Using relative clauses is a very convenient way to load sentences with more information. They do their job quite well when only one or two of them are involved, as in this sentence: “The car that figured in the smashup ran through the red light, first hitting the sedan, which rolled over on impact.” The first relative clause in the sentence is, of course, “that figured in the smashup,” modifying “car”; the second is “which rolled over on impact,” modifying “sedan.”

When we attach more and more relative clauses to the sentence, however, ambiguity and monotony start getting into the picture. The sentence becomes progressively confusing until it breaks into an incomprehensible sprawl. See, for instance, what the addition of three more relative clauses does to the sentence given as example above: “The car that figured in the smashup ran through the red light, first hitting the incoming sedan, which rolled over on impact, hitting in turn a van that was parked on the side of the road, which then hurtled toward eight joggers having breakfast at the sidewalk café.” This time, we have produced a mishmash of vague antecedents and linkages—a clear sign of a serious relative-clause overload.

We have already seen how a good resumptive modifier straightens out this messy and confusing state of affairs. By using, say, “smashup” as a resumptive modifier, we can construct this compelling, admirably coherent rendition of the same sentence:

A car that ran through the red light figured in a terrible smashup, a smashup that made an incoming sedan roll over on impact, a smashup so strong the sedan hit a parked van and sent it hurtling toward eight joggers having breakfast at a sidewalk café.

Not even the most well-organized string of relative clauses in the world can match the drama of this resumptive-modifier-using sentence.

As good as the resumptive modifier is in doing its job, it finds worthy competition in another semantic device for that same assignment. That device is the summative modifier. Instead of repeating a key phrase used in a preceding clause of the sentence, a summative modifier introduces an altogether new word or phrase that sums up a core idea of the preceding clause, then makes that word or phrase the thematic subject of succeeding relative clauses.

The phrase “tragic accident,” for example, works as a summative modifier in this alternative rendition of our previous example:

A car that ran through the red light figured in a terrible smashup, a tragic accident in which the wayward vehicle first hit an incoming sedan, creating a domino effect that made the sedan roll over and slam on a parked van, which in turn hurtled toward eight joggers having breakfast at a sidewalk café.

This sentence packs an even more powerful wallop than the resumptive-modifier version, principally because its summative modifier offers even more graphic and more compelling imagery than the resumptive modifier used in the other sentence.

Let’s take a closer look at the mechanism of the summative modifier. We can see that this device positions itself right after a pause created by a comma at the end of a sentence segment. It comes in the form of a noun or noun phrase that concisely—and very quickly—recapitulates a major idea presented earlier in the sentence, and a relative clause in turn elaborates on it with new information. There isn’t much room in a sentence for long, extended summative modifiers; the best ones are single summary words or very short noun phrases of perhaps two to three words. To make summary modifiers longer than this only serves to arrest the momentum of the exposition, defeating the very reason for using them in the first place.

Look what happens when a summative modifier gets too long for comfort:

A car that ran through the red light yesterday figured in a terrible smashup, a tragic accident of such horrendous proportions and repercussions in which the wayward vehicle first hit an incoming sedan, creating an unparalleled, bizarre, and gory domino effect that made it roll over and slam on a parked van, which in turn hurtled toward eight joggers having breakfast at a sidewalk café.

The extended noun phrases “a tragic accident of such horrendous proportions and repercussions” and “an unparalleled, bizarre, and gory domino effect” invalidate themselves as summative modifiers because of their excessive length and ponderousness.

The summative modifier is meant to help us avoid ambiguity and monotony in our prose, not to create confusion and introduce tedium to it. It’s an excellent sentence extender but it doesn’t tolerate delay or hesitance in execution. So long as we keep this in mind, the summative modifier—like the resumptive modifier—can make our writing much better organized and more expressive than it can ever be with only plain relative clauses at our command.
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 25, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 62 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

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Useful as the four basic grammar strategies and techniques are for crafting more readable and compelling sentences, they are not all we need to write really good prose. In fact, indiscriminate reliance on them can hook us to a lifetime of plain and simple but thoroughly unexpressive writing. So this time, to better equip ourselves against producing stiff, dreary, and uncompelling prose, we will take up three highly effective techniques for giving flesh and feeling to our sentences without running them to the ground and without getting our thoughts entangled in verbal sprawl. These advanced sentence-development techniques are the use of resumptive modifiers, the use of summative modifiers, and the use of free modifiers.

Let’s begin with resumptive modifiers, a device that can dramatically improve our organization of ideas while packing emotional wallop into our sentences.

The best way to understand what resumptive modifiers are and how they work is to scrutinize a sentence that uses a string of relative clauses. Here’s one such sentence: “The incumbent provincial governor is being seriously threatened by an upstart with absolutely no public service experience who is being propped up by a ragtag band of political discards who are desperate to recover lost glory and whose qualifications for the post are at best doubtful or downright spurious.”

With such a jawbreaker of a sentence, figuring out who does which and what modifies which can be infuriatingly difficult indeed! This is because the sprawl created by the multiple relative clauses has horribly garbled the ideas in the sentence and weakened the linkages between them.

Now see what happens when we restructure that sentence by using the noun phrase “an upstart” to take the role of the reference relative pronoun: “The incumbent provincial governor is being seriously threatened by an upstart with absolutely no public service experience, an upstart being propped up by a ragtag band of political discards who are desperate to recover lost glory, an upstart whose qualifications for the post are at best doubtful or downright spurious.”

The key phrase “an upstart” in this new sentence is what is called a resumptive modifier, and its virtue is that: (1) it allows the elimination of the relative links “who is” and “whose” to make the sentence more concise, (2) it arrests the verbal sprawl of the original sentence by making its ideas more clear-cut and their procession more orderly, and (3) it makes the sentence more expressive and forceful. Note that as a resumptive modifier, “an upstart” replaced the unexpressive linking phrases “who is” and “whose” to become the subject or theme of the modifying phrases that come after it.

Let’s now generalize the steps for making resumptive modifiers decongest and perk up sentences that are badly encumbered by relative clauses: first, at or near the end of the main clause, find a key word or phrase that can serve as a resumptive modifier; second, repeat that key word or phrase so it becomes the pivotal subject or theme of all the relative phrases that come after the main clause; and third, have that key word or phrase modified by those relative phrases.

A resumptive modifier can take the form of a noun, a verb, or an adjective central to the idea of the main clause, like the noun “woman” in this sentence: “She was a woman of a few thoughts, a woman of a few words, a woman with not a single bit of true feeling or informed opinion in her.” Contrast that sentence with this one that’s overly laden with relative clauses: “She was a woman who was capable of only a few thoughts, who was capable of saying only a few words, and who did not have a single bit of true feeling or informed opinion in her.”

Verbs and adjectives can also be freely used as resumptive modifiers. See how the verb “threatens” serves as a resumptive modifier in this sentence: “An upstart with absolutely no political experience threatens to dislodge the incumbent provincial governor by capitalizing on his immense popularity, threatens to resurrect political discards desperate to recover their lost glory, and threatens to win by a landslide in a province dominated by voters beguiled by his phenomenal mass appeal.”

And then, see how the adjectives “real” and “serious” work as resumptive modifiers in this variation of the sentence above: “The threat to the incumbent provincial governor by the inexperienced political upstart is both real and serious, real because of the continuing deterioration of the economic life of the province, and serious because the upstart is immensely popular among the impoverished provincial folk.”

The beauty in using resumptive modifiers is that, aside from being a powerful tool for clarifying and emphasizing ideas, they also make it so easy to add information to sentences. They allow the widest latitude possible for developing a chosen theme and going into new directions of thought within the same sentence—and all that without missing a beat or making readers gasping for air. This is what makes resumptive modifiers superior to most other modifying devices in organizing sentences and in fighting sprawl.

We will see this superiority more clearly when we compare how two of the usual sentence-organizing techniques fare against resumptive modifiers in extracting sense from the usual meandering prose that passes for academic writing these days.

Take this breathtakingly convoluted sentence:

This 79-word behemoth, as we can see, needs nothing less than major surgery.

First, as a newspaper journalist might do it, we will boil that sentence down into the bite-size sentences that go with the obligatory inverted-pyramid structure of most newspaper reporting:

The reconstruction is clear and not really bad, if all we are after is bland objectivity.

Second, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an opinion writer sold to the limitless utility of relative clauses:

Said with more conviction perhaps, but the deadly sprawl of the relative clauses still makes the sentence teeter on the edges of incomprehension.

Now, for our third and last recourse, we will use resumptive modifiers to see if they can whip up the original sentence into better shape and give it more verve. Let us pick, say, “celluloid popularity” as the resumptive modifier and use it to get rid of most of the relative pronouns in the sentence:

The ideas in the sentence have remained complex, of course, but they are much clearer and they flow much better than the original and the previous two rewrites. More than that, however, something amazing has happened to the sentence as a result of using a resumptive modifier. It now seems not only to have a greater ring and rhythm of truth to it but also the strong sense of conviction of someone who truly believes every word he says. This, other than better organization and clarity and verve, is the magic that a good resumptive modifier brings to prose.
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This posting combines two essays that appeared consecutively in the daily column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the February 23 and 24, 2004 issues of The Manila Times © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. The two essays subsequently appeared as Chapters 60 and 61 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

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