Compare the following sentences. Which of them leave one idea in your mind?
The tongue is a sharp-edged tool.
A sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
A sharp tongue is like an edged tool, and it grows keener with constant use.
Exercise 198
The following is wordy. Rewrite it, condensing as much as possible. Use simple and complex sentences rather than compound, expressing in each only one thought.
In the early summer the corn crop frequently seems to be very poor, and so reports begin to circulate that corn will be high in the autumn, but when the autumn really comes, Wall Street, that great center of business life, begins to see that the reports have been greatly exaggerated and that crops really will be very good, and so business begins to pick up. The size of the crop largely settles the volume of the next season's business, because so great a part of the world's business activity is made up of buying and selling the actual potatoes and corn and wheat and cattle or the products made from these, and when the crop is poor there are a great many people concerned, because they will be poor just as the crops are poor, and this applies to the farmer as well as to the dealer.
The size of the crops is always important, and is especially so to the farmer, and this is because he has to live by the crops. A man may be living in the city and working for a salary and begin to see that his work is not supporting him, and if he is an ambitious man, he will change his occupation. This the farmer cannot do because he has made an enormous investment; in the first place, he has invested in his land, and then in his seed and farm implements, and this investment often means all the available money the farmer has, and often it means a mortgage on his farm. He puts the mortgage on his farm in hope of getting a good crop, and when his hope is not realized, he is in trouble, because he may lose his whole farm if he cannot pay the installments of interest due on his mortgage; but then, on the other hand, if we consider the other side of the question, when the crop is large, the situation is altogether different. Even if the farmer has put a mortgage on his farm, he gets enough money from his produce to pay the debt of that mortgage, and he need not worry how he is to live during the next winter.
The town merchants depend on a good crop, because, if the farmer has not a good return from his fields, he will have almost no ready money, and so he cannot buy much clothing or household furnishings. In Iowa, for instance, there is a little town in the center of a corn-raising community, and it is here that the farmers congregate to do their buying, and in this town there is quite a large department store, and it is run by a woman. She does most of her buying in the autumn and she prefers to do it personally, and so she likes to make a trip to New York for the purpose, but she never sets out until she knows that the corn crop is good. And the reason for this is that she knows that it will cost her hundreds of dollars to make the trip East, to stay at a good hotel, and to spend the requisite length of time choosing her purchases at the different wholesale houses, and she knows that if there is no corn crop she will sell very few coats and hats and lace curtains, and it will never pay her to run up her expenses into the hundreds of dollars, but she will buy as best she can from the drummers, and buy only a little, and thus the size of the crop determines how much the farmer can buy, and, therefore, how much the wholesale and retail dealers can sell.
Exercise 199—Subordination in the Sentence