Re: Long Sentence Help
- From: HVS <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 13:05:55 +0100
On 10 Apr 2007, Todd wrote
As I often see sentences beginning with "this," I was thinking
about
parsing the following, rather long sentence into two, and
starting the second with "this." So I was wondering what people
here think of using "this" to start a sentence, or if they would
rewrite the sentence some other way.
1. "These factors, coupled with the failure to recognize that
the age of a theory and the number of authorities supporting it
cannot make it true, allowed the geocentric theory of the solar
system to survive for centuries, in some circles even after
experiments conclusively showed otherwise, to a large extent
because the notion of a heliocentric solar system severely
threatened a world view that many people had been
psychologically, emotionally, professionally and religiously
vested in for ages."
2. "These factors, coupled with the failure to recognize that
the age of a theory and the number of authorities supporting it
cannot make it true, allowed the geocentric theory of the solar
system to survive for centuries, in some circles even after
experiments conclusively showed otherwise. This to a large
extent because the notion of a heliocentric solar system
severely threatened a world view that many people had been
psychologically, emotionally, professionally and religiously
vested in for ages.
I'd break it differently and re-write it further: even in your re-
write, the first sentence is an ugly little sucker, and the end of
second sentence seems wrongly cast.
How about:
"These factors, coupled with the failure to recognize that
the age of a theory and the number of authorities supporting it
cannot make it true, allowed the geocentric theory of the solar
system to survive for centuries. In some circles this continued
even after experiments conclusively showed otherwise -- to a large
extent because the notion of a heliocentric solar system
severely threatened a world view to which many people had long been
psychologically, emotionally, professionally and religiously
committed."
--
Cheers, Harvey
Canadian and British English, indiscriminately mixed
.
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