Reunited

Keep your friends close—and your subjects and verbs closer.

Hack Recap: In the last Hack, I suggested taking a look at your conclusion for a clearer version of your main point.

This Week’s Hack: To sharpen a sentence, keep your main subject and main verb close together.

Long sentences can be elegant, and if you can write a good one, you shouldn’t hesitate to do so. Fun fact: The novelist Lucy Ellmann published a 426,100 word (!) book that was all one sentence. But long sentences can also create confusion, especially when multiple clauses obscure your main point. 

Sometimes the fix for a long sentence is to rethink what you’re saying: If you tend to write long sentences, you should make sure you cut repetition and words you don’t need. But sometimes the fix for a long sentence is to rethink how you’re presenting your information. Specifically, when you separate your main subject and your main verb, readers have trouble understanding your sentence.

Here’s an example of a sentence that’s difficult to follow because the main subject (“CVS”) is “socially distanced” from the main verb (“offers”).

If you need a COVID-19 vaccine, CVS, a pharmacy chain with stores around the country that has recently been authorized by the federal government to provide vaccines, offers the Pfizer vaccine.    

This isn’t the longest sentence in the world, but the multiple clauses make it hard to follow. Here’s the problem: I just want to know where I can get a vaccine. But before I can find that information, I have to wade through all of that other information. I know that CVS is going to be doing something, but I don’t get the verb until two lines later: CVS offers.

So what should we do with this sentence? We could cut the extra information and focus on the central information: CVS offers the Pfizer vaccine. That will work if the main purpose of this sentence is to let people know that CVS offers the vaccine.

But wait. Maybe there’s a reason why we were getting all that other information in the first place. Perhaps the audience for this sentence isn’t familiar with CVS. Or perhaps it’s important in this context to highlight the fact the federal government has authorized CVS as a federal vaccine provider. In those cases, we have some decisions to make about what to emphasize and how to avoid creating distance between the subject and verb.

Depending on what you want to accomplish in your sentence, try these strategies to reunite your main subject and main verb:

• Reunite the subject and verb and cut what you don’t need: CVS offers the Pfizer vaccine.

• Reunite the subject and verb and keep the rest of the information by changing the order of your clauses: Now that they have been authorized as a vaccine provider, national pharmacy chain CVS will offer the Pfizer vaccine.

• Split the sentence into two sentences: CVS is a national pharmacy chain that has been authorized by the federal government to provide vaccines. CVS offers the Pfizer vaccine.

• Change the verb, subject, or both to better reflect the main purpose of the sentence: The federal government has authorized national pharmacy chain CVS to offer the Pfizer vaccine.

At this point, you might be thinking that you had no trouble understanding the original sentence. Would it be so terrible to just leave it alone? Probably not. But if you stack your clauses, you’re going to tax your readers. And when you tax your readers, they might miss important information. Let’s take a look at another example:

If there are no COVID-19 vaccine locations within 25 miles of your home, you, if you live within ten miles of another state, and if you are currently eligible for the vaccine according to that state’s regulations, may travel to a neighboring state to obtain a vaccine.

What’s the message here? If you live far from a vaccine site in your state, you can travel to a neighboring state for the vaccine. (I made this up, so don’t jump into your car and head to another state!) Health information needs to be clear, and this sentence obscures the key information.

In this case, we can’t just cut all the other clauses. We need the information that not just any person can do this. You have to live within 10 miles of another state. And you have to live more than 25 miles from a vaccine location. And you have to be eligible for the vaccine. So how can we rewrite the sentence to make sure readers understand the key information?

Sometimes you’re just trying to do too much with one sentence. We can reunite the main subject and main verb if we split the sentence into two sentences:

If there are no COVID-19 vaccine locations within 25 miles of your home, you can travel to a neighboring state to obtain a vaccine. This provision only applies to people who live within 10 miles of another state and are currently eligible for the vaccine according to that state’s regulations.

We could also keep all of the information in one sentence by shifting the clauses to move the subject and verb closer together. I don’t love this option, but it’s easier to follow than the original:

If there are no COVID-19 vaccines within 25 miles of your home, and if you live within 10 miles of a neighboring state, you can travel there to obtain a vaccine, as long as you are currently eligible for the vaccine according to that state’s regulations.

There’s no right answer here. The ideal fix will depend on your purpose and the number of clauses you’re dealing with. So my best advice is the same advice I always offer: Whatever you do, do it on purpose. The goal isn’t to write a sentence with one clause or some other fixed number of clauses; the goal is to write a sentence that readers can understand.

I’ll leave you with this sentence from the novel Stuart Little by E.B. White (co-author of the famous writing guide Elements of Style):

 In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.¹

I’ve put the main subject and verb in bold. Notice that they’re right next to each other.

There’s a reason why the sentence wasn’t written like this:

Stuart, in the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns, stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.

By the time we get to “stopped,” we’ve forgotten that Stuart exists!

I, Jane Rosenzweig, author of Writing Hacks, resident of Massachusetts, writing instructor at Harvard, reader of fiction, amateur baker, am grateful that you took the time to read this week’s Hack.

1. You can find this sentence on page 100 of E. B. White’s Stuart Little (Harper, 1945).