On Horses and Clear Writing

As an unabashed wordsmith, I enjoy learning about arcane factoid origins. Many of these tidbits stem from my Mental Floss Words for Words Calendar. The other day, it served up this absolute gem:

The horse raced past the barn fell.

These seven words may be grammatically correct, but they are concurrently confusing as hell.

Naming the Offending Term

As it turns out, there is a name for this type of linguistic offender: the garden-path sentence. From Wikipedia, here's its definition:

...a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning.

Here's another gem from Reddit:

Fat people eat accumulates.

I can think of a few prominent authors who routinely construct their sentences in such an ambiguous manner.

On Title and Subtitle Redundancy

Thoughts on author term stuffing, specious claims, and lack of imagination.

Racket PublishingPhil Simon

What You Need to Know

Occasional variations and turns of phrases are fine. At the same time, you don't want your readers regularly wondering what the hell they just read. If I've learned anything in my writing career, it's this: Stick to clear, simple, and active sentences. In other words, nothing remotely close to this peach.

Trying to be cute or a little too clever is bound to alienate more people than you please.