How to improve writing (no. 112)

I made it almost through a New York Times article, and then I hit this single-sentence paragraph:

Mr. Trump has used a political action committee that is aligned with him, and that is replete with money he raised in small-dollar donations as he falsely claimed he was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election, to pay the legal bills of a number of allies, as well as his own.

There’s something odd about the phrase “replete with money.” The bigger problem though is that “that is aligned with him, and that is replete with money he raised in small-dollar donations as he falsely claimed he was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election” is just too much to position between “Mr. Trump has used a political action committee” and “to pay the legal bills.”

Better:

To pay his legal bills and those of several allies, Mr. Trump has used small-dollar donations to a political action committee that he falsely claimed was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election.

But making two sentences is better still:

To pay his legal bills and those of several allies, Mr. Trump has used funds from a political action committee that he falsely claimed was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election. The funds were raised mostly as small-dollar donations.

I like keeping the detail about small-dollar donations in a separate sentence, making it what we used to call a zinger.

E.B. White’s advice:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

True that.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 112 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. The passage from E.B. White appears in The Elements of Style, in “An Approach to Style,” the chapter White added when revising William Strunk Jr.’s book.]