Re: Long Sentence Help
- From: "Don Phillipson" <d.phillipsonSPAMBLOCK@xxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:50:35 -0400
"Todd" <burns417@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:i8um13t24ia5pct0fkrtldk4vu6s5ho7as@xxxxxxxxxx
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.
1. Rewriting a single sentence as two is not
"parsing." You can look that up.
2. Your best maxim may be Strunk/White's
"omit needless words."
3. It seems unwise to make the subject of your main verb
a compound of:
-- positive events (these factors, as above) and
-- negative events (failure to recognize X and Y).
Your main thought here is that geocentrism was believed partly
because it reinforced a valued world-view despite:
a) These events (if different from (b) and (c));
b) Failure to recognize (that antiquity is no proof);
c) New evidence suggesting heliocentrism.
All that stuff about "psychologically, emotionally, professionally and
religiously vested . . . " looks like a digression (assuming your
main topic is heliocentrism.) The point you obviously omit is
the authority of the Catholic church which in Galileo's time (and
for centuries later) asserted supreme privilege to govern what
was to be believed as well as what was to be taught.. (This
was fully understood by Galileo and was the reason he wrote
to Bellarmine first.)
Omit needless words . . . If you cut a truly essential idea,
you will spot this tomorrow and you can put it back.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
.
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