Revisiting that question

Write Now reader Simon Lewis joins the great ‘that’ debate:

Definitely one of my bugbears, that. Take this example: “The teaching medical students receive also leaves them with an incomplete picture.” I started interpreting this as “The medical students who teach…” — and then obviously realised [that] it was supposed to be interpreted “The teaching *that* medical students receive…”. I’m all for brevity, but not at the expense of clarity, and definitely not at the expense of causing the reader to re-start the sentence!

Thanks, Simon.

So it looks like there needs to be a context-specific clause added to our rule.

If the ‘that’ doesn’t add any clarity to the sentence, as in ‘the watch [that] my father gave me’, then cutting it is fine.

But if the ‘that’ distinguishes the word preceding it as, for example, a noun (as it does for the word ‘teaching’ in Simon’s example) rather than an adjective (which is how Simon interpreted the word to begin with, as a way of defining the ‘medical students’) then for goodness’ sake leave it in.

This does, at least, reinforce the importance of another thing we stand for: proofreading!

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Author: Catie Holdridge

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Catie joined Emphasis with an English literature and creative writing degree and a keen interest in what makes language work. Having researched, written, commissioned and edited dozens of articles for the Emphasis blog, she now knows more about the intricacies of effective professional writing than she ever thought possible.

She produced and co-wrote our online training programme, The Complete Business Writer, and these days oversees all the Emphasis marketing efforts. And she keeps office repartee at a suitably literary level.