Fused sentences are telltale signs of a writer’s inability to link ideas

Most everybody who knows basic English grammar can construct a one-idea sentence correctly, like “The woman fainted,” but not a few would probably fumble adding to that very same sentence the fact that she won the lotto jackpot and that’s why she went into a state of shock. They may come up with a sentence like, say, “The woman fainted she went into a state of shock she won the lotto jackpot.”* This, of course, is what’s known as a fused or run-on sentence—the result of improperly linking or wrongly punctuating two or more clauses in the construction.

Fused sentences go beyond the nuts-and-bolts of English grammar. They are telltale signs that the writer hasn’t mastered the craft yet of connecting ideas in English, so it’s very disturbing to see them not so infrequently in professional writing like news stories and feature articles. Indeed, seeing one of them some time ago in the lead sentence of a government news release prompted me to write the grammar critique below in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in May of 2011. In the essay, re-titled here as “Grammatical options for giving sense to fused sentences,” I offer four ways of making the annoying wayward clauses of such sentences achieve a clear and satisfying functional linkage. (April 22, 2012)    

Grammatical options for fixing fused sentences

Of the many varieties of flawed English that I encounter when reading news and feature stories, I consider fused sentences the most serious and the most annoying. This is because I’m pretty sure that they aren’t just run-of-the-mill grammar errors arising from haste or oversight but a disturbing sign of an inadequate grasp of how the English language works.

As discussed in my book The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors, a fused sentence is formed when two or more clauses are improperly linked or wrongly punctuated, resulting in a fractured, badly articulated, and confusing statement. Of course, in an essay written by a college freshman, a fused sentence every now and then may be forgivable, but in the lead sentence of a major education news story?

Consider the following lead sentence in a report of a leading Metro Manila newspaper last weekend about the country’s preschool education initiative:

Manila, Philippines—The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach pre-school pupils expected to reach 2.5 million enrollees under its universal kindergarten program this coming school year. 

DepEd Assistant Secretary Tonicito Umali said each volunteer, who will work for three to four hours a day (,) will receive a monthly allowance of P3,000.

Like me when I was reading the lead sentence above, you must have stumbled in bafflement at midsentence. This verb phrase, “expected to reach 2.5 million enrollees under its universal kindergarten program this coming school year,” simply won’t connect to the preceding clause. The sentence suddenly got garbled and won’t make sense because the reporter—or perhaps the desk editor—had been so intent to cram into that sentence every bit of information in just one long uninterrupted burst of words (a tendency that, I regret to say, is very profound indeed among reporters and editors when constructing lead sentences for their news stories).

On inspection, we find that the problem with that sentence is that with neither rhyme nor reason, it fused the following two independent ideas:

1. “the Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach pre-school pupils,” and

2. “enrolment is expected to reach 2.5 million under the DepEd’s universal kindergarten program this coming school year”

Note that these two ideas are actually independent clauses—grammar elements that, as most of us learned early in English grammar, need to link up properly and logically so they can work and make sense together. In this case, however, the fused construction was unable to do that basic sentence-combining task.

So how can that sentence achieve a functional linkage? Here are four grammatical options:

1. The relative cause option (using “who” as relative pronoun): “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach the 2.5 million pre-school pupils who are expected to enroll under its universal kindergarten program this coming school year.”

2. The coordinate conjunction option (using “as” as conjunction): “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach pre-school pupils this coming school year as enrolment is expected to reach 2.5 million under its universal kindergarten program.”

3. The subordinate conjunction option (using “because” as subordinator”): “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach pre-school pupils this coming school year because enrolment is expected to reach 2.5 million under its universal kindergarten program.”

4. The total rewrite option: “The Department of Education (DepEd) will tap the services of about 22,000 volunteers to teach the 2.5 million pre-school pupils expected to enroll this coming school year under its universal kindergarten program.”

My personal preference is Option 4, for this total rewrite makes for a much simpler and more streamlined sentence—a far cry from the tangled original and decidedly more readable than the other three options above. (May 28, 2011)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 28, 2011 issue © 2011 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

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*That fused sentence unfused: “The woman won the lotto jackpot, went into a state of shock, then fainted” or “When the woman won the lotto jackpot, she went into a state of shock and fainted” or “The woman went into a state of shock after winning the lotto jackpot, then fainted.” Any other possible way?

Dealing with the vexing inverted syntax of passive-voice sentences

We all know the difference between active-voice and passive-voice sentences, with most discussions about them revolving around the idea that as a norm in writing, the active voice should be preferred over the passive voice. This is because, the subject-verb relationship and the sentence structure in an active-voice sentence are decidedly simpler and and more straightforward than those in the passive voice sentence, as we can see in the following comparative constructions:

Active voice: “We pushed through with our plan despite the insurmountable difficulties.”

Passive voice: “Our plan was pushed through by us despite the insurmountable difficulties.”

We can see that the syntax of the passive-voice construction tends to become convoluted when it is forced to supply all of the equivalent grammatical elements of its active-voice counterpart; in particular, the phrase “by us” in the passive-voice sentence above sticks out like a sore thumb and makes the statement sound icky. Indeed, the grammar and structure of passive-voice sentences differ in remarkable ways from that of active-voice sentences, as I explain in the essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in April of 2011 in reply to a member of Jose Carillo's English Forum who expressed bafflement over those grammatical differences. (April 8, 2012)

How the grammar of active-voice and passive-voice sentences differs

A Forum member, Nathan_Yell, asked the following very interesting grammar questions:

“What is the function of the prepositional phrase in the passive voice? Most grammar guides say that the object in the active voice becomes the subject in passive. Is the reverse true? Does the subject become the object in the passive? In the sentence ‘The rice is harvested by the farmers,’ isn’t the phrase ‘by the farmers’ a modifier of the verb ‘harvested’ and thus, an adverb phrase rather than an object? Or, is the term ‘object’ generally used to refer to anything that completes, complements or modifies the verb?”

Here are my answers to Nathan_Yell’s questions:

The function of the prepositional phrase at the tail end of a passive-voice sentence is to identity the doer of the action of the operative verb, as in the sentence you presented, “The rice is harvested by the farmers.” As we know, such prepositional phrases are an optional element in the passive-voice sentence, which actually can stand without them: “The rice is harvested.”

Now, does the subject of a sentence in the active voice become the object when the sentence is rendered in the passive voice? Before I answer that question, let’s first clarify what the active voice and the passive voice are in the first place.

By definition, a sentence is in the active voice when its grammatical subject performs the action of the operative verb, as in this form of the sentence you presented: “The farmers harvest the rice.” Here, the noun “farmers” is the grammatical subject, “harvested” is the operative verb in the active-voice form, and the noun “rice” is the direct object of that verb.

On the other hand, a sentence is in the passive voice when its grammatical subject receives the action of the operative verb, as in the original form of that sentence you presented: “The rice is harvested by the farmers.” Here, the noun “rice” is the grammatical subject, “is harvested” is the operative verb phrase in the passive-voice form, and the noun “farmers” is the doer of the action.

We can clearly see here that the grammatical subject of the active-voice sentence, “farmers,” is not the direct object in the passive-voice sentence. Instead, by becoming part of the prepositional phrase “by the farmers,” that noun has become what’s known as the object of the preposition. The object of the preposition, as I pointed out earlier, is optional to the passive-voice sentence. That sentence can therefore stand without it: “The rice is harvested.”

My answer to your second question is therefore a categorical “no.” The subject of a sentence in the active voice doesn’t become the direct or indirect object when the sentence is rendered in the passive voice. It becomes a different grammatical element known as the object of the preposition—just a noun or a pronoun that follows a preposition to complete its meaning, as in this passive-voice form of the sentence you presented: “The rice is harvested by the farmers.”

As to your third question on whether the phrase “by the farmers” is not an object but an adverb phrase that modifies the verb “harvested,” the answer is “yes.” It is functionally an adverb phrase that modifies the verb “harvested,” but grammatically, “the farmer” is also the object of the preposition “by” in that sentence.

Now to your last question: Does the term “object” generally refer to anything that completes, complements, or modifies the verb? No, definitely not; the term “object” refers to anything that receives the action of the verb, whether as direct object or indirect object. Anything that completes, complements, or modifies the predicate—not the verb—is a complement, which by definition is any added word or expression by which a predication is made complete, like the adjective “impertinent” in the sentence “The judge found the lawyer’s question impertinent” and the phrase “as her traveling companion” in “She chose him as her traveling companion.” (April 30, 2011)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 30, 2011 issue © 2011 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

Conclusion: Achieving greater mastery of paragraphing

This week’s edition of the Forum continues “Making Effective Paragraph Transitions,” the four-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in early 2006. The essay discusses the various techniques that a writer can use to effectively bridge a paragraph to the one preceding it—a process that works in much the same way as logically bridging adjoining sentences in an exposition.

Part I, which I posted in the previous Forum edition together with Part II, took up the most basic forms of paragraph transitions, namely (1) to simply repeat in the first sentence of a paragraph the same operative word used in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, and (2) to use in the first sentence of a new paragraph a synonym or words similar to a chosen operative word in the last sentence of a preceding paragraph. Also taken up in the essay were the various task-oriented paragraph transitions.

Part II then took up the basic extrinsic or implicit transitional devices that use the pronouns “this,” “that,” “these,” “those,” and “it” in the first sentence of a succeeding paragraph to link it to the preceding paragraph.

This time, Part III takes up the use of the words “it,” “such,” and “there” as well as of prepositional phrases for making paragraph transitions, while Part IV discusses the most sophisticated form of paragraph transitions—the so-called  “deep-hook” paragraph transitions, which subtly work out their bridging logic by making themselves an intrinsic part of the idea being developed. (April 1, 2012)

Part III – Making effective paragraph transitions

We have already looked into several extrinsic or implicit strategies for making a transition to a new paragraph from the one preceding it. All of these strategies begin the new paragraph with a sentence that either repeats a key word or phrase used in the preceding paragraph, or else substitutes a summary word or pronoun such as “this” or “that” for that key word or phrase. This time we will look into the use of the words “it,” “such,” and “there” as devices for similarly making such paragraph transitions.  

To illustrate how these words work as transitional devices, we will use the same prototype first paragraph that we used in the previous column, as follows: 

“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.”  

Strategy 5:  Use the anticipatory pronoun “it,” otherwise known as the expletive “it,” to begin the new paragraph. We know, of course, that many teachers of writing frown on this usage, claiming that it seriously robs sentences of their vigor. As the two examples below will show, however, this device can be very efficient as a paragraph transition:

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan. 

It was past midnight at our Boracay cottage when my friend suddenly sprung the Palawan idea on me… 

or:

It was farthest from my mind that my friend would even think of a Palawan trip just when we were ready to fly to Manila…

It’s true, however, that too many expletives in a composition can be very distracting, so we must use this paragraph transition device very sparingly.

  

Strategy 6: Use the pronoun “such” in the first sentence of the new paragraph to echo an operative idea in the preceding paragraph:

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan. 

Such was what happened to my best-laid plans after my friend chanced upon a Palawan tour brochure…

We must take note, though, that some grammarians find this use of “such” as a noun semantically objectionable. They would rather use “such” as an adjective or adverb to make such transitions:

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan. 

Such a radical departure from our travel plans was very unpalatable, but my friend was so headstrong about it…

or:

            Such was my consternation about the Palawan idea that I actually considered going back to Manila without my friend…

Strategy 7: Use the pronoun “there” in the first sentence of the new paragraph to introduce the new idea that will be developed. See how effective this transitional device can be in effecting shifts in time, place, scene, or subject:

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.

There was a time when I would summarily reject unplanned trips like that…

or:

There was a very compelling reason why I didn’t want to make that Palawan trip, but my friend would hear nothing of it…

For the same reasons that they shun the expletive “it,” however, many teachers of writing strongly caution against this usage, arguing that it encourages lazy writing. Thus, as a rule for short compositions, more than one paragraph beginning with “there” would probably be too much.

We will now go to another type of paragraph transition, one that exhibits both extrinsic and intrinsic properties. The most common transitional devices of this type are the prepositional phrases used to begin the first sentence of paragraphs that set off events by order of occurrence, or to indicate changes in position, location, or point of view. Typically, these prepositional phrases are introduced by a preposition, but unlike such usual stock transitional words or phrases as “before,” “after,” and “as a result,” they carry specific information about the subject being discussed.

Some examples:

Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking the sequence of events: “At 8:00 in the morning…”, “By noon…”, “At 6:00 in the evening…”

Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking changes in position:  “At sea level…”, “Below sea level…”, “Above sea level…”

Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking changes in location: “In Manila…”, “In Rome…”, “In London…”

Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking changes of point of view in the same composition: “As a private citizen…”, “As a professional…”, “As a public official…”

To conclude our discussions on paragraph transitions, we will take up in Part IV the so-called “deep-hook” paragraph transitions—the type that blends so effortlessly and so unobtrusively with the developing prose that we hardly notice that the transition is there at all. (January 23, 2006)

Part IV – Making effective paragraph transitions

We will now discuss “deep-hook” paragraph transitions—the type that subtly works out its bridging logic by making itself an intrinsic part of the idea being developed. Unlike the usual conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases such as “but,” “however,” and “as a result,” deep-hook paragraph transitions don’t call attention to themselves. They do their job so unobtrusively that readers hardly notice they are there at all.

To show what they are and how they work, we will use the same prototype first paragraph that we used to illustrate the other types of paragraph transitions:

“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.”

Strategy 8:  Use the last word or phrase of the preceding paragraph as the first word or phrase of the next paragraph, then make it the takeoff point for developing another idea. This is the simplest of the deep-hook paragraph transitions and is most effective when limited to two or three words, such as “Palawan” in this example:

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.           

           

An unplanned trip to Palawan was farthest from my mind at the time because I was so in a hurry to get back to Manila...

1.5

When it uses too many words, this type of paragraph transition may still work but it tends to be repetitive and clunky.

Strategy 9: Use an earlier word or phrase in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph as the first word or phrase of the next paragraph, then make it the takeoff point for developing another idea.

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.

           

Our tour guide had apparently spared no effort in foisting the outrageous idea on my friend’s impressionable mind...

Strategy 10: As the next paragraph’s takeoff point for developing another idea, use a word or phrase in a sentence other than the last sentence of the preceding paragraph. To establish its logic, however, this type of paragraph transition usually needs a multiple hook—perhaps two or more operative words or phrases from the preceding paragraph:

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.

That my friend should specifically insist on Palawan after already visiting several vacation resorts in the Visayas was terribly upsetting to me...

Here, the multiple hooks are “friend,” “several vacation resorts,” and “Visayas” from the second sentence of our prototype first paragraph, and “Palawan” from its last sentence.

Strategy 11: Use an “idea hook,” one that distills into a single phrase an idea expressed in the preceding paragraph, then use it as takeoff point for developing the next paragraph. This is the subtlest and most sophisticated form of paragraph transition of all, and its skillful use in compositions often indicates how good a writer has become in the writing craft.

Here are two idea hooks for a paragraph that will follow our prototype first paragraph:

As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.

Giving in to my friend’s utterly capricious idea upset all of my well-laid plans for the remainder of that month...

or:

That spur-of-the-moment decision led to an experience so delightful that I vowed never again to so doggedly take the well-beaten path in my travels...

In practice, however, deep-hook paragraph transitions should not be used to the exclusion of the conventional conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases. In fact, compositions that use a wide variety of paragraph transitions flow better and are generally more readable than those that use only one type. (January 30, 2006)

This ends the four-part essay on “Making Effective Paragraph Transitions.” I hope that it has clarified whatever lingering doubts you might have about how to properly bridge paragraphs in your expositions.