The magic that resumptive modifiers can do to our English

During these past two months, I have presented here in the Forum four basic grammar strategies and techniques for crafting more readable and compelling sentences: the use of synonyms to enliven prose, the reference word strategy for avoiding repetitive use of the same nouns, the use of the demonstrative reference words, and the use of repeated action and sequence words. This time, I’ll now go to the advanced sentence-development techniques for giving more substance and feeling to our sentences: the use of resumptive modifiers, the use of summative modifiers, and the use of free modifiers.

As the fifth in the Forum’s series of pointers for expository writing, I am now posting for starters the composite essay below, “The Usefulness of Resumptive Modifiers,” that I wrote for my daily English-usage column in The Manila Times in January of 2004. The essay shows that far better than relative clauses, resumptive modifiers can dramatically improve the organization of our ideas and make our sentences much more readable and compelling. (September 2, 2012)

The usefulness of resumptive modifiers

Useful as the four basic grammar strategies and techniques are for crafting more readable and compelling sentences, they are not all we need to write really good prose. In fact, indiscriminate reliance on them can hook us to a lifetime of plain and simple but thoroughly unexpressive writing. So this time, to better equip ourselves against producing stiff, dreary, and uncompelling prose, we will take up three highly effective techniques for giving flesh and feeling to our sentences without running them to the ground and without getting our thoughts entangled in verbal sprawl. These advanced sentence-development techniques are the use of resumptive modifiers, the use of summative modifiers, and the use of free modifiers.

Let’s begin with resumptive modifiers, a device that can dramatically improve our organization of ideas while packing emotional wallop into our sentences.

The best way to understand what resumptive modifiers are and how they work is to scrutinize a sentence that uses a string of relative clauses. Here’s one such sentence: “The incumbent provincial governor is being seriously threatened by an upstart with absolutely no public service experience who is being propped up by a ragtag band of political discards who are desperate to recover lost glory and whose qualifications for the post are at best doubtful or downright spurious.”

With such a jawbreaker of a sentence, figuring out who does which and what modifies which can be infuriatingly difficult indeed! This is because the sprawl created by the multiple relative clauses has horribly garbled the ideas in the sentence and weakened the linkages between them.

Now see what happens when we restructure that sentence by using the noun phrase “an upstart” to take the role of the reference relative pronoun: “The incumbent provincial governor is being seriously threatened by an upstart with absolutely no public service experience, an upstart being propped up by a ragtag band of political discards who are desperate to recover lost glory, an upstart whose qualifications for the post are at best doubtful or downright spurious.”

The key phrase “an upstart” in this new sentence is what is called a resumptive modifier, and its virtue is that: (1) it allows the elimination of the relative links “who is” and “whose” to make the sentence more concise, (2) it arrests the verbal sprawl of the original sentence by making its ideas more clear-cut and their procession more orderly, and (3) it makes the sentence more expressive and forceful. Note that as a resumptive modifier, “an upstart” replaced the unexpressive linking phrases “who is” and “whose” to become the subject or theme of the modifying phrases that come after it.

Let’s now generalize the steps for making resumptive modifiers decongest and perk up sentences that are badly encumbered by relative clauses: first, at or near the end of the main clause, find a key word or phrase that can serve as a resumptive modifier; second, repeat that key word or phrase so it becomes the pivotal subject or theme of all the relative phrases that come after the main clause; and third, have that key word or phrase modified by those relative phrases.

A resumptive modifier can take the form of a noun, a verb, or an adjective central to the idea of the main clause, like the noun “woman” in this sentence: “She was a woman of a few thoughts, a woman of a few words, a woman with not a single bit of true feeling or informed opinion in her.” Contrast that sentence with this one that’s overly laden with relative clauses: “She was a woman who was capable of only a few thoughts, who was capable of saying only a few words, and who did not have a single bit of true feeling or informed opinion in her.”

Verbs and adjectives can also be freely used as resumptive modifiers. See how the verb “threatens” serves as a resumptive modifier in this sentence: “An upstart with absolutely no political experience threatens to dislodge the incumbent provincial governor by capitalizing on his immense popularity, threatens to resurrect political discards desperate to recover their lost glory, and threatens to win by a landslide in a province dominated by voters beguiled by his phenomenal mass appeal.”

And then, see how the adjectives “real” and “serious” work as resumptive modifiers in this variation of the sentence above: “The threat to the incumbent provincial governor by the inexperienced political upstart is both real and serious, real because of the continuing deterioration of the economic life of the province, and serious because the upstart is immensely popular among the impoverished provincial folk.”

The beauty in using resumptive modifiers is that, aside from being a powerful tool for clarifying and emphasizing ideas, they also make it so easy to add information to sentences. They allow the widest latitude possible for developing a chosen theme and going into new directions of thought within the same sentence—and all that without missing a beat or making readers gasping for air. This is what makes resumptive modifiers superior to most other modifying devices in organizing sentences and in fighting sprawl.

We will see this superiority more clearly when we compare how two of the usual sentence-organizing techniques fare against resumptive modifiers in extracting sense from the usual meandering prose that passes for academic writing these days.

Take this breathtakingly convoluted sentence:

According to a leading Filipino social scientist, the public has to have a clear appreciation of the factors that have brought about the primacy of celluloid popularity in gaining a foothold on Philippine voting preferences, of which the most outstanding characteristic is the profound tendency of Filipinos to identify very strongly with their favorite movie heroes, which in turn makes them embrace the latter’s make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less as the real thing.

This 79-word behemoth, as we can see, needs nothing less than major surgery.

First, as a newspaper journalist might do it, we will boil that sentence down into the bite-size sentences that go with the obligatory inverted-pyramid structure of most newspaper reporting:

A Filipino social scientist has urged the public to clearly understand why celluloid popularity has gained such a strong foothold on Philippine voting preferences. He said that Filipinos have such a profound tendency to identify with their favorite movie heroes, which makes them actually think that the latter’s make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less is for real.

The reconstruction is clear and not really bad, if all we are after is bland objectivity.

Second, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an opinion writer sold to the limitless utility of relative clauses:

We must seriously ponder a leading Filipino social scientist’s admonition that the public should have a clearer appreciation of why celluloid popularity has gained such a strong foothold on Philippine voting preferences, a situation which, of course, stems from the fact that Filipinos identify very strongly with their favorite movie heroes, as a result of which they embrace make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less as the real thing itself.

Said with more conviction perhaps, but the deadly sprawl of the relative clauses still makes the sentence teeter on the edges of incomprehension.

Now, for our third and last recourse, we will use resumptive modifiers to see if they can whip up the original sentence into better shape and give it more verve. Let us pick, say, “celluloid popularity” as the resumptive modifier and use it to get rid of most of the relative pronouns in the sentence:

We have to seriously ponder a leading Filipino social scientist’s admonition that the public should clearly understand why Filipinos are so strongly influenced by celluloid popularity in their voting preferences, a celluloid popularity that makes them identify so strongly with their movie heroes, a celluloid popularity that makes them embrace make-believe ability to solve life’s problems in two hours or less as the real thing itself.

The ideas in the sentence have remained complex, of course, but they are much clearer and they flow much better than the original and the previous two rewrites. More than that, however, something amazing has happened to the sentence as a result of using a resumptive modifier. It now seems not only to have a greater ring and rhythm of truth to it but also the strong sense of conviction of someone who truly believes every word he says. This, other than better organization and clarity and verve, is the magic that a good resumptive modifier brings to prose.

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This posting combines two essays that appeared consecutively in the daily column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the February 23 and 24, 2004 issues of The Manila Times © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. The two essays subsequently appeared as Chapters 60 and 61 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.