Sentence Branching
Because its grammar is relatively simple, English is primarily a language of word order; in other words, English has a fairly firm expectation about the order in which words will appear in a sentence. When the expected word order is changed, the sentence is likely to need more punctuation. More important, the sentence may become disjointed and less clear.
The core of the English sentence includes three elements:
- Subject
- Verb
- Object
Other elements are often needed in a sentence in order to specify place, manner, time, or purpose, but these other elements should ordinarily be kept outside the core of the sentence. When the development is not direct, a sentence may “branch.”
Here are two examples of sentences that have too much branching. For each example, try to find the main subject and verb and note their positions in the sentence. Notice where the branching occurs. When you click on the Show Problems button, you will see the subject and verb underlined and the branching highlighted.
Example 1 Despite the fact that the general prohibitions regarding personal financial transactions are not applicable to pre-existing financial holdings, if you hold prior investments in financial assets of a country or group of countries to which you have been newly assigned and with respect to which you are likely to have access to confidential information, you should seek the views of the officer designated by management.
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Example 2 So-called right-to-information provisions, by the use of which the regular residents of villages of all sizes can (at least in theory) gain access to documents in which official expenditures are detailed, have been enacted in all three provinces to ensure greater participation in government processes.
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