Thursday, July 14, 2022

How to do a left-branching sentence

It’s by Olivia Nuzzi, writing in New York:

Donald Trump was impeached twice, lost the 2020 election by 7,052,770 votes, is entangled in investigations by federal prosecutors (over the Capitol insurrection and over the mishandling of classified White House documents and over election interference) and the District of Columbia attorney general (over financial fraud at the Presidential Inaugural Committee) and the Manhattan district attorney (over financial fraud at the Trump Organization) and the New York State attorney general (over financial fraud at the Trump Organization) and the Westchester County district attorney (over financial fraud at the Trump Organization) and the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney (over criminal election interference in Georgia) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (over rules violations in plans to take his social-media company public through a SPAC) and the House Select Committee on January 6 (whose hearings are the runaway TV-ratings hit of the summer), yet on Monday, July 11, he was in a fantastic mood.
Virginia Tufte, in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006):
In many successful left–branching sentences, there is a temporal or logical development of the expressed idea that invites the delayed disclosure of the left-branching arrangement. The material that comes first seems natural and appropriate, and the anticipated material that concludes the sentence makes an almost inevitable point.
It’s the opposite here: the point is not inevitable but surprising, aberrant, and the sentence is all the stronger for it. The repetition of “(over financial fraud at the Trump Organization)” is especially effective in piling up all the points that will be contradicted by “yet” when the sentence comes to its close.

[Garner’s Modern English Usage defines left-branching sentence: “A complicated sentence that has most of its complexity — the conditions, exceptions, etc. — before the principal verb; one that has a majority of its constituents on the left side of the tree diagram.” I’ve omitted the links in Nuzzi’s sentence. You can find them in the original.]

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