Sentence of the Week

This week's sentence:

A cheap industrial chemical at the heart of a massive food recall in China following its detection in infant milk powder, the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) announced that sweets containing melamine at levels of 11.25mg/kg, 152mg/kg and 80 mg/kg respectively had been detected on the shelves.

What went wrong?

When faced with the sentence above, most readers will give up somewhere in the middle. What went wrong? Two things. First, the writer began with an extraordinarily long orienting phrase:

This phrase would make the sentence top-heavy and difficult no matter what followed. Readers are usually confused -- or at best bored -- by such lengthy, throat-clearing beginnings.

But something else went wrong. It's not just readers who are confused by long openings; writers can get confused by them too. It's easy for writers to get so wrapped up in a long orienting phrase that they forget how the phrase is supposed to relate to the rest of the sentence. That seems to be what happened here.

The author was almost certainly trying to use an orienting phrase to define the subject, as in this simpler example:

A kitten of unusual ingenuity and determination, Jezebel had figured out how to climb the Venetian blinds to reach the birdcage.

This sentence works because we know that "a kitten of unusual ingenuity and determination" describes "Jezebel." We know this because the proper noun "Jezebel" sits next to the orienting phrase. The sentence would collapse, however, if Jezebel wandered away from the orienting phrase:

WRONG! A kitten of unusual ingenuity and determination, the Venetian blinds presented no obstacle to Jezebel in her quest to reach the birdcage.

Disaster! A similar disaster occured in this week's sample sentence. The opening phrase "a cheap industrial chemical" is meant to describe "melamine." But with the sentence structured as it is, "a cheap industrial chemical' modifies what it sits next to: 'the UK's Food Standards Agency.' Since that makes no sense, readers are left bewildered rather than enlightened.

How can this sentence be saved?

We can revise the original at least three times: once to make it grammatically correct, and twice more to make it less awkward.

To make it grammatically correct, we can put 'melamine' next to the orienting phrase:

Correct, but dreadful: A cheap industrial chemical at the heart of a massive food recall in China following its detection in infant milk powder, melamine was detected in sweets on the shelves by the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) at levels of 11.25mg/kg, 152mg/kg and 80 mg/kg respectively.

Technically, this revision is correct. Unfortunately, it is also awful. The revision remains difficult because it remains top-heavy. It forces readers to struggle through thick clots of prepositional phrases before they learn the sentence's subject and verb.

Another revision:

Melamine, a cheap industrial chemical at the heart of a massive food recall in China following its detection in infant milk powder, was detected in sweets on the shelves by the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) at levels of 11.25mg/kg, 152mg/kg and 80 mg/kg respectively.

This is in some ways a bit less awkward. Since "melamine" is now up front, readers at least know that the long orienting phrase is a definition. But readers' path to the verb is still far too long.

Another revision:

The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) has found on store shelves sweets contaminated with melamine, a cheap industrial chemical at the heart of a massive food recall in China following its detection in infant milk powder. In three samples, melamine levels stood at 11.25mg/kg, 152mg/kg and 80 mg/kg respectively.

This revision breaks the sentence up, but the crucial change is not that the sentence was broken up, but how. The revised sentences are both fairly long, but they're not top-heavy. They both get to their subjects and verbs pretty quickly. They also divide the work of the original sentence strategically. The most important information grabs the reader's attention in the first sentence, while more specific technical details follow in the second sentence, once readers already understand why these details might be important.

Do you have a candidate for sentence of the week?

If so, submit it to writing-program@uchicago.edu. Sentences must be from published, professional prose (sorry, no poetry). You must include a complete citation with your entry. If we use a sentence, we will thank you publicly (if you wish) or privately (if that's what you'd prefer), and we will also reward you with gratitude, kind thoughts, and good karma. If a sentence is good, we will reveal the name of the author on the site; if a sentence is bad, we will gracefully conceal the author's identity, telling only a few dozen of our closest friends and relations, as well as anyone else who asks nicely. All others are encouraged to try googling the sentence, which usually returns an answer faster than we do.

Bad sentences written by University of Chicago faculty, staff, or students are not eligible, since we assume that such persons write bad sentences only while under the influence of some occult force. Apart from this trivial and unimportant restriction, we welcome sentences, bad and good, by any author whatever, regardless of academic discipline or political affiliation.

If you are interested in structural features common to many academic sentences that seem cumbersome to readers, you may wish to visit the Academic Sentence Generator.