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Demystifying RC
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Session 4: Difficult Passages

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Theme: Breaking down hard to read sentences

Simplify by focusing on the clause— the subject and a verb. Ask yourself questions like “Who or what is this sentence about?” and “What did they do?”
My friend who has long legs is great at jumping hurdles.
By focusing on subject and verb, I can break this down and say that my friend:
has long legs
is great at jumping hurdles
He put on weight when he stopped running.
What did he do? He put on weight. When did he do it? When he stopped running
She told me that she would call me when she got home.
Note here that we have an object that is also a clause.
Who is this about? “She”
What did she do? She told me something.
What did she tell me? She told me that she would call me when she got home.
The above are all very simple examples, but they can be really helpful when dealing with long, abstruse sentences. Think of the following:
In Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, J.W. Binns asserts that the drama of Shakespeare, the verse of Marlow, and the prose of Sidney—all of whom wrote in English—do not alone represent the high culture of Renaissance (roughly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century) England.

This is a long sentence with a lot of information, and it is broken up by interjections. It can be easy to get lost in sentences like this! Now look at the following breakdown:
In Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, J.W. Binns asserts that the drama of Shakespeare, the verse of Marlow, and the prose of Sidney—all of whom wrote in English—do not alone represent the high culture of Renaissance (roughly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century) England.

OR:
J.W. Binns asserts something. What does he assert? That the drama of some writers do not represent the high culture of Renaissance England.

This is so much easier to understand, and once you have a handle on this, you can go back and fill in the details if you need to. Don’t place too much heed on lists and memorizing its content, simplify the list into a broader idea. But the important thing is to not try to take all of the information in at once. Instead, break the sentence down into broader points. Then, once you understand that, go back and fill in the details.

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