Annoyingly Confusing Long Noun Phrases
The topic of long noun phrases is one I’ve wanted to cover since I began focusing these newsletters on grammar.
Say it with me: A noun is a person, place, or thing. Some examples include the word noun itself, boards, Lake Superior, Christian, and leadership.
Words before and after the noun can describe what it is and create noun phrases. Those words can take a variety of forms:
Bulletin boards (bulletin is a noun serving as an adjective)
Clean Lake Superior (clean is an adjective)
Christian with a purpose (with a purpose is a prepositional phrase serving as an adjective)
Leadership deconstructed (deconstructed is an adjective after the noun)
Annoyingly confusing long noun phrases (annoyingly is an adverb describing confusing, which is an adjective kind-of serving as an adverb describing long, which is an adjective describing noun, which is a noun serving as an adjective describing phrases)
As you can see, when a writer provides too many words in a row to describe the noun (creating a long noun phrase), readers may have difficulty interpreting the meaning of the thing being described.
I recently read a long noun phrase that looked a little like this: a Christian leadership pastoring college for you. In this case, the word college is the main noun. The words after the main noun are clear: It’s a college for you. However, several of the words before college are each nouns in themselves, serving here as adjectives, and I don’t know which adjective describes which noun. Is the college a pastoring college, and does Christian leadership describes the kind of pastoring the college teaches? Is Christian describing a college that is for leadership pastoring? (To be fair, I’m not sure what leadership pastoring is.) Is Christian leadership pastoring one concept that the whole college teaches?
One way to help avoid the confusion of long noun phrases is to hyphenate terms: a Christian-leadership pastoring college for you, a Christian leadership-pastoring college for you, or a Christian-leadership-pastoring college for you.
Another, often-more-helpful solution is to rearrange the describing words: your college for leaders in Christian pastoring; a pastoring college that teaches Christian leadership, designed for your needs; a pastoring college for Christian leaders like you; and so on.
Here are some other examples and fixes:
I don’t like annoyingly confusing long noun phrases.
I don’t like long noun phrases because they are confusing and, thus, annoying.
The delayed data management project customers are unhappy.
The customers of the data-management project are unhappy about the delay.
Customers of the delayed data-management project are unhappy.
Those characters are contemporary romance novel relevant.
Those characters are relevant to contemporary romance novels.
She is his whiskey swigging couch potato daughter-in-law.
She is his whiskey-swigging, couch-potato daughter-in-law. (As you can see, sometimes long noun phrases are fun, and all we have to do to fix them is add some commas and hyphens.)
Three shameless plugs:
I want to once again shout out the Delco Literacy Council Champions of Adult Literacy fundraiser.
October 9 through 13, the e-book for Midnight Clear at Christmas will be free. I’m hoping the new literacy champions will download a free book. BTW, please review this book if you’ve read it and liked it.
Book 4, A New Heart, is in the review stage. The goal is to get it out by Christmas. This means I’ve begun writing book 5. More on that next month.