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As a non-native speaker I’m struggling with how to order the clauses in the following sentence:

  1. Because I, as a graduate of a vocational college and as someone who has already successfully absolved an internship, have a range of experience to offer.

  2. Because as a graduate of a vocational college and as someone who has already successfully absolved an internship, I have a range of experience to offer.

Is either or both of these two sentences grammatical and natural-sounding in English? If both are ok, would one be preferred over the other? Would some other ordering than given here be better, and if so, why?

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    "absolved" seems an odd choice of word in this case
    – KillingTime
    Jan 28 at 15:35
  • Get rid of the as's. And (2) is clearer than (1).
    – John Lawler
    Jan 28 at 16:07
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    Your sentences are dependent clauses and hence fragments by some definitions. Your first sentence separates the subject "I" by a long way from its verb "have". This makes it in my opinion the less preferable version.
    – Shoe
    Jan 28 at 16:12
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    @BillJ. Yes, the CGEL analyses "because" as a preposition. However, I suspect that a large majority of teaching and learning materials for non-native speakers continue to categorise "because" as a (subordinating) "conjunction".
    – Shoe
    Jan 28 at 16:28
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    @BillJ. The OP is a non-native speaker who may not be familiar with the CGEL's analysis and terminology. Aarts in Oxford Modern English Grammar calls "because" a "conjunctive preposition". Quirk in the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language calls "because" a "conjunction". I think it is helpful to state the source of the terminology one is using.
    – Shoe
    Jan 28 at 17:13

2 Answers 2

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Initial because is syntactically irrelevant to the issue under consideration here, so I'll pretend it doesn't exist (at least then the two texts look more like "sentences").

The first example is stylistically very poor, because the syntactically optional adverbial clause (as a graduate ... internship) is so long that it's unreasonable to expect the reader to remember the initial subject (I...) until he finally reaches the associated verb (...have a range of experience).

OP's second suggestion really does benefit from the comma[s]...

2a: As a graduate of a vocational college [,] and as someone who has already successfully absolved an internship, I have a range of experience to offer.

...but feasibly that comma could be omitted if we change the sequence...

3: I have a range of experience to offer [,] as a graduate of a vocational college [,] and as someone who has already successfully absolved an internship.

Personally, I would either include both or neither of the commas above, but that's essentially a stylistic choice.

I don't recognise the usage to absolve an internship, but that's another question entirely.

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    I suspect the OP is German, The German word absolvieren means to complete a course of study.
    – Shoe
    Jan 28 at 16:29
  • @Shoe Somehow along the centuries German deviated from Latin's sense famously seen in Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, which is the only dominant sense in English. These sorts of things happen from time to time in one language but not in another.
    – tchrist
    Jan 29 at 15:13
  • @tchrist: Before I started writing my answer (and thus before seeing Shoe's comment) I'd intended to edit my own guess (which was obviously completed anyway) into the Question (in brackets with a question mark). But as things have turned out, that particular "irrelevant" word has generated far more attention here than the "syntactically disastrous" inclusion of because in OP's example text.
    – FumbleFingers
    Jan 29 at 15:24
  • @tchrist. Thanks for the reminder of the countless hours of my youth spent in bored contemplation of the stations of the cross.
    – Shoe
    Jan 30 at 8:19
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The conjunction "and" coordinates two prepositional phrases: "as a graduate of a vocational college" and "as someone who has already successfully absolved an internship". Because those are unnecessary modifiers, let's remove them:

Because I have a range of experience to offer.

This is a subordinate clause and thus does not constitute a complete sentence, at least in the traditional sense. You can fix the problem simply by deleting "because".

As noted in another answer, sentence 1 separates the sentence's subject and verb with a lengthy phrase, so sentence 2 is probably better stylistically.

As also noted in that other answer, "absolved" is not the correct word here.

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  • Interestingly, CGEL calls "because" a preposition. See Geoff Pullum's convincing explanation here link
    – BillJ
    Jan 29 at 13:47

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