I tried to find a snappy linguisitic term for this, but I couldn’t. Instead, here are three examples of what I’m calling separated phrases. Unfortunately I spotted all of these within 200 words of each other in a single article…

The Daily Mail in particular, I think she mentioned.

[...]

She develops a crush the size of a football crowd on Sugar.

[...]

They’re either too much like boys, or the really good ones her mum gets her claws into first.

In the first example, mentioned has been separated from what was mentioned. In the last example, gets her claws into has been separated from what she gets her claws into. Both of these are examples of OSV (Object Subject Verb) constructions, whereas much more straighforward form is SVO: I think she mentioned the Daily Mail in particular; or her mum gets her claws into the really good ones first. OSV is rather like the language of Yoda, which is probably not the writer’s core audience.

The second example is slightly different. The writer has become so carried away with his imagery that he’s damaged the clarity of the sentence: it’s not just a crush, it’s a crush the size of a football crowd. Unfortunately, by the time you’ve got to the end of this phrase it’s no longer clear what the rest of the sentence refers to. Does on Sugar refer to the crush or the football crowd? You have to work a bit before you can be sure of the answer.

For this second example one alternative is to forget the rhetorical flourish and go for simplicity: She develops a huge crush on Sugar.

But a much more interesting alternative is to try a rewrite which involves moving the shorter phrase, which was previously separated, to be right next to a much more related phrase. In this case we’d have She develops on Sugar a crush the size of a football crowd.

That’s clearly not the most straightforward construction, but I think it works surprisingly well. It’s not ambiguous, and we get the advantage that the punchline (the comical description of the crush) really is at the end of the sentence, no longer being diluted by being followed by extra wording.

If you’re a bit unconvinced of this, here’s another example where moving the shorter phrase has been used. This is from a news agency report the following day:

US President George Bush left open yesterday the possibility of closing the Guantánamo Bay prison, a day after his White House predecessor Jimmy Carter called for it to be shut.

Here, yesterday has been placed right after left open, even though that isn’t the most straightforward construction. Otherwise we could have had:

US President George Bush left open the possibility of closing the Guantánamo Bay prison yesterday, a day after his White House predecessor Jimmy Carter called for it to be shut.

In that case we could interpret yesterday as being the day of the closure, when in fact it was the day the possibility was left open.

Rethinking separated phrases is a great help in writing more clearly. But a great technique to use as part of this is moving a shorter phrase much closer to its relevant wording.

Tags: clearerwriting, writing