Garden-Path Sentence

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8 pointsharporoeder4 comments

Neat, now I have a name for these. A lot of what is considered "bad writing" seems to consist of these "garden-path sentences", written unintentionally. Finding one of these in a text is a good indication that the author either didn't re-read what they wrote, or re-read it and couldn't step out of their own head to notice how confusing it is.

While copyediting, I often find that complex sentences can be easily clarified by rearranging a few words.

Because people often write as a stream-of-consciousness, and they'll begin a phrase, insert some explanatory phrase, and then finish the original thought, where now words are disconnected and make little sense.

This is, of course, peculiar to English, because if you're working in a language with declensions and many conjugations, word order may be less important, and word order itself is often an artistic element.

Topical and recent: https://xkcd.com/2793/

That comic is an example of excessive subordination, another common pitfall.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/cmt-40/kantoo/...

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