Here’s the first sentence from a recent “Budget Travel” newspaper column by Arthur Frommer. See if you notice anything. (Hint: There’s no usage error.)
Following its victory with the U.S. Department of Transportation (where it won the right to use an Irish subsidiary to operate cheap flights between Europe and the United States),
If I had been the editor, I would have asked Frommer to rewrite the sentence. Here’s why: Readers don’t find out what it is until the 30th word in the sentence. That’s confusing. Readers need to know right away what you’re writing about.
Frommer’s grammatical-but-not-very-good sentence illustrates a point I harp about all the time: Many English teachers mistakenly believe that if everybody would just learn how to diagram sentences and identify parts of speech, writing problems would disappear.
Alas, it’s not that simple. Writers need to learn how to change places with their readers to see a sentence or paragraph from the reader’s point of view. That’s not an easy skill to learn.
Here’s Frommer’s complete sentence, followed by a suggested revision:
Following its victory with the U.S. Department of Transportation (where it won the right to use an Irish subsidiary to operate cheap flights between Europe and the United States), Norwegian Air has unleashed a torrent of headline-grabbing announcements.
The travel industry has been seeing a torrent of headline-grabbing announcements from Norwegian Air, which has just won an important victory with the U.S. Department of Transportation: the right to use an Irish subsidiary to operate cheap flights between Europe and the United States.
I hope you’ll indulge me while I make two more points:
- I was able to explain what I didn’t like about Frommer’s sentence without using the grammatical term antecedent. You can talk intelligently about writing without resorting to jargon.
- Every Norwegian Air plane features a picture of a famous Norwegian. I’m a very happy person right now!
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