Day 244: Reduce that and which phrases.

Phrases starting with that and which add description to a sentence. They can be useful, but they make the sentence complicated. For simple-to-read text, we try to limit the number of these phrases in a document. Consider this sentence.

“She threw the apple at the man that was standing by the tractor.”

In this sentence, we can simply remove the word “that” and the “was” that is required by “that.” “That” is implied, so it is not necessary:

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“She threw the apple at the man standing by the tractor.”

This also removes an unnecessary verb, so the entire sentence is more concise. Now consider this sentence.

“She threw the apple, which was on the table, at the man standing by the tractor.”

In this sentence, we have a non-restrictive phrase starting with the word “which.” Like all non-restrictive phrases, this phrase is not necessary to make the sentence grammatically correct. We can remove it, but then we will lose content. Instead, we can revise the sentence so that we don’t need “which.” This gives us the following sentence.

“She threw the apple on the table at the man by the tractor.”