Writing Tip

Left-Branching Sentences Will Blow Your Reader’s Mind

Difficulty Level: Intermediate

Recommendation: Avoid injecting many words between the subject and verb of a sentence.

Readers read in an habitual way. This way includes speed (words per minute), eye movement (called saccades), and focus. The last thing that a writer wants to do is install a trip line in a sentence, yet we do so in many ways. One way to skin the reader’s knee is to stuff a bunch of words between a subject and its verb. Why does that bunch of words debilitate the reading process? Because reading works by a process known as “phrase collapsing,” and if you interfere with phrase collapsing, you interfere with comprehension.

Here, try it: “John went shopping when the snow accumulated on the ground.” We have several phrases here. “On the ground” collapses to form a single meaning in our mind—so does the subordinate clause “When the snow accumulated.” The entire sentence, which is also a phrase, now consists of several collapsed phrases and finally coalesces into a unified meaning.

The reader does all of this phrase collapsing unconsciously, but the writer should know a few things (let’s call them constraints) to enable smooth reading. One constraint is memory capacity. We can only keep about seven linguistic pieces active in our brain at once (this number is debatable, but you get the picture). So, what if you have a prepositional phrase, like “on the ground,” except instead of three words, the phrase contains 30 words, and instead of collapsing into a unified meaning, you bump into the memory limit and fail to make sense of the phrase? This word bloat can take many forms, but for this writing tip, I want to talk about left-branching sentences, wherein the author stuffs many words between the subject and the verb of the sentence, preventing phrase collapsing. Let’s look at an egregious example:

This sentence has 35 words (and two abbreviations) between the subject of the sentence (requests) and the verb (has accelerated). The words don’t fizz—they just ooze, and by the time that you get to the verb, you have forgotten what the subject is—memory overload. Because the words in this type of phrase inhibitor branch out of the left side of the verb, it is called a “left-branching sentence.” We can fix this branching by moving phrases and words around (reframing the sentence). But for this particular kind of phrase inhibitor, consider the “active/passive toggle.”

As you learned in grammar class, any active sentence can be transformed into a passive sentence and vice versa with a relatively trivial maneuver. The active sentence “The dog bit the man” becomes the passive sentence “The man was bitten by the dog.” The object of the sentence becomes the subject, and the form of the verb is changed. This is the active/passive toggle. Now consider our original example, which is an active sentence. If we toggle it, we get not only a passive sentence but also an immense reduction in the number of words between the subject and verb:

Still not a delicate sentence, but now only three words intervene between the subject (The timing) and the verb (has been accelerated).

Here’s an example of a toggle from passive to active:

The subject is too big. There are 28 words between “process” and “was initiated,” so turn the passive/active toggle to transform the sentence into active.

Now, there are zero words between the subject (Acme) and verb (initiated). Here’s one more active-to-passive toggle.

There are 33 words (and one abbreviation) between subject (the shift) and verb (expands). Let’s toggle this to a passive sentence. However, first note that “expand” used here is sort of passive (used without an object) but not technically passive:

There are 10 words between the subject (the population) and verb (will expand).