IN the past six columns on crafting more readable sentences, we have focused on ways to make our English clearer, more concise, and more forceful. We have seen how reference words, adjective phrases, adverb clauses, and relative clauses allow us to plug in more details about the actors, actions, and locations that figure in our sentences.

Useful as these conventional modifying devices are, however, they are not all we need to write really good English expositions. Indiscriminate reliance on them, in fact, can hook us to a lifetime of plain and simple but thoroughly inexpressive writing. Straight-news journalism, for instance, is studded with such nuts-and-bolts modifying devices; they just happen to go so well with inverted-pyramid storytelling. But even more mechanical is the general run of academic writing, where otherwise solid research and scholarly enthusiasm often die in lackluster exposition or convoluted verbiage.