MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Fused sentences are bad for the health of journalistic prose

When reading the daily newspapers, I find coming across run-on or fused sentences in a news story very disruptive. The aggravation is worse when the offending sentence is the lead sentence itself, for the problem then seriously detracts from the import and immediacy of the news—sometimes to a point that I no longer want to read on.

I felt that way in the case of these two problematic lead sentences from an issue of a leading broadsheet last week:

(1)
“In line with the peace and development program of President Arroyo, the deployment of troops of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in Surigao del Sur, particularly in the 15 hinterland communities in Lianga town, is to conduct community consultation, project identification and other social services for far-flung villages, said regional Army spokesman Maj. Mitchele B. Anayron Jr.”

(2)
“Traffic between Cagayan Valley and all areas to its south was hampered for several hours on Friday as a result of landslides that piled up along sections of the national highway in Nueva Ecija with thousands of passengers and motorists stranded, as well as agricultural produce and other goods, from rains brought about by typhoon ‘Kiko’.”

As I’m sure you must have experienced yourself while reading the two sentences above, it takes a lot of mental effort and patience to grasp what they are saying. There seems to be nothing overtly wrong in their grammar, but why is it that they are insufferably hard to read and to grasp?

One reason, if course, is that they cram and deliver too much information in just one long, nonstop burst of words. The first lead sentence above, in particular, consists of 59 words in all, and the other, of 56 words. This fact alone already seriously reduces their readability; from my experience, in fact, the readability of a sentence in a news story typically begins to plunge once it breaches the 25- to 30-word level.

The problem is further compounded when the sentence is also fused or run-on, as in the case of the two lead sentences above. The readability suffers and the statement becomes  poorly articulated and confusing due to improperly linked or wrongly punctuated clauses. The most common form of a fused sentence, of course, is the comma splice—a sentence where the comma proves inadequate to the task of punctuating its clauses and fails to establish their logical relationship.

MY CRITIQUE AND SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS:

Let’s now analyze each of the two problematic lead sentences from that broadsheet and see how we can improve them.

(1)
“In line with the peace and development program of President Arroyo, the deployment of troops of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in Surigao del Sur, particularly in the 15 hinterland communities in Lianga town, is to conduct community consultation, project identification and other social services for far-flung villages, said regional Army spokesman Maj. Mitchele B. Anayron Jr.

That its subject is unclear is the first major stumbling block to understanding the sentence above. Is its subject “the peace and development program of President Arroyo”? “the deployment of troops of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in Surigao del Sur”? or “to conduct community consultation, project identification and other social services for far-flung villages”? Because the sentence is a run-on, there’s really no way of knowing for sure—and that’s why it’s so difficult to understand what that sentence is all about. When we don’t know what the subject or the doer of the action in a sentence is, how can we tell what the sentence is up to in the first place?

My feeling—what we might consider an intelligent guess—is that the reporter really meant the Armed Forces of the Philippines to be the doer of the action in that sentence. With that, I think we can now proceed to untangle and reconstruct the sentence with some degree of confidence and hope of grammatical success.

Here’s my best effort:
“The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) will be deploying troops in Surigao del Sur,  particularly in the 15 hinterland communities of Lianga town, to conduct community consultation, project identification, and other social services.

“Maj. Mitchele B. Anayron Jr., regional Army spokesman, said these social-service initiatives of the Army are in line with the peace and development program of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.”

We can see that by identifying and using a proper subject for a sentence, by providing proper and adequate punctuation, and by breaking down the sentence to two or more sentences if need be, it becomes much easier to untangle a run-on sentence and make it much clearer and much more readable.

(2)
“Traffic between Cagayan Valley and all areas to its south was hampered for several hours on Friday as a result of landslides that piled up along sections of the national highway in Nueva Ecija with thousands of passengers and motorists stranded, as well as agricultural produce and other goods, from rains brought about by typhoon ‘Kiko’.”

The lead sentence above is a classic case of a fused sentence. What happened is that the reporter indiscriminately lumped all of the information in his head about the event in just one sentence—as if it was a grammatical crime to deliver some of the information in a subsequent sentence! The result is a sentence that leaves you breathless and confused when you attempt to read it till its very last word.

The reporter who wrote this sentence needs to get used to the idea that not all information about an event are of equal importance or of equal news value. When that happens, it should become second nature to him to break that fused sentence into the two sentences that it should have been in the first place.

Look:
“Traffic between Cagayan Valley and all areas to its south was hampered for several hours on Friday as a result of landslides that piled up along sections of the national highway in Nueva Ecija. Because of rains brought about by typhoon ‘Kiko’, thousands of passengers and motorists got stranded and agricultural produce and other goods could not be moved.”

PROBLEMATIC ODDS AND ENDS FROM THE SAME BROADSHEET:
(All underlining mine)

1. Wrong prepositional phrase usage #1
“Tons of smuggled vegetables are being sneaked in the country through the ports of Cebu.”

Problem:
The correct prepositional phrase for that sentence is “sneaked into,” not “sneaked in.” As a preposition of motion, “into” is used to indicate movement into an enclosed space—and a country is considered enclosed by its territorial boundaries.

Fix:
“Tons of smuggled vegetables are being sneaked into the country through the ports of Cebu.”

2. Two-time wrong preposition usage #2
“Chief Supt. Samuel Pagdilao, Jr., Northern Police District (NPD) director, called yesterday for courts to speed up the issuance of ‘commitment orders’ to prisoners to help decongest jails and avoid jailbreak and other inconveniences.”

Problems:
(a) The use of the preposition “for” in the verb phrase “called yesterday for courts” makes the phrase semantically wrong. The speaker here didn’t call for courts to be set up; he only asked them to speed up the indicated action. The correct form for the verb phrase here is “called on the courts yesterday” or “asked the courts yesterday.”

(b) The term “commitment orders” is a pretty well established term in penology, so there’s no need to enclose them in quotes in that sentence. Also, the use of the preposition “to” in the phrase “‘commitment orders’ to prisoners” is improper, giving the wrong impression that it is the prisoners themselves who are their recipients (the true recipients are the prison officials concerned); that preposition should therefore be “for” instead.

(c) The prepositional phrase “to help decongest jails and avoid jailbreak and other inconveniences” at the tail end of that sentence is misplaced. It gives the wrong impression that the prisoners themselves will work to decongest the jails. One way to avoid this wrong meaning is to replace “to” with “as a means of.”

Fix:
“Chief Supt. Samuel Pagdilao, Jr., Northern Police District (NPD) director, called on the courts yesterday to speed up the issuance of commitment orders for prisoners as a means of helping decongest jails and avoiding jailbreak and other inconveniences.”

or:
“Chief Supt. Samuel Pagdilao, Jr., Northern Police District (NPD) director, asked the courts yesterday to speed up the issuance of commitment orders for prisoners as a means of helping decongest jails and avoiding jailbreak and other inconveniences.”

3. Wrong word choice
“Taiwanese PC maker Acer has posted an impressive 23-percent growth in global PC sales in the second quarter, putting it in a dangerously close position to overtake second-placer Dell, whose sales plunged -17.1 percent.”

Problem:
The use of the adverb “dangerously” in that lead sentence gives the distinct and evidently wrong impression that the speaker here—it must be Acer or the reporter himself—considers it bad and dangerous for Acer to be in a close position to overtake its rival Dell. If the speaker or writer is an Acer publicist, his sympathies must be with Dell and as such he deserves to be fired; if the speaker or writer is a reporter for the paper, then he is being overtly biased in favor of Dell—and must be sanctioned for being unobjective in his journalism.

From the face of it, though, the reporter’s use of the word “dangerously” must have been only inadvertent. I think that had he given it more thought, he would have settled for “comfortably” or perhaps “threateningly,” each of which is a better, on-the-level, and more fitting word than “dangerously.”

Fix:
“Taiwanese PC maker Acer has posted an impressive 23-percent growth in global PC sales in the second quarter, putting it in a comfortably close position to overtake second-placer Dell, whose sales plunged -17.1 percent.”

or:
“Taiwanese PC maker Acer has posted an impressive 23-percent growth in global PC sales in the second quarter, putting it in a threateningly close position to overtake second-placer Dell, whose sales plunged -17.1 percent.” 

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