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Definition:The piling up of modifiers before a noun.
Because clarity may be sacrificed for conciseness, stacked modifiers are often considered a stylistic fault, especially in technical writing.
Because clarity may be sacrificed for conciseness, stacked modifiers are often considered a stylistic fault, especially in technical writing.
Examples and Observations:
Also Known As: stacked modifiers, jammed modifiers, long adjectival phrase, brick sentence
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/stackingterm.htm
- "The board also gave third reading to a Foothills Boulevard Landfill gas emission reduction credits transfer contract authorization bylaw."
(from the Prince George Citizen [British Columbia], quoted by The New Yorker, June 27, 2011) - Stacked phrases range all the way from supposedly simple combinations like "the then district attorney" to complex combinations like "the Halloween-night multiple-gunshot killing of a 30-year-old woman."
The "then district attorney" is presumably a person who was district attorney at that time, and the murder must have occurred on Halloween night when someone shot a 30-year-old woman several times. . . .
Newswriters who adopt this technique sacrifice clarity and may not save time. . . . Conciseprepositional phrases and subordinate clauses are usually more neutral.
(R.K. Ravindran, Handbook of Radio, TV and Broadcast Journalism. Anmol, 2007) - "Nouns can legitimately modify other nouns but long strings of modifiers (nouns, or nouns and adjectives) are often difficult to understand. Non-specialists may find phrases such as:a steroid-induced GABA channel burst duration prolongationcompletely impenetrable. Insert verbs or prepositions between groups of three (or at most four) nouns, or nouns plus adjectives, as in:a steroid-induced prolongation of the burst duration of GABA-activated channels.In sentences with too many abstract nouns, 'of' and 'the' may be redundant . . . but in word strings you may need to insert these short words to make your writing clearer and more precise."
(Maeve O'Connor, Writing Successfully in Science. E & FN Spon, 1991) - Stacked modifiers are strings of modifiers preceding nouns that make writing unclear and difficult to read.Your staffing-level authorization reassessment plan should result in a major improvement.The noun plan is preceded by three long modifiers, a string that forces the reader to slow down to interpret its meaning. Stacked modifiers are often the result of an overuse of buzzwords orjargon. See how breaking up the stacked modifiers makes the example easier to read:Your plan for reassessing the staffing-level authorizations should result in a major improvement.(Gerald J. Alred, Charles T. Brusaw, and Walter E. Oliu, Handbook of Technical Writing. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006)
- Be careful of stacked modifiers (adjectives and adverbs). . . . Be especially careful of cases in which the first descriptor could modify either the second descriptor or the noun. For example, what exactly is a "buried cable engineer"? (And how does one breathe?)
(Edmond H. Weiss, 100 Writing Remedies. Greenwood, 1990)
Also Known As: stacked modifiers, jammed modifiers, long adjectival phrase, brick sentence
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/stackingterm.htm