The order of words in a sentence is very important to its meaning. A standard sentence uses the order readers expect: subject–verb–object.

It’s easy to misinform readers by getting the word order wrong. If you do get it wrong, you should rewrite or punctuate to impose order and meaning.

Did John arrange my meeting while he was in the seminar room? Or is my meeting in the seminar room?

Option: rewrite

The meaning is clear, but the emphasis has shifted. The original sentence starts with ‘I’, which emphasises my having a meeting. The rewritten sentence emphasises John having arranged the meeting. If the emphasis shift doesn’t suit, then try another option.

We split the 2 ideas in the original sentence into 2 simple sentences and added 2 words. The sentences are easy to read and the meaning is clear. The order of sentences emphasises who is having the meeting over who arranged it.

Option: punctuate

We added a comma pair to mark out the supplementary information in the sentence. The meaning is clear.

If we remove ‘which John arranged’, the sentence that remains is grammatically correct: ‘I have a meeting in the seminar room’. This is how to work out if you can use a comma pair.

Readers will probably untangle a sentence like our original example. But the more complex a sentence is, the more they’ll have to work. Here’s a high-stakes sentence.

Style Manual pages

• Commas
• Types of words (section)