Many journalists or professional writers with a journalistic background routinely omit “that” in modifying clauses, as in this sentence taken by Miss Mae from a news report:
“While China said it would also ask its fishermen to leave the area, it stressed it had no intention of pulling out its bigger ships from there.”
Such sentences are a common elliptical form, particularly in spoken English. The unellipted form of the sentence above is, of course, this construction with the two missing “that’s” restored:
“While China said
that it would also ask its fishermen to leave the area, it stressed
that it had no intention of pulling out its bigger ships from there.”
A rule of thumb I use for such sentences is to avail of the ellipsis only (1) if the elimination of “that” won’t confuse the reader, and (2) if the resulting elliptical sentence reads and sounds better than the full-blown sentence.
I would say that if read aloud, the following fully ellipted version of that sentence would handily meet the two conditions I cited above:
“While China said it would also ask its fishermen to leave the area, it stressed it had no intention of pulling out its bigger ships from there.”
Even if “that” is absent after the verb “stressed,” there should be no problem understanding what is meant by the ellipted clause “it stressed it had no intention of pulling out its bigger ships from there” as articulated.
But what about if that sentence is silently read in print? My perception is that even if “that” is absent, there’s still no real danger of misconstruing the intended sense of the modifying clause “it had no intention of pulling out its bigger ships from there.” I would therefore say that the following doubly ellipted sentence is semantically airtight both in its written and spoken form:
“While China said it would also ask its fishermen to leave the area, it stressed it had no intention of pulling out its bigger ships from there.”
Still, it’s prudent to observe this caveat in doing elliptical constructions: When in doubt, don’t.
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