Maintaining Clarity
Lift Your Language
I have a vast collection of ‘sentences that need saving’.
Here is an example of a failure of construction (with punctuation in need of rescue as well):
Your people need maintenance too, not just your machine’s.
Where’s the problem?
There are two.
Regardless of what the sentence is trying to say, there’s NO apostrophe in ‘machines’; it’s a plural noun!
The next problem is one of ambiguity.
The suggestion is that ‘your people’ need two things: they don’t just need ‘your machines’ but also ‘need maintenance’ – almost certainly not what the writer meant.
It happened because the writer constructed the sentence with only one subject (‘your people’) of the verb ‘needs’.
The solution?
The sentence needs two subjects (‘people’ and ‘machines’). Both subjects ‘need maintenance’.
The verb doesn’t have to be repeated, but is implied.
Therefore, the sentence can be written clearly, like this:
Your people need maintenance, just as your machines do.
or
It isn’t just your machines that need maintenance; so do your people.
I prefer the first, because the main message is about what ‘your people’ need.
Either way, we now know what they need and what the sentence needs for clarity.
Problems solved. Sentence saved.
Ask me about my book, Saving Sentences, if you’re interested in seeing more.