MediaForFreedom.com quotes Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark:
“Clark began with a brief history of American journalism’s movement away from complicated sentence construction to a new simplicity.
“From de Tocqueville to Orwell to E.B. White and Red Smith, he traced the rise of a form that served democratic purposes by making public affairs accessible to all. As it turned out, a special kind of sentence was especially appropriate to the task at hand.
“The form, Clark said, was the ‘right branching sentence.’ Such a sentence begins with the basic statement (‘A horse reared… ‘). Then it adds meaning with a series of language units that branch off to the right. These may include prepositional phrases (‘ . . . in front of Henderson Saloon. . . ‘) individual modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs ( ‘… yesterday. . . ‘), participial phrases (‘ . . . knocking parson Pugh to the ground. . . ‘), subordinate clauses (‘ . . . because the Parson failed to notice that . . . ‘),and even whole sentences (‘ . . . and the sheriff came running when’).”
