Is it OK to have a sentence that "leaves the reader in suspense"?

Hi, Andrew,

Perhaps you should have opened two different threads because your posting above deals with two different questions, the only element in common being the sense of expectation on the part of the reader at some point in the text.

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

Consider this sentence:

Rome has—regarding the Egyptian war—an official goal, namely to weaken the Parthians.

You can see that "has" is interrupted. So there's some "suspense" (I call it "suspense" anyway) where the reader isn't sure (until after the interruption) whether it will be something like "Rome has many buildings" or something like "Rome has lost many soldiers". The word "has" can attach to some object that you have (he "has a stone") or it can be in a verb phrase or whatever (he "has been there").

I wonder about this "suspense" and whether it's OK.

I don't know how much "suspense" the average sentence has. I suppose that the "suspense" that I'm referring to here might be ubiquitous. The more frequently you see this "suspense", the less I should worry about it...right?

Suspense should not be a problem as long as it does not deviate the reader's attention (what Fowler describes as leaving a "false scent"). My advice would be to avoid suspense if a reader other than the writer—who knows what to expect—feels at a loss, for example, when coming across a parenthetical that interrupts a verb-object or a compound verb structure. If that proofreader experiences confusion, it would be advisable to replace "has" with a clearer verb like "possesses" or "pursues."

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

I also saw this example where the "and' after "crucible" could go in different directions (imagine the sentence said "forged in this crucible and in this situation"; I wonder if this kind of fleeting uncertainty and ambiguity is minor, innocuous, and commonplace.

The third part explores the new world of Roman politics forged in this crucible and how Blue Romans and Red Romans have both responded, in different ways, to the political pull of Rome's superrich.

The main problem with the sentence above is that there is no parallelism between the two coordinate objects of "explores": one is a noun phrase (the new world of Roman politics ...) and the other is an embedded clause (how Blue Romans and Red Romans have both responded ...) This is what unbalances the sentence. To ensure balance, you should coordinate two structures of the same syntactic hierarchy, that is, either two phrases or two clauses.