One morning recently, I looked out the window and said, “The snow that fell last night has already melted.” When I spoke, I paused after “night”:
The snow that fell last night (pause) has already melted.
Most declarative sentences have a two-part structure: a noun phrase (“the snow that fell last night”) which is the subject, and a predicate (“has already melted”). Each of these two parts have further structure, but since the top-level structure consists of these two parts, it is natural to pause between them when the subject is complicated. This helps the listener to parse the sentence in real time.
However, when we write such sentences we must not do this:
The snow that fell last night, has already melted.
There is a rule about English writing that forbids putting a comma between the two main parts of a sentence. This rule is dysfunctional! It makes very complicated sentences hard to read:
The book with the pictures of the baby sits usually in the pink bedroom dresser.
“Baby sits” is a familiar phrase but it is confusing here because the two words are in different main parts of the sentence. You may have to back track while reading to make sense of it. Another famous example is
The horse raced past the barn fell.
Since the Powers That Be insist we mustn’t separate the two main constituents of a sentence by putting a comma between them, perhaps in our modern world of computers we could use color.
The snow that fell last night has already melted.
The book with the pictures of the
baby sits usually in the pink bedroom dresser.
The horse raced past the barn
fell.
Charles Wells
April,