For many years, I’ve resisted teaching sentence structure in my business and technical writing classes. I’ve concentrated on document structure, audience awareness, persuasive content, procedural steps, grammar and punctuation–all important stuff!

Recently, however, I’ve become interested in sentence structure, and now I know why I’ve not focused on this earlier: It’s a tough, complex subject. I’m actually scared of sentence diagramming, although I’ve taken several short courses in this technique.

So I’m taking a class on sentence structure through the Teaching Company® and reviewing my old files on sentences. I’m overwhelmed by all the information, and when that happens, I take it in, one idea at a time.

The idea that makes most sense to me right now is the benefit of right-branching sentences over left-branching ones. Here’s an example of these two structures:

Right-branching: “Any fatality on forest land we’re required to investigate.”

Left-branching: “We’re required to investigate any fatality on forest land.”

The right-branching sentence places the subject and verb that is the topic of the sentence at the beginning of the sentence and then places additional information to the right of the subject and verb. (Think of starting the sentence with subject and verb  and “branching” additional information off to the right.)

Left-branching sentences are those in which the initial information does not become intelligible until the arrival of later information.

The research strongly suggests that right-branching sentences are easier to process than left-branching. These findings seem intuitive to me, however, when I look at these two versions:

The functional state of our mold, options for correction, and responsibility are the topics I would like to discuss. [Left-branching and quite confusing]

I would like to discuss the non-functional state of our mold, options for correction, and responsibility. [Right-branching and clearer than left-branching version ]

Of course, there are sentences that function well even when left-branching, usually those that have an introductory clause or phrase branching left (in orange text) from the main clause:

• With the price of crude mired at half the peak of $147 it reached in July, this may seem like an odd time to invest in oil wells.

This sentence makes sense and is easy to comprehend; however, most technical and business writers would be wise to write more right-branching sentences to allow readers to process the text and ideas more quickly.