1

I'm currently in the midst of proofreading a particular text, and this following paragraph reads strangely to me:

He took some time to arise from his cruciform, corpse-like state on the wicket, during which the available daylight started ebbing from the sky, and therefore making it steadily more difficult for incoming players.

To me, the last line appears to be dependent on the former, and so 'and therefore' reads strangely to me. What does everyone else think? I've edited the sentence to read as follows:

He took some time to arise from his cruciform, corpse-like state on the wicket, during which the available daylight started ebbing from the sky, therefore making it steadily more difficult for incoming players.

As opposed to '...and therefore making it steadily more difficult for incoming players.'

I've been staring at this text for hours on end and, with the conjunction preceding the conjunctive adverb 'therefore', it just reads...strangely?

I'm a recent graduate and thus new to the industry, so the overall quality of the text is entirely out of my control. I'm just trying to save this text as much as I possibly can; I've only been given permission to point out the 'obvious' errors.

Apologies for any typos; I'm posting this from my phone!

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback. I am more than aware that this text is horrible to read; however, I am limited in what criticism I can offer. It pains me just as much as it does all of you!

Improve this question
4
  • 4
    Did your cited text come from a native speaker? It's very poorly written (and I suspect steading is a mistranstription of steadily, otherwise it's just syntactic garbage). It would be a slight "improvement" to remove the words and therefore, but I'd still say the sentence as a whole would be very poor quality even after that.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 11:12
  • Welcome to ELL. Answers should only be used for answering the question. I went ahead and copied the text from the answers into your question - you probably will want to edit it. You may want to take the tour to learn a bit about how this site works - it's a bit different.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 12:36
  • I agree with the first comment. While awkwardly written (and deserving to be rephrased on principle), the only part that's outright wrong is making it steading. (Another possibility for a workable replacement word is seemingly.)
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 14:37
  • It looks like you may have accidentally created two accounts - you might want to use the “Contact” link at the bottom of the page and ask to have them merged so that you can edit and comment on your question.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 16:55

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

This is a terrible example of English prose. "Therefore" is acceptable although I'd prefer "thereby." Here is what this grotesque mess means (to the extent that it has intelligible meaning).

He delayed the game while the fading daylight steadily increased the difficulties faced by the opposing players.

"Therefore" is appropriate because the fading daylight is the cause of the increasing difficulty. It is, however, awkward, and in prose this awful any additional awkwardness may be the straw that reduces the camel to gibbering incoherence.

How you want to comment on the unique qualities of this fiasco I leave to you because this is NOT a proofreading site.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .