Sloppy, Impossible Writing
I’m reading the online news this morning, and one of the stories presents me with the following two sentences … sentences which are so badly written that I wonder how the writer made it out of journalism school! Can you pinpoint the problems and fix them?
Problem Sentence 1:
A widow is suing Petsmart Inc, saying that her husband died after a liver transplant that was contaminated by a sick hamster sold by the largest U.S. specialty pet retailer to the organ donor.
Problem Sentence 2:
In papers filed in the state court, Nancy Magee charged that a Petsmart in Warwick, Rhode Island in March 2005 sold a hamster infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, or LCMV, to a woman not named in the suit.
Analysis:
The primary problem with these two sentences is that the writer is trying to cram far too much information into one sentence. To compound the error, the information is not arranged logically so that modifiers can be eaily linked to the words they are modifying.
In sentence one, the main problem is a misplaced prepositional phrase. As written, the sentence implies that PetSmart is the largest seller of pets to a particular organ donor. Which may be true, but which is not the point of the sentence. The point of the sentence is that PetSmart sold a hamster to an organ donor.
There are several ways to fix sentence one. First would be to delete the modifier “largest U.S. specialty pet retailer” entirely. Most people already know that fact about PetSmart, and it doesn’t really add to the story. In fact, it almost sounds like a shameless plug for the brand. If it’s really important to keep that modifier, then rearrange the sentence so that the modifier doesn’t interrupt the flow of the sentence:
A widow is suing Petsmart Inc, saying that her husband died after a liver transplant that was contaminated by a sick hamster sold to the organ donor by the largest U.S. specialty pet retailer.
This version is better, but it’s still not very good because people who are not reading the story carefully will get the wrong impression, as I did, that the husband bought the hamster. He didn’t. The person from whom the husband got his liver is the person who bought the hamster. So to make the sentence even clearer, perhaps we should break it up a bit:
A widow is suing Petsmart Inc, saying that her husband died after he received a transplanted liver that was contaminated. The liver donor had purchased a sick hamster from PetSmart, the largest U.S. specialty pet retailer, and her liver had become infected.
Sentence two is actually a much bigger mess. It seems that information is just crammed into this sentence willy-nilly. And it’s missing a couple of crucial commas. Let’s start with the commas. According to The AP Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, and every other reference I’ve checked, when you include a city and state designation in a sentence, the state must be set off by commas. “Surrounded” by them. So we need a comma after “Rhode Island.” Furthermore, when a date comes in the middle of a sentence, if it’s not crucial to the point of the sentence, it, too, should be set off with commas. So we need another comma after “March 2005.”
This helps a little, but not much. Because that “March 2005” is just sort of tacked into that sentence. It’s not really crucial to the point; it just gives some time perspective. But it’s placed in the sentence so that it seems important. And, because it’s not set off by commas, it almost leads the reader to a first impression that this PetSmart was only in Warwick, Rhode Island, during March 2005. Which is, of course, absurd. So let’s move that date stamp around a bit.
In papers filed in the state court, Nancy Magee charged that, in March 2005, a Petsmart in Warwick, Rhode Island, sold a hamster infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, or LCMV, to a woman not named in the suit.
Now, two small problems remain. It would be easier on the reader to put the abbreviation for the medical condition in parentheses rather than setting it off by commas. And it would be clearer to include “who was” between “woman” and “not named.” What’s there isn’t wrong; it’s just not the easiest setup for good reading comprehension. See how these two little changes make your reading flow better:
In papers filed in the state court, Nancy Magee charged that, in March 2005, a Petsmart in Warwick, Rhode Island, sold a hamster infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) to a woman who was not named in the suit.
All of this may seem profoundly nitpicky. But in writing, as in nearly everything else, the devil is in the details. Misplaced modifiers, missing commas, and missing conjunctions (especially “that”) can make your writing difficult to read and understand. And they can leave you open to misunderstandings. If you aren’t communicating your ideas clearly, you’re not doing much good with your writing.