Postponement of Heavy Noun Phrases in Technical English
5 exercises — practise moving long, complex noun phrases to the end of the sentence for readability.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly postpones a heavy noun phrase to the end using "there is" instead of leaving it as an awkward long subject?
"There exists a critical race condition in the payment reconciliation job that only triggers under high concurrency" is correct: the existential "there exists" construction postpones the heavy noun phrase ("a critical race condition...high concurrency") to the end of the sentence, following the end-weight principle that longer, more complex information reads more clearly at the end. Option A leaves the entire heavy noun phrase in subject position before the verb "exists", forcing the reader to hold a long, complex phrase in mind before reaching the verb. Option C is more readable than A but still front-loads a long modifying clause immediately after a short subject without the smoother existential postponement. Option D awkwardly fronts the prepositional phrase "in the payment reconciliation job", separating it from the noun phrase it modifies and creating a convoluted structure.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses extraposition with "it" to postpone a heavy subject clause describing a testing requirement?
"It is required that every microservice exposes a standardized health check endpoint before deployment" is correct: the anticipatory "it" allows the heavy subject clause ("that every microservice...before deployment") to be postponed to the end, which is far more natural and readable than placing that long clause in subject position. Option A places the entire heavy clause as the grammatical subject before the verb "is", which is grammatically possible but stylistically awkward and hard to process. Option C garbles the structure by appending a stray "that" after an already complete-seeming sentence, which is ungrammatical. Option D omits the required subject "it" entirely, leaving the sentence without a grammatical subject.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly postpones a heavy direct object noun phrase to the end of the sentence, after a shorter adverbial, for better readability?
"The linter flagged seventeen unused imports scattered across twelve different files before the pull request could be merged" is correct: the heavy direct object ("seventeen unused imports...different files") stays close to its verb "flagged", while the shorter adverbial clause ("before the pull request could be merged") is postponed to the very end — this ordering follows end-weight and keeps the verb-object relationship clear. Option A awkwardly interrupts the verb and its heavy object with the adverbial clause inserted mid-sentence, forcing the reader to hold the verb in mind across an intervening clause. Option C fronts the heavy noun phrase as if it were the subject, creating a confusing structure since it is actually the object of "flagged". Option D incorrectly inserts the heavy noun phrase as a parenthetical between the subject and verb, which is both ungrammatical and disrupts the core sentence structure.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly postpones a heavy noun phrase using a cleft ("what...is") structure to emphasize it at the end?
"What caused the outage is a misconfigured load balancer health check that marked all healthy nodes as unavailable" is correct: the "what"-cleft places the short, known information ("what caused the outage") first and postpones the heavy, new noun phrase to the end after "is", which follows end-weight and gives the complex explanation appropriate final emphasis. Option B reverses this order, putting the heavy noun phrase first and the short "what"-clause last, which is grammatically possible but works against end-weight and buries the short, more digestible information after a long phrase the reader must process first. Option C has scrambled, ungrammatical word order that does not form a valid cleft sentence. Option D similarly breaks the required "what X is Y" cleft structure with incorrect word order.
5 / 5
Choose the sentence that best postpones a heavy noun phrase to the end when describing what a config validator checks, following end-weight for readability.
"The validator checks a wide range of settings, including timeouts, retry counts, and TLS certificate paths, for every environment" is correct: it places the heavy noun phrase ("a wide range of settings...TLS certificate paths") right after the verb it belongs to and reserves the very end for the short adverbial "for every environment" — but critically, the heaviest, most complex element still reads smoothly attached to its verb rather than being interrupted or fronted. Option B awkwardly inserts the short adverbial "for every environment" between the verb "checks" and its heavy object, splitting a tightly connected verb-object pair. Option C fronts the entire heavy noun phrase as if it were the subject, which is confusing since it is actually the object of "checks", violating end-weight entirely. Option D compounds this problem by also fronting the adverbial before the heavy noun phrase, producing a convoluted, hard-to-parse sentence.