different points of view in turn. They were pulled into relief by virtue of the difference between their views and those of their counterparts.
That is a pretty rough cut. But grammatically it is much easier for the reader to parse. It keeps the subjects and verbs in each main clause up front and in natural order to help guide the reader through the sentence. ‘He had to draw … the characters were animated … they were pulled.’
You might object that the sense is still a little obscure. Does it follow that the involvement of the author’s own experience creates this shuttling? Are we talking about a shuttling between the points of view of different characters; or between the expectations and disappointments within each character? Does it follow from this shuttling that the characters’ counterparts – i.e. other characters – are what pulls the characters into relief; or is it their own multiplicity of perspectives?
I suspect that the author of the passage is himself a little confused. Here, then, is the point famously made by George Orwell: clear writing is a fantastic solvent for muddied thought. It’s not just that if you can’t think clearly you can’t write clearly: it’s that if you can’t write clearly you won’t even know if you’re thinking clearly.
Now here’s a sentence that is actually not bad – or not accidentally bad. But, being about two thirds as long as the Gettysburg Address, it’s certainly a candidate for the editor’s pencil. I owe this one to its author’s son, my old newspaper friend Tom Utley.
When Tom was a child, his 12-year-old sister had been told for her homework to write a very long sentence. She asked their father, the blind journalist T. E. Utley. In Tom’s account of it, T. E. ‘took a deep pull on his cigarette, thought for about three seconds and began to dictate. The sentence that he uttered was so sensationally long – and so gloriously unfitted for passing off as a 12-year-old’s homework – that my siblings and I set ourselves the challenge of committing it to memory. It has stayed in my head ever since.’
Here it is:
The factors that bind a society together, whether that society be large or small, whether it be a nation or a school, are multifarious and complex, not easily to be defined, nor succinctly to be expressed in any code of conduct or profession of faith, but exerting their cohesive force in subtle and silent ways; yet, strong as these factors may be, which make for the spontaneous coordination of will and effort – which is in some measure the mark of all societies, but which is in particular the glorious mark of a free society – they can never be so strong as to dispense with those penal sanctions against the vandal, the thief, the sworn enemy of society itself, which are part of the normal apparatus of civil government and the absence of which signifies not a lofty regard for freedom, as is commonly supposed by ‘progressives’, but a contemptible indifference to the conditions and limitations that alone make freedom possible.
How on earth is one to break that down? As ever, start with the spine of the sentence: the main clause. The subject presents itself straight away: ‘The factors’. There follows a good deal of mellifluous modifying material – ‘that bind a society together, whether that society be large or small, whether it be a nation or a school’ – before we meet the verb ‘are’ and its predicate ‘multifarious and complex’.
The material that comes after is essentially polystyrene packing expanding on the other qualities of these factors. It’s the reader’s choice as to whether difficulty of definition, succinct expression, etc. are qualities in addition to (making it part of a list), or constitutive of that multifariousness and complexity, i.e. presented in apposition to it. The semicolon after ‘ways’ marks off the first half of this compound sentence from the second. We’ll cross that semicolon when we come to it.
If we wanted to simplify the sentence, we now have the means to do so. We know what the core of the statement is: the factors that bind a society are multifarious and complex. As it stands, that’s more abstract than necessary: ‘are’ as the main verb is weaker than ‘bind’; ‘multifarious and complex’ has a certain airy grandeur. There’s less magniloquence – but not much less precision – in writing:
Many different factors bind a society.
Can you prune any of the various qualifying clauses? You could probably red-pencil ‘whether that society be large or small’ altogether: it swells the cadence but adds nothing to the meaning. Unless the author is planning to tell us that medium-sized societies work completely differently, he doesn’t really need to reassure us that what he says applies to both large and small societies: ‘a society’ stands as a general statement until we hear otherwise.
The red pencil hovers over ‘whether a nation or a school’, too. If it’s considered essential in context to make clear that you’re using ‘society’ in a broader sense than tribe or nation-state, though, it has a role in the sentence.
Many different factors bind a society, be it a nation or a school.
The clauses piled on the back end of that thought (‘not easily to be defined, nor succinctly to be expressed in any code of conduct or profession of faith, but exerting their cohesive force in subtle and silent ways’) can pretty easily be relegated to a separate sentence or two themselves. And why not make those sentences indicative?
They are not easy to define or simple to express in a creed or code of conduct. They work subtly and silently.
Now – deep breath – let’s tiptoe past the semicolon into the even more bloviating second half of that sentence. Where’s the main clause? If you strip off all the dependent clauses before and after, it’s this:
they [these factors again] can never be so strong as to dispense with those penal sanctions …
The basic meaning of the whole sentence, in paraphrase, is: ‘more things cause societies to hang together than can be summed up on the back of an envelope, but however strong these things are you still need laws’.
But between the dread semicolon and the subject of the main clause, we have a parenthesis, nested in a parenthesis, nested in a parenthesis, nested in a parenthesis. Hypotaxis gone bananas. To make it (a bit) clearer, I’ve put each parenthesis on a new line:
yet,
strong as these factors may be
which make for the spontaneous coordination of will and effort
which is in some measure the mark of all societies
but which is in particular the glorious mark of a free society
they can never …
Stylistically this sentence flows rather marvellously. Utley had a fine ear for cadence. Considering its pretty exacting grammar, it’s much easier to parse than The Confuser. But it’s still tricky. So strip the gun.
The straightforward thing to do would, again, be to break it into smaller sentences. Remember: this whole monster sentence is governed by its subject, ‘the factors’. So you could say, without stripping the thought down too far:
They make for the spontaneous coordination of will and effort that is the mark of all societies, and in particular the glorious mark of a free society.
Then you’re back in business – at least temporarily. But parenthesis ahoy:
Yet,
strong as these factors may be, they can never be so strong as to dispense with those penal sanctions against the vandal, the thief, the sworn enemy of society itself,
which are part of the normal apparatus of civil government
and the absence of which signifies not a lofty regard for freedom,
as is commonly supposed by ‘progressives’,
but a contemptible indifference to the conditions and limitations that alone make freedom possible.
Again, each indent takes us further into a nested sub-clause. So let’s apply the same un-nesting process, break the thoughts into smaller sentences, and put the main idea up front.
Yet strong as these factors may be, they can never be so strong as to dispense with penal sanctions for the vandal, the thief, the sworn enemy of society itself. These sanctions are part of the normal apparatus of civil government. Progressives think their absence signifies a lofty regard for freedom; in fact, it shows a contemptible indifference to the conditions and limitations that make freedom possible.
That’s a light edit. I’m trying to preserve Utley’s own idioms.
You could go further into the plain style:
However strong these factors are, they can never be strong enough for a society to do without laws. Punishments for criminals are a normal part of civil government. Progressives think not having them shows regard for freedom: actually, it shows contempt for the rules that make freedom possible.
But, as ever, the editor’s task is to think about tone of voice and decorum. Utley’s orotundity is deliberately fitted to the grandeur of his subject.* It’s possible to oversimplify a piece of writing. We’ve all had the experience of walking away from a haircut wishing we hadn’t been quite so blithely categorical in asking for something ‘much shorter’. So I prefer a middle path – one that preserves some of Utley’s rhetorical flourishes and most of his language, while making his meaning more digestible:
Many different factors bind a society, be it a nation or a school. They are not easy to define or simple to express in a creed or code of conduct. They work subtly and silently. These factors make for the spontaneous coordination of will and effort that is the mark of all societies, and in particular the glorious mark of a free society. Yet strong as they may be, they can never be so strong as to dispense with penal sanctions for the vandal, the thief, the sworn enemy of society itself. These sanctions are part of the normal apparatus of civil government. Progressives think their absence signifies a lofty regard for freedom; in fact, it shows a contemptible indifference to the conditions and limitations that make freedom possible.
I’ve warned often in these pages about the difficulty of parsing a sentence where subject and verb – or, sometimes, verb and object – get separated. This can be a problem – but is not always the only concern. You need to consider the sentence’s relationship to those on either side of it, the emphasis given to different parts of the sentence itself, and its rhythm. So these calls are often marginal. The way to get them right is, if you have time, to tinker about and see what works. Here’s one I stumbled over while proofreading a book review:
Whether Wilson’s thesis – that the 1850s marked the advent of modernity – entirely stands up is debatable.
There’s a bit of a clunk, there. Here you have a 15-syllable parenthesis – ‘that the 1850s marked the advent of modernity’ – interrupting a 16-syllable main clause. The problem is that this huge parenthesis, though manageable, is spliced into the middle of the subject of the sentence, which is the conditional clause ‘Whether Wilson’s thesis entirely stands up’.
You might think – and your reading brain probably does think – that the main verb of the sentence is ‘stands up’. It isn’t. The main verb is ‘is’, but the house-lights are coming up on the sentence before your brain cottons on to that.
One way of doing it would be to give the sentence a more natural word order:
It’s debatable whether Wilson’s thesis – that the 1850s marked the advent of modernity – entirely stands up.
Here at least you get subject and verb in the first syllable. But you still have that great parenthesis stuffed into the middle. And the problem is that you can’t put it anywhere else in a single-sentence version: it has to be next to the word (‘thesis’) that it explains.
So it might be kinder to the reader to lop the parenthesis out altogether and splice it into two different sentences.
Thus, a light edit might be:
Wilson’s thesis is that the 1850s marked the advent of modernity. Whether it entirely stands up is debatable.
Perhaps you object to the author’s weakness for nouny circumlocutions and impersonal constructions (‘Wilson’s thesis is’; ‘the advent of’; ‘it is debatable that’). So a heavier edit might be:
Wilson argues that modernity began in the 1850s. I don’t think he’s right.
But here we are not only altering the author’s style, but the emphasis of what he is saying. In the original he’s not actually saying the thesis is wrong, but that it’s debatable – mealy-mouthed, admittedly, but a different thing. He isn’t interpolating himself into it – which may be an evasion, but it’s the author’s own evasion. And even in my lightly edited version, which is more or less in the author’s own words, we’ve changed the emphasis. In the original sentence the main point was the debatability, not the substance of the thesis.
In the end? I let the sentence go to print as was. Was that the right decision? You tell me. When you’re editing you have a duty not only to make life easy for the reader, but to honour the author’s precise meaning and the author’s own voice (both of which are duties to the reader as well as to the author). All of these, I repeat, are stylistic judgment calls – and you make them when editing yourself as much as you do when editing the work of others.
* Such as ‘for’, ‘and’, ‘nor’, ‘but’, ‘or’, ‘yet’ or ‘so’ – remember the FANBOYS?
* This is the highbrow version, perhaps, of the 1970s idea that if you were punk enough, it didn’t matter whether you actually knew how to sing or play your instruments.
* Also, the need for his daughter to have a ludicrously long sentence for her homework; and, in the same context, a good joke.