I’ve had enough of the pretentious stringing together of clauses and predicates. I think news people do it just to look smart. But they don’t look smart at all, they just alienate their readers.

Take this opening sentence from a story in the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance.

HARVEY — A man believed to be in his 20s who died after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, authorities said.

Are we clear? Did you understand that? Neither did I.

Let’s take a look at this sentence grammatically, bit by bit.

• subject:
  authorities
• verb:
  said
• object (noun clause):
  a man believed to be in his 20s who died after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey suffered a gunshot wound to the chest

Wow. That’s a really complicated object. Let’s break it down:

• subject:
  A man
• adjective (noun clause):
  believed to be in his 20s
• adjective (noun clause):
  who died after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey
• verb:
  suffered
• object:
  a gunshot wound to the chest

Okay, so on a simplified level, what the authorities said was that a man suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.; But that second noun clause is still too convoluted. Let’s dig deeper:

• subject:
  (still the man)
• verb:
  died
• subordinate clause:
  after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey

Holy cow. It’s like an onion. Let’s keep peeling:

• subordinate conjunction:
  after
• subject:
  he (the man)
• verb:
  was shot
• object:
  by a Harvey police officer
• subordinate clause:
  when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey

You’re kidding me, right? This subordinate clause establishes that the man was dead, yet it was placed in the original sentence as an adjective of the man. To paraphrase, what they’re saying is that “the dead guy who got shot to death got shot in the chest.” Welcome to the Redundancy Department of Redundancy and Repetition.

What’s worse is that we could keep digging. There is another grammatical layer hidden in that subordinate clause above.

What I want to know is, how did this get past the editor? It should have been rewritten to make more sense, like so:

HARVEY — According to authorities, a man believed to be in his 20s was shot by a police officer in south suburban Harvey after allegedly pointing a handgun at the officer. The man died of a fatal gunshot wound to the chest.

Isn’t that much easier to read? I think so.

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