The longest distance in writing

 The longest distance in writing is between the period of the last sentence and the subject of the next one.

Verlyn Klinkenborg made that observation in a famous book published in 2012. But a lot of people have  warned of the dangers of introductory clauses.

One of the funniest sentences I ever read went something like this:

 

Because he urinated on the floor of City Hall, the mayor said he would no longer bring his dog to council meetings.

 

I think readers are entitled to assume that the subject of an introductory clause is the first noun that follows. Had that sentence gotten into print, I think the mayor — not his dog — would have had a claim that he’d been falsely defamed.

I tried to convince young people who wanted to be newspaper reporters that they should have a prose they could control, as Klinkenborg put it. If you keep making mistakes with introductory clauses, don’t use them.

My attempts to improve the English that appeared in a few newspapers were mostly unsuccessful. I couldn’t convince writers they’d do better if they went back over their stories and cut half the introductory clauses.

I had three beefs:

• Introductory clauses are minefields for grammatical mistakes.

• Clauses generally make sentences longer. They slow readers down. They often make reading harder.

• Newspaper writers are susceptible to a certain kind of clause that undermines the credibility of everything they write. An example would go something like this:

 

In a move that was largely criticized by experts as an unprecedented effort to undermine democracy, President Trump ….

 

The writer has spent 16 words and hasn’t told readers whether the current occupant of the White House  bugged the homes of political opponents or ordered the Air Force to bomb the capitals of unappreciative NATO allies. The sentence makes a longish demand on the reader’s attention before giving her the news. If the reader is constantly subjected to this, she will conclude that the reporter thinks the most important thing is not the news but the context of the story. The reader will wonder whether that’s a kind of bias.

You can lose a reader’s trust in many ways. It seems to me that a lot of them show up in introductory clauses.

• Source: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing; New York: Vintage Books, 2012, p. 11.