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It is not that I want all my writing to be so easily understood, but in some writing of mine, perhaps, I want to be as easily understood as possible, such as in certain kinds of fiction, which I plan to write in the future.

Now in a sentence, there are phrases, and each phrase belongs to what I think of as a semantic category, whether time, manner, destination, etc. I have seen that in some clauses which are sophisticated, because of the way that the phrases are arranged, I have difficulty in interpreting the clause. Therefore my question is, in what order should these categories be arranged, for the simplest understanding of a clause?

I say again that I do not want all my writing to be so easy to understand. And perhaps it is better to break down a clause which presents the difficulty above-spoken into more basic elements.

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    You're not going to get any simple rule, because there is none that English writers adhere to. You need to consider each sentence on a case-by-case basis. Generally in English, important information goes near the front of a sentence, although you can vary that for emphasis. Also, particularly in fiction, it's very boring if every sentence has the same structure - you can get away with that for legal documents or math textbooks but not literature. – Stuart F May 21 '22 at 22:09
  • Oh okay. Thank you. I was just thinking about thar because I was having trouble comprehending one clause of a sentence, which I could not simplify without destroying its emphasis at the end. –  May 22 '22 at 10:57
  • I do comprehend the clause, but I can't comprehend it immediately. It is a clause in the KJV, and my study of it lead me to think of the way one determines if something is easy to understand. –  May 22 '22 at 10:58
  • I was also reading the Lord of the Rings Return of the King. It seems that my reading processing speed is improving, because I keep reading the same paragraph repeatedly between breaks. –  May 22 '22 at 11:01
  • I'm trying to enhance my concentration and increase my attention span and verbal context span. And I've been trying to visualize what I read like I used to a long time ago, even though I was never good at reading fiction. –  May 22 '22 at 11:04
  • Also, I'm not sure if exercise helped but I had been exercising a little. –  May 22 '22 at 11:21
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    Maybe also keep in mind that the older books are, the more difficult the language tends to be. Books written these days are a lot "smoother". That's not just a matter of a cultural or generational gap, but there's also simply a lot more competition, so there's a selection pressure to write "better". –  May 22 '22 at 14:01

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