I read an article and there was a sentence that bothered me so bad.
The sentence went like this (this is based on my memory):
The monument was erected by John McCoy, the president of *** company
in 80s, who lived in the vicinity of Brooklyn, the place his father
settled and started his first career.
I am not sure but I feel like the sentence will be so much better if they were written separately.
Is it grammatically ok to be written like this?
No revision is needed since the sentence was written just to make my point.
PS: I have heard that the sentence was translated from one language to English, so the translator was trying to convey lots of things in one sentence and jammed up many clauses in one sentence.
Thank you!
Best Answer
Sentences with many dependent clauses
Grammatically, there's nothing wrong with nesting subordinate clauses to any number of levels. Here's a sentence from a well-known children's song, "This Is the House That Jack Built":
Legal writing often contains long sentences with very complex structure. Here is just part of a long sentence from a compact between two U.S. state governments:
Long, complex sentences are also used in ceremonial speeches, commemorative plaques, or short biographies that summarize a person's life in one paragraph. In those places, there is a need to pack a lot into one sentence. For example, here is the text of one commemorative plaque:
Your example sentence sounds like it might be part of a short biography of John McCoy or maybe a plaque placed on the monument or maybe a short encyclopedia article about the monument.
Thus a very long, complex sentence can establish a certain tone—playful, legal, ceremonial, or summary—which may or may not suit the situation where you're saying or writing it. But such sentences are certainly grammatical.
Clarity and emphasis
It requires some skill to keep a long sentence clear. Skillful use of subject-verb agreement can help a reader or listener follow the sentence without confusion—but the writer can easily become confused and make a mistake. The second "was" in the sentence from a legal document above doesn't agree with "purposes"—a genuine grammatical error. The author got confused by the upcoming "as well as" and whether the following "to" governed just "conserve" or also "control", "regulate", and "permit". It would be useful here to repeat "to" before each verb.
Another pitfall is that pronouns can become unclear if there are too many reasonable choices for antecedents. For example:
It's not clear whether whose refers to John McCoy or his father.
Your example sentence seems pretty clear, though I wonder if the last "his" was intended to refer to John McCoy or his father.
Regarding the choice of whether to break the sentence into smaller sentences, this is a stylistic choice, depending on the kind of tone you want to set and which facts you want to emphasize. Your example sentence emphasizes the fact that John McCoy built the monument most of all; the other facts sound like background information, of secondary or minor importance. If you wanted to emphasize the fact that McCoy and his father both lived near Brooklyn, you could write it like this:
Very often, the best solution to a problem with how to include some information in a sentence without wordiness or awkwardness or lack of clarity is not to resequence it, regroup it into smaller sentences, or rewrite it at all, but to delete it. If the secondary information is causing annoyance and isn't important anyway, just omit it:
Really, your sentence doesn't seem especially long to me, nor does its structure with several dependent clauses seem remarkable. Compared to the first two sentences above, your example sentence is negligibly short. It's not even as long as my own made-up sentence about John McCoy, which isn't all that long. If it has a problem, it's that the emphasis isn't clear. If the point is that John McCoy erected the monument, what's the relevance of the other information? However, context might make that clear.