Author Topic: It’s not good to strand a direct object at the end of the main clause  (Read 2050 times)

Joe Carillo

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We learn early in English grammar that the proper position for a direct object is right after the transitive verb, as in the following sentence: “The furious woman whacked the thief with her handbag.” Placing the direct object elsewhere often ruins the syntax of the sentence, as in “The furious woman whacked with her handbag the thief.” When we come across a ludicrous, bad-sounding construction like this in a news report, we’d be justified in thinking that the reporter—or the editor—doesn’t know English well enough to make a living using it.

Several years back, a foreign reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times called my attention to one such misshapen sentence on the web. Here’s what reader Swapna Dasgupta said in her e-mail:

“Please help me understand the following sentence published on a website:

“‘GM has brought out of retirement Bob Lutz, one of Detroit’s most colourful if sometimes controversial executives, to advise its senior management team.’

“In that sentence, the placement of the object (‘Bob Lutz’) has been delayed to insert information at its end. Is it permissible in English grammar? If so, will it affect the readability?”

Here’s my reply to Swapna:

Let’s closely examine that sentence and read it aloud: “GM has brought out of retirement Bob Lutz, one of Detroit’s most colourful if sometimes controversial executives, to advise its senior management team.”


That sentence pattern delays the verb’s direct object and strands it at the tail end of the main clause so it can be modified by a long descriptive phrase. As we can see, that pattern grammatically fractures the main clause and makes the sentence sound so awful.

I don’t think it’s advisable to use that sentence pattern at all, but the reality is that for the sake of immediacy, some news reporters and editors tend to use it not just occasionally these days. It’s actually just another manifestation of the general tendency of news journalism in English to forcibly combine and compress too much information and too many details of the news story in the lead sentence, often making it so convoluted and so confusing to read.

But the bigger grammatical issue here is this: Should news reporters and editors fracture the main clause and strand its operative verb just so they can modify the direct object with a long descriptive phrase?

I don’t think so. But if they absolutely must for reasons of style in news reporting, they can actually avoid such awful-sounding sentences by using a verb phrase that’s more congenial and amenable to such disruptions of the natural grammatical order. In that particular sentence, for instance, it’s the phrasal verb “brought out of retirement” that causes the problem. See how the phrasal verb “taken out of retirement” works better grammatically and structurally for that sentence pattern:

“GM has taken Bob Lutz, one of Detroit’s most colourful if sometimes controversial executives, out of retirement to advise its senior management team.”

In this form, the verb “has taken” is able to fully act on its direct object “Bob Lutz”—unlike “has brought out,” the verb phrase “has taken” doesn’t “hang”—and is properly modified later by the adverbial phrase “out of retirement” after the obligatory appositive had done its job of modifying “Bob Lutz.”


But an even better and trouble-free way, regardless of the verb phrase used, is to use the passive-voice construction for such sentences:

Bob Lutz, one of Detroit’s most colourful if sometimes controversial executives, was brought out of retirement by GM to advise its senior management team.”

Bob Lutz, one of Detroit’s most colourful if sometimes controversial executives, was taken out of retirement by GM to advise its senior management team.”


I know that some journalists will stand firm on using the active voice even in this particular case, but I think this is one of those rare instances when the passive voice obviously outperforms the active voice in clarity and readability. (2011)

This essay first appeared in the weekly “English Plain and Simple” column of Jose A.Carillo in the September 17, 2011 issue of The Manila Times, © 2011 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2018, 11:07:50 AM by Joe Carillo »