Don’t lead your readers up the garden path
Image: in the public domain
‘The government plans to raise taxes were defeated.’
Did you stumble over that sentence? If you’re like most people, you read ‘government’ as a noun and ‘plans’ as a verb, and when you got to ‘were defeated’, the sentence suddenly made no sense, and you had to go back and read it again.
Sentences like this are called ‘garden path sentences’ because they lead you into incorrect interpretations and then leave you with nowhere to go. Because we read one word at a time, building up meaning as we go, it’s especially jarring when we have to stop and re-assess a sentence. You don’t want this happening to your readers. This might work better: ‘The government’s plans to raise taxes were defeated’.
‘The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.’
Because garden path sentences are grammatically correct, they can be easy to miss. As a writer, you know the meaning you intended, and you’ll always read it with that meaning in mind, likely missing the other possible interpretations. (This is why you should always get a second pair of eyes to look over your writing, even if you don’t hire a professional editor.) I suggest: ‘The huntsman ducks out on weekends’.
‘Romney wins mask lingering questions about his candidacy’
Headline writers, in their attempt to be as brief as possible, do this all the time. In the example above, replacing ‘wins’ with ‘victories’ would get rid of any ambiguities – but would add five more letters to the headline length. Or you could turn the noun into a possessive adjective: ‘Romney’s wins mask lingering questions about his candidacy.’
‘Escaped wallaby caught using huge fishing net’
These ambiguous newspaper headlines are known as ‘crash blossoms’ after the 2009 headline ‘Japan Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms’. And look, I’m sharing these examples because they’re pretty funny, but they also completely distract from the content – and when the topic is serious and would be undermined by humour, you can do your message real harm. For the above example, try ‘Escaped wallaby caught in huge fishing net’.
‘Mansell guilty of missing businessman's murder’
The key to avoiding these is the key to all good writing – think of the reader. How familiar are they with the topic? Are there any surrounding clues that will give them context? Put yourself in their position, with their level of knowledge and their level of interest. Is your meaning still clear? A simple change like ‘Mansell guilty of murdering missing businessman’ makes all the difference.
