5 exercises — using cleft sentences, negative inversion, and fronted structures in design docs, incident reports, and code reviews.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A design doc needs to emphasise a key gap. Which sentence uses fronting to put the emphasis where it belongs?
"What the system lacks is a proper retry mechanism" is a cleft sentence — a fronting structure. The "What…is…" pattern moves emphasis to the end of the sentence, the information-focus position: "What the API returns is a 503", "What caused the outage was a misconfigured load balancer", "What this PR addresses is the race condition in the scheduler." Cleft sentences are powerful in technical writing to draw attention to a specific piece of information. Option A is neutral — no emphasis. Option C is awkward and passive. Option D adds unnecessary words. Use cleft sentences when you want the reader to notice one thing above all others.
2 / 5
You want to emphasise when the database goes down in a report. Which sentence fronts the time correctly?
"It is during peak traffic that the database goes down" is a preparatory-it cleft (also called an it-cleft). The pattern "It is [focus] that [rest of clause]" puts maximum emphasis on the fronted element: "It is the connection pool exhaustion that causes the timeout", "It was the schema migration that triggered the outage", "It is at 3am that the cron job runs." Option C is also good (fronted adverbial), but the it-cleft in D signals even stronger emphasis — it isolates and highlights the focus element. Use it-clefts in post-mortems and RCAs when pinpointing the exact cause or time.
3 / 5
A code reviewer wants to acknowledge a positive but contrast it with a problem. Which sentence uses fronting to create the contrast most effectively?
"Clean though the logic is, the tests are completely missing" uses the fronted adjective + though concessive structure. Moving the adjective to the front and inverting the subject and verb creates an elegant contrast: "Fast though the query is, it will break under load", "Readable though the code is, the performance is unacceptable", "Simple though the fix appears, it has side effects." This structure is common in formal code reviews, design document critiques, and technical assessments. Option A is plain coordination — the contrast is present but not emphasised. Option B is Yoda-speak and grammatically wrong in modern English. Option D reverses the intended emphasis.
4 / 5
An incident report needs to highlight the root cause. Which version uses fronting to place the root cause in the most prominent position?
Both option B and option D are valid fronting structures, but "What caused the incident was a misconfigured nginx timeout value" (option D) places the root cause at the very end — the natural information-focus position in English. The "What…was…" cleft builds anticipation and delivers the key fact last, which is the position readers remember most. Option B ("It was X that Y") fronts the cause for emphasis but is slightly more formal. In incident reports, both are excellent; option D reads more naturally in narrative writing. Option A and C are plain declarative sentences with no fronting — adequate, but less emphatic.
5 / 5
In a technical presentation, you want to stress that only in production (not staging) does the bug appear. Which sentence uses fronting correctly?
"Only in production does the bug appear" uses negative adverbial inversion — when a restrictive adverb like "only", "never", "rarely", "not until" is fronted, the subject and auxiliary verb invert: "Only after the cache clears does the response return correctly", "Never does this function receive a null value", "Only in edge cases does the validator fail." This inversion is grammatically required (not optional) when these adverbs are fronted. Option A is correct but less emphatic — no inversion. Option C and D are grammatically incorrect word orders. Negative inversion is a powerful stylistic device for technical talks, blog posts, and documentation.