Neurophilosophy Sentence Makeover: increasing cell availability

• Their rationale was that the increase in CREB function resulting from this microinfusion would make cells otherwise unavailable for formation of the fear memory trace available.

Today I’ve chosen to work with a typical academic sentence. I call it “typical” because it uses high-level vocabulary without impenetrable jargon, and because it is long but not overly so. Many academic sentences have these two features. Writing this way produces timid, digestible prose. But we want our prose to strike harder and shine brighter, so here I’ll discuss some possible improvements.

Let’s focus on length. Long sentences aren’t always bad, but not all long sentences are long for the same reason. Whether we should shorten a sentence depends on why it is long. Sometimes sentences keep going because many things are happening and the author wants to convey motion and forward progress without using stops like commas and periods to break up the action all the time. Fiction writers use this technique.

That isn’t why today’s sentence is long, however; it’s long for a different reason. That reason also explains why most other academic sentences are long: they try to do the work of multiple sentences at once.

We can test how much work a sentence is taking on by eliminating everything except the subject, verb, and any predicate complement or objects. We’ll end up with the sentence’s main idea, the bit of work this sentence is trying to accomplish. Everything else will be extra. Once we identify the extra, we can figure out how to work some of it in and delegate the rest to other sentences.

In our sentence, we’ll ignore the “Their rationale was that” part for now. Our primary focus is what comes after that. After getting rid of everything except the subject, the verb, and in this case a predicate complement, we are left with this:

The increase would make cells available.

That’s it—at bottom, this sentence is communicating an idea that is six words long. I call these words the sentence’s “core.” Everything else goes beyond the core to communicate something additional. Is the extra material important? Of course. Could we understand the sentence’s paragraph without it? Maybe not. The point is, though, that a single sentence doesn’t need to do all that extra work. We can force it to, but things may get unruly fast. By farming out the responsibility for communicating all this information, we’ll end up with something punchier and easier to understand.

Let’s look at how the parts of the sentence are related to each other. We’ll make a bulleted list with each part of the core on one level, and everything else on subordinate levels:

• The increase
  • in CREB function
  • resulting from this microinfusion
• would make
• cells
  • otherwise unavailable
    • for formation of the fear memory trace
• available.

When we break the sentence down this way, we see two problem areas. The first is the two phrases following “increase.” One is prepositional, the other participial, and both add to the cognitive load a reader carries into the verb. In addition, the phrases force a big separation between the subject and the verb.

The second problem area is the phrase and sub-phrase after “cells.” Arranging the phrases as the original sentence has done introduces a double complication. First, the verb “make” needs a predicate complement to complete its meaning, but here the complement comes all the way at the end of the sentence. As written, the sentence takes too long to communicate its core. Second, things get worse when we realize that the various phrases after “cells” can complete the verb in multiple ways. All the following sentences make sense:

• The increase would make cells. (drop both phrases and the predicate complement)
• The increase would make cells otherwise unavailable. (add the first phrase)
• The increase would make cells otherwise unavailable for formation of the fear memory trace. (add the first phrase and subphrase)
• The increase would make cells otherwise unavailable for formation of the fear memory trace available. (add the first phrase, subphrase, and predicate complement)

From our list showing the sentence’s structure, we know that the original sentence has two groups of subordinate material. The two groups suggest a rewrite involving three sentences: one each for the subordinate ideas, and a third for the sentence’s core. Here is a possibility for the first:

The microinfusion produces an increase in CREB function.

Here’s a possibility for the second:

Some cells are unavailable to form the fear memory trace.

Now we’re ready to write the core of the original sentence. The tough part is creating a logical connection from that core to our two new sentences. In their current form, those two sentences may seem unrelated, and we’d have to shoehorn the core to add it back in. We still need a bit more reworking, and a sentence transition.

I’ve chosen to combine the second new sentence above with the core of the original sentence. This produces a rewrite involving two sentences. The first is “The microinfusion…” above, and the second is this one:

That increase makes cells available for the fear memory trace which weren’t available before.

There is a strong temptation to hold the predicate complement “available” until the end of the sentence. This choice would make the result of the “increase” more dramatic, but it would re-introduce many of the problems we saw earlier. We should resist that temptation.

It’s also tempting to eliminate the relative clause “which weren’t available before” by adding an adjective, maybe “new,” to describe the cells. Thus we might try this:

That increase makes new cells available for the fear memory trace.

This sentence is simple and direct, but it is not equivalent to our original. The adjective “new” suggests several interpretations which the original sentence does not imply, such as that the increase in CREB function actually generates brand-new cells. In this case, we’re better off sticking with the relative clause at the end of the sentence.

We have two more tasks before finishing—we must include the “rationale” part of the original sentence, and we must adjust the verb tense. We’ll make these additions to the second new sentence.

In the original sentence, the “rationale” construction forces a subordinate clause, but we don’t need to do that. We can use a simpler insertion set off by commas to communicate the same idea:

That increase, they assumed, would make cells available for the fear memory trace which weren’t available before.

All we’ve done in this version is add “they assumed” after the noun and change the verb tense. Our two sentences together now communicate everything in the original sentence, but in a simpler way.

Let’s look at the finished product, alongside the original:

Before	After
Their rationale was that the increase in CREB function resulting from this microinfusion would make cells otherwise unavailable for formation of the fear memory trace available.	The microinfusion produces an increase in CREB function. That increase, they assumed, would make cells available for the fear memory trace which weren’t available before.

The original sentence had 26 words, and the revision has 25. We’ve reduced the length by only a single word. But even experienced readers will comprehend the revision better than they will the original. Simple and direct writing is best, but compressing our sentences too much may leave some ideas behind. Despite their length, the revised sentences punch harder because they require less effort to understand.

When we began, I said that the original sentence was long because it was trying to do the work of many sentences at one time. We farmed out some of that work to a second sentence. Adding a new sentence kept the word count up. In general, though, multiple simple (complete) sentences are easier to understand than fewer sentences with subordinate clauses. In this revision, what we sacrifice in word count we make up for in clarity.

Writing sentences forces us to make tradeoffs between simplicity, directness, and length. Clarity adjudicates these tradeoffs. If further compressing a sentence would make it more difficult to understand, then brevity can become a vice.

In general, though,

multiple simple (complete) sentences

are easier to understand than fewer sentences with subordinate clauses.

This sentence makeover was written by Bryce Gessell.