Thus, the details are Georgia.
Contributed by David Mansfield on 09 November 2006 at 12:40In a draft of a current paper, I wrote the following:
I attempted to decipher Robert Frost’s “Design,” finding that I had no idea what the poem might mean but that its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than did the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations.
Upon a first revision, the sentence is now:
I attempted to decipher Robert Frost’s “Design,” finding that I had no idea what the poem might mean, but its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than did the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations.
The difference is miniscule. I placed a comma between mean and but and removed that. That's all. Does it even make a difference?
Yes. In the first version of the sentence, the second half of the sentence is almost endless, becoming quite confusing because it contains both an idea -
I had no idea what the poem might mean
- and its opposite -
but that its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than did the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations.
- without even a comma to separate them. That's no good. Adding that comma (and removing that to make the comma grammatical) makes the sentence immensely more readable by separating two opposing ideas into different parts of the sentence.
On my second revision, the sentence is now
I attempted to decipher Robert Frost’s “Design,” finding that I had no idea what the poem might mean, but its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations did.
The only difference? I moved did from before than to the end of the sentence. The first way was not strictly speaking wrong; it's the sort of archaic but acceptable inverted sentence that I include in most of my papers. Nonetheless, the length of the sentence necessitates a clear structure, and inverting the subject and verb was probably not the best route to go in creating such clarity. So, I changed it.
These are small changes, but the sentence is significantly easier to read. The devil is in the details may be an old saw, and clunkiness may not be the devil, but working on the details can still make a difference.