A Quick Craft Series On Sentences

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: #4

Take Five Minutes to Fall Off A Cliff

Subordinate trailing clauses with past participles and past continuous tense (meaning “ing” verbs):

The issue with using verbs ending in “ing” after the major subject and verb is pacing. An example is: He slipped off the cliff edge, crashing to the ledge below him, breaking his arm and spraining both ankles while cutting his head open.

If we use continuing action verbs, it sounds like his arm fracture proceeds through time for awhile, like, maybe 5 minutes? Really? If the writer wants to hurry the reader through, as if duplicating the action, then it is better to reshape the sentence(s) in simple past, or use a subordinate leading clause in simple past tense

He slipped off the cliff edge. His body crashed to the ledge below. His arm snapped. Both ankles were sprained. Blood spurted from a head cut.

And similarly, As he slipped over the cliff and crashed to the ledge below, his ankles wrenched under, his arm snapped, and his head spurted blood.

A side note: Verbs ending in “ing” are not gerunds. Gerunds are nouns formed from verbs that normally end in “ing.” Example: to run gives you the action running and then gives you the sport Running.

The set of rhetorical classes and bad sentence types is directly borrowed from The New Strategy of Style by Weathers and Winchester, but the examples are, for better or worse, from Scott.