Sentence of the Week RSS feedSentence of the Week: Which children? Which parents?
This week's sentence:
Neglect of children due to either economic constraint or willful torture without a direct or indirect benefit to the offender formulated by increased attention and notoriety is also not considered typical MBP behavior.
This week's sentence is meant to do some important work: let doctors know when a parent should be diagnosed with a controversial syndrome called MBP (Munchausen By Proxy, for the curious). The writer here faces a challenge common to experts. She's juggling a lot of complex information, and she's writing for readers who need the information to do their jobs. Unfortunately, the resulting sentence is so difficult that many readers might give up in despair. How might it be fixed?
What went wrong, part 1: finding the verb
If you thought the sentence was as hard to get through as War and Peace rewritten by a lawyer, there's a simple grammatical explanation for your woe. The sentence forced you to wait a long time between its subject ("neglect") and its verb ("is not considered").
Neglect of children due to either economic constraint or willful torture without a direct or indirect benefit to the offender formulated by increased attention and notoriety is also not considered typical MBP behavior.
The sheer length of this wait would make any sentence top-heavy and difficult. As a first step in revision, then, we can rearrange the sentence so that some sort of verb appears up front:
Other behaviors not considered typical of MBP include neglect of children due to either economic constraint or willful torture without a direct or indirect benefit to the offender formulated by increased attention and notoriety.
Once armed with a verb, readers are better prepared to hack their way through the thicket of phrases at the end of the sentence.
What went wrong, part 2: logical sorting
But wait! We're not done. That thicket of phrases will still be a trial for some readers -- more so, perhaps, because the material being discussed is so emotionally charged. Many readers will have trouble contemplating the behavior described here. For that reason alone, the sentence should be as easy to process as possible. Readers have enough to worry about without having to fight the sentence structure.
To make some pathways through the thicket, we could use bullet points:
The following kinds of neglect are also not considered typical of MBP:
- neglect due to economic constraint
- neglect due to willful torture without a direct or indirect benefit to the offender formulated by increased attention and notoriety.
This revision is more than a little clunky, but it at least makes more clear that we're talking about two kinds of neglect. (Is this what the author meant? It's what the author said: "neglect due to either economic constraint or willful torture." It's the placement of "either" that commits the sentence to this interpretation. The sentence would have meant something quite different if it had said "Neither neglect due to economic circumstances nor willful torture … is considered typical.")
We're still left, though, with that hair-raisingly long final phrase, which is problematic for two reasons. First, it's hair-raisingly long. Second, in the original sentence, readers lose track of one of the most important aspects of the diagnosis -- the "offender's" desire for attention and notoriety. Another revision can foreground this:
In cases of neglect, a diagnosis of MBP is appropriate only if the neglect is motivated primarily by the offender's desire for increased attention and notoriety. MBP is not an appropriate diagnosis, however, if the neglect is motivated by economic constraint or willful torture [or: "by a desire to cause pain"].
This revision does even more logical sorting than our bullet pointed version. We know the master category of cases under consideration: neglect cases. We also know the primary criterion being used to evaluate these cases (the offender's motives).
What went wrong, part 3: revealing the human beings
But wait! We're still not done. To many readers, the sentence will still seem unclear, or at least highly abstract and difficult to imagine applying to a real-life situation. One reason for that may lie in the information it leaves out: information about people.
The original sentence describes a situation that involves many flesh-and-blood human beings: children, their parents or caregivers, and the doctors or law enforcement officials who have been called upon to decide what, if anything, is going wrong. The original sentence does name children and their caregivers ("offender"), but the most important character in the sentence's story does not appear: the doctor or law enforcement official who actually makes the diagnosis.
For some readers, this omission of a crucial human agent will not be a problem. If a reader is, say, a doctor, and she has to make this kind of diagnostic decision every day, she'll be aware of the role played by doctors. She will value information about how to make the decision more than information about who makes it. For readers like this, our last revision will probably be fine.
Other readers, however, will need more information. Readers who don't know much about MBP -- say, parents -- might need to know who is responsible for evaluating parents' motivations.
In cases of neglect, doctors will consider diagnosing a parent with MBP if they believe she is motivated by a desire for increased attention or notoriety. If, however, doctors believe she has some other motive for the neglect -- whether that motive is economic constraint or a simple desire to inflict pain -- they may rule out an MBP diagnosis.
This version will not be necessary for all readers. It's longer than the original, and that length may make some writers nervous. But the extra length provides important information for readers whose key question is "who decides?"
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