In the most recent six columns on crafting more readable sentences, we have focused on ways to make our English clearer, more concise, and more forceful. We have seen how reference words, adjective phrases, adverb clauses, and relative clauses allow us to plug in more details about the actors, actions, and locations that figure in our sentences.
Useful as these conventional modifying devices are, however, they are not all we need to write really good English expositions. Indiscriminate reliance on them, in fact, can hook us to a lifetime of plain and simple but thoroughly unexpressive writing. Straight-news journalism, for instance, is studded with such nuts-and-bolts modifying devices; they just happen to go so well with inverted-pyramid storytelling. But even more mechanical is the general run of academic writing, where otherwise solid research and scholarly enthusiasm often die in lackluster exposition or convoluted verbiage.
But this is not to say that journalistic and academic writing are not in themselves desirable. It’s only that the perceptive reader (more so the hawk-eyed editor) often finds it difficult not to think that they are being used simply as cover for the inability to write clearly and felicitously.
So this time, to better equip ourselves against producing unduly stiff, dreary, and uneventful English, we will take up three highly effective techniques for giving flesh and feeling to our sentences without running them to the ground, and without losing the thread of our thoughts 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.
Resumptive modifiers. They are devices 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 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! The sprawl created by the multiple relative clauses often horribly garbles the ideas in the sentence and weakens 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 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 that new sentence construction is what’s called
a resumptive modifier, and its virtue is that it (1) allows the elimination of the relative links “who is” and “whose” to make the sentence more concise, (2) arrests the verbal sprawl of the original sentence by making its ideas more clear-cut and their procession more orderly, and (3) 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.
Verbs and adjectives can likewise be freely used as resumptive modifiers. See how the verb “threatens” serves as such 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.”
We will continue this discussion of resumptive modifiers in next week’s column.
This essay, which first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times
, subsequently became Chapter 60 of my book Giving Your English the Winning Edge
, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times
:The usefulness of resumptive modifiersNext week:
The magic that resumptive modifiers can do (November 28, 2024)
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
