Writing Elegantly Most of us know clumsy sentences when we hear or read them, but we don’t always know exactly why they are clumsy or possess the skills to fix them. An E-Newsletter reader heard the awkwardness of the following sentence but was puzzled by how to reword it. The network that this computer is able to connect to contains information that is privileged and confidential. She may have felt uncomfortable about "able to connect to" because it sounds like a dangling modifier. However, this is just a symptom of bigger problems. The clumsiness is caused by several common writing errors: *Unnecessary dependent clauses Get rid of that is/which is, that are/which are clauses whenever possible. *Extraneous verb phrases Delete verb phrases that don’t add meaning: is able to. *Subjects too far away from their verbs Place subjects closer to their verbs: computer connects, network contains. *Redundancy Weed out repetitious words: Confidential and privilegedmean the same thing in this context. Finally, tweak the wording so that the sentence flows: This computer connects to a network containing confidential information.