Eliminating if/then

ELIMINATING UNNECESSARY IF/THEN STATEMENTS

One popular way to complicate a simple expression is to add unnamed people and place them into a confusing and unnecessary cause/effect situation. Readers can be misled into thinking the identities of the players in these dramas are important. In addition, the characters introduce gender and number problems where they don’t belong.

Here’s the simple sentence that does not require an if/then or any anonymous actors:

Teenage drivers are being ticketed for speeding proportionally more often than other drivers.

The Hard Way:

If the driver looks as if he or she might be a teenager, then he or she is more likely to be pulled over and given a ticket for speeding by an officer who thinks he or she might be a youthful driver.

In addition to unnecessarily complicating our simple idea, this sentence is also massively overpopulated with at least one female teenage driver and one male, plus an opinionated officer.

A Valid Objection:
You may say that the new sentence introduces a fresh and useful piece of information about the prejudice of certain traffic officers, and I agree. But the solution is not to place everybody into if/then mayhem.

Instead, if you want to feature the drivers:

Easy way #1:

Teenage drivers are ticketed for speeding by opinionated traffic officers proportionally more often than other drivers.

Easy way #2:

Teenage drivers are victimized by opinionated traffic officers who give them proportionally more speeding tickets than they give other drivers.

Or, if you think the focus of your sentence now features the traffic officers:

Easy way #3:

Opinionated traffic officers ticket teenage drivers for speeding far more often than they do other drivers.

EXAMPLES FROM REAL LIFE

1. If/then problems: My writing was based on who my audience was and what kind of paper I was writing for. For instance, if my writing was for an editorial, then of course personality was not implemented into its tone. However, if I was writing a Letter to the Editor then tone is instrumental when it comes to establishing my point; it becomes necessary.
2. Correction for 1: I used a personal tone for appropriate audiences. For instance, I kept my personality out of my editorial writing, but used it to establish tone in my Letter to the Editor.
3. If/then problems: Creating and shaping ideas are great ways to add uniqueness and purpose to one’s writing, but that’s only the case if his or her writing is inherently good.
4. Correction for 3: Good writers create and shape unique ideas.
5. If/then problems: I learned it was much easier to keep my purpose known throughout my writing, as well as the reasoning behind it. Even if it was not necessarily what I agreed with personally, I realized it was vital for my attitude on the paper to be one the audience can familiarize with.
6. Correction for 5: I learned to defend even positions I personally reject by using clear and obvious reasoning throughout my writing.

THE EXERCISE

Rephrase each of the numbered sentences below to eliminate the unnecessary if/then constructions and the needless cast of characters. As above, the solution to the problem is often to name the category of person who acts out the behavior:

• youthful drivers instead of drivers who look as if they might be teenagers, or
• prejudiced officers instead of cops who think that teenagers are more likely to violate the law.

1. Do your work in the Reply field below this post.
2. Number your sentences to match the examples.
3. If you do two versions to feature different agents, use 1A and 1B, for example.
4. Finish what you can before the end of class.
5. Complete the exercise before class THU JAN 31.

THE SENTENCES

1. It’s almost guaranteed that if we continue disregarding our pollution and effects on Global Warming, we’ll see storms like Sandy more than once a year.
2. If they had realized that the infrastructure of the levees, before Katrina, was outdated, maybe then the city’s people could have prevented such devastation.
3. The Park Ranger should have been allowed to take the semi-automatic weapon away from Mr. Embody if he felt that the citizens in the park were in danger.
4. The most important idea to consider is the safety of all citizens, and in the case of Leonard Embody, the safety of those in the park that day could have been in jeopardy if it were not for the park ranger, Steve Ward, who smartly and correctly detained him.
5. As people of character we know to do the right thing even if no one is watching.
6. If students learn ethical behavior now, then further down the road if they face an ethical dilemma, even if the opportunity of making a dishonest decision presents itself, maybe they’ll think twice about taking that risk.
7. They clearly did not understand what Harvard was trying to teach them, if they needed to resort to such conduct in order to overcome this obstacle.
8. The Stock Exchange needed to be open for morale, even if trading was limited and slow, and it needed to be open for the Street, “to show that it was there,” Silverblatt explained.
9. If the parents of a man or woman haven’t voted in their lifetimes, then their child is not as likely to vote than they would be if he or she had been brought up in a household where the parents always vote.
10. Portugal will not legalize all drugs but will decriminalize them, which for the most part means that if a citizen is caught with illicit drugs, then they will not be incarcerated.