There are 3 ways in which supporting events can make complex sentences tricky to read, write, and edit.
1. Supporting events can turn up anywhere in a sentence.
At the beginning:
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Watching the glass closely, she bounced up and down.
At the end:
A plank of wood lay by the track, roughly fashioned in the shape of an arrow.
Or even in the middle:
A cramped diner haunted by insomniacs is as good as any joint.
2. Supporting events can be essential to the meaning of a sentence, or just add extra detail.
A lot of the time, supporting events just give the reader a bit of extra detail:
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But sometimes the sentence as a whole wouldn't make sense without them:
The sounds of night aren't really what's keeping me from Burke and Wills, though.
Bod heard Scarlett choking back a scream.
He'd been sent there for being a nuisance in Assembly.
3. They can be nested inside each other.
A supporting event can itself have another supporting event inside it, creating a layered, hierarchical structure. Here's an example:
Zangara died thinking of the family he'd left behind to come over to the United States on this difficult mission.
There are 4 events in this sentence:
More importantly, each of the events are layered into each other and add more information about each other:
To recap, complex sentences can be tricky to read and write because:
Okay, we have a rough idea of what makes a complex sentence complex.
Now let's look at the kinds of information we can convey with complex sentences.
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