Exciting sentence structure
Amid the story of the so-called Piano Man (the one which so many people were going to base a film on — like Shine, but true — only now it turns out he’s just a guy with no musical genius who lives on a farm with his family — so if anything it will be more like the Dukes of Hazzard) I was amazed with this sentence from a report a today:
Mr Grassl flew home on Saturday after breaking his silence last week and with help from the German embassy, who gave him a new passport.
Film fans can walk away now — I was impressed with the sentence structure. I originally misread this as
Mr Grassl flew home on Saturday after breaking his silence last week with help from the German embassy, who gave him a new passport.
which might be strictly okay but is clearly misleading. That sentence is more likely to suggest that the German embassy helped him break his silence, not that it helped him fly home, even though that is a legitimate interpretatation. Then — before I re-read it — I imagined how I might reword it if I was a subeditor on the news desk:
Mr Grassl flew home on Saturday with help from the German embassy, who gave him a new passport, after breaking his silence last week.
Just a rearrangement of the words. This is unambiguous but it really is a bit clunky. So I was amazed that after a re-reading it appears the ambiguity has been entirely dissipated by simply inserting an and:
Mr Grassl flew home on Saturday after breaking his silence last week and with help from the German embassy, who gave him a new passport.
I’ve no idea if the journalist put that and there, or if it was the sub. But either way that tiny word is an exciting addition that I wouldn’t have thought of. There’s probably a name for this kind of sentence structure, and if I knew it my writing would be markedly improved. But if there is I don’t know it. Instead I’ll just have to remember that all that flashy restructuring might just be a waste of time, and maybe all that’s needed is judicious placement of a little and. I feel as if there’s a whole new world out there, and I’m only just beginning to understand it.
