Grammatical Guidelines, Part 3: All about That

Never ending are those questions about the unclear use of the pronoun that. Here is one:

Greetings Phil,

In the sentence below, does that relate to order or to complaints?

We have tabulated staff complaints concerning the CEO’s order that unrestricted access be given to construction contractors in January.

Best,
George



Nice hearing from you, George.

The reader should be clear about that referring to the CEO’s order, not the staff complaints, because of the proximity of that to order. In this case, however, what difference would it make? Couldn’t staff complaints be about the order as well as the unrestricted access and still make the intended point? If you’d prefer, you can eliminate the entire problem by getting around that:

We have tabulated staff complaints concerning unrestricted access to construction contractors in January.

The best thing about the revised sentence is the word-count reduction from 19 to 13 words.

Take care,
Phil


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