Learn English – What’s the best way to write nested “and” clauses

conjunctionslistsword-choice

Say I have the following sentence:

I went to the store to buy eggs, regular, chocolate and soy milk, apples, and bread.

There are two and clauses here, one that describes the kinds of milk I was buying, and one that describes the other groceries.

One option would be:

I went to the store to buy eggs, regular milk, chocolate milk, soy milk, apples, and bread.

But that seems redundant and wordy. What's best? A big problem with the first one is that it's not immediately clear whether I mean chocolate or chocolate milk, since chocolate can be either a noun or an adjective in this case.

Best Answer

Parallel construction is good for simplifying sentences for your audience:

I went to the store to buy regular [milk], chocolate [milk], and soy milk.

Here, the parallel construction removes the repeated word milk, simplifying communication and making it more pleasing to the ear. Unfortunately, as you've noted, it can become awkward when not all of the elements of the sentence fit into the parallel structure. It's not too bad if you keep the parallel elements together at the beginning of the list:

I went to the store to buy regular, chocolate, and soy milk, eggs, apples, and bread.

That's still fairly easy to understand, and it keeps people from mis-parsing the list as “eggs milk, . . . and soy milk.” However, in more complex constructions, you may simply want to keep all words for clarity. You can break up the repeated words to help reduce the monotony:

I went to the store to buy eggs, milk, bread, apples, chocolate milk, and soy milk.

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