Exercise:
- The house with the red tile roof is the finest in the city, and is owned by Mr. Saunders, who made his money speculating in land.
- Then the engine tilted and fell over on one side, and the boiler exploded and added to the frightful scene.
- The deer whose antlers you see over the fireplace as you enter the room was shot by my Uncle Will, who is now in South America on a hunting expedition.
- The seeds, which have previously been soaked in water over night, are now planted carefully, not too deep, in straight rows sixteen inches apart, the best time being in April, when the ground is soft and has been thoroughly spaded.
- One day last week my employer, Mr. Conway, a jolly, peculiar man, raised my salary, first telling me I was about to be discharged, and laughing at me when I looked so surprised.
[Stringy Sentences to be Broken up]
12. Avoid stringy compound sentences. The crude, rambling style which results from their use may be corrected by separating the material into shorter sentences, or by subordinating lesser ideas to the main thought.
- Faulty: The second speaker had sat quietly waiting, and he was a man of a different type, and he began calmly, yet from the very first words he showed great earnestness.
- Right: The second speaker, who had sat quietly waiting, was a man of a different type. He began calmly, yet from his very first words he showed great earnestness.
- Faulty: There are many stops on the organ which control the tones of the different pipes and one has to learn how and when to use these and this takes time and practice.
- Right: On the organ are many stops which control the tones of the different pipes. To learn how and when to use these takes time and practice.
- Faulty: He published prose fiction, and this was then the accepted literary form, and the drama was neglected.
- Better: He published prose fiction, which was then the accepted literary form, the drama being neglected. [This sentence makes three statements in a diminishing series. The important idea is expressed in a main clause; a less important explanation is fitted into a relative clause; and a still less important comment takes a parenthetical phrase at the end.]
[Note.]—One of the crying faults of the immature writer is that by excessive coördination he obscures the fine shades of meaning. When two clauses are joined, the meaning will very often be more exact if one is subordinated to the other. For a list of subordinating connectives, see [36].
Exercise:
- He went down town, and it began to rain, and so he decided to go to the city library.
- There is an old saying which I have often heard and I believe in it to a certain extent, and it runs as follows: The more you live at your wit's end, the more the wit's end grows.
- Our salesman, Mr. Powers, has spoken very favorably of your firm, and we feel that our relations will be most pleasant, and the report of the commercial agencies is sufficient evidence of your good financial standing.
- There was no escaping from this churn, so one of the frogs, after a brief struggle thought that he might just as well die one time as another, and so he gave up and sank to the bottom.
- Socrates did no writing himself, and the only information we have of him we get from the writings of his pupils and from later writers, and our most reliable knowledge comes from two of these writers, Plato and Xenophon.
[Choppy Sentences to be Combined]
13. Do not use two or three short sentences to express ideas which will make a more unified impression in one sentence. Place subordinate ideas in subordinate grammatical constructions.