When editing my writing I’m often tempted to remove a “that.” For example: We know that the best way to reduce cancer deaths is to prevent the disease from occurring.
Could the third word, “that”, be eliminated without changing the meaning, or grammatical correctness, of the sentence?
In the example given, the “that” is not required and it doesn’t make any difference in the meaning. It’s not “wrong” to use it or to not use it; it’s a matter of style and preference.
There’s a book by a (now deceased) Harvard linguistics professor named Dwight Bolinger called That’s That which examines the subtle ways that dropping “that” does or doesn’t change the meaning.
More or less my take. There’s a lot of times–although I can’t think of any examples on the fly, I just know it when I write them–where deleting the “that” is not incorrect, but leaving it in does help with parsing the sentence. Actually, I suppose sentences like the somewhat well-known “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” would be aided by the addition of the optiona “that” between the first “buffalo Buffalo” occurance (although it is still difficult to parse until you get what the sentence is trying to say.)
IMHO the “that” in your example does help with parsing the sentence (to be specific, it lets me know not to expect a period after “deaths”) and is thus slightly preferable.
I write technical documentation for an international audience, and my editors often have me insert “that” to improve readability and clarity.
I agree.
I start reading and find that “We know the best way to reduce cancer deaths …” and think, Oh, we know the best way. Perhaps the rest of the sentence will tell me how we know it. But then I hit “is”, which doesn’t scan.
The “that” eliminates the need for me to mentally rescan to parse the sentance. I don’t get it wrong the first time. The “that” serves the same function as “quote” in LISP (which I doubt is much help, but whatever.) The point is it introduces a level of indirection.
I’ve heard people recommend removing thats, but IMHO, it’s usually not very good advice. I do strongly believe in eliminating every word that doesn’t serve a purpose. (Yeah, I don’t write posts that way, I’m thinking out loud, not writing a term paper.) I just don’t think eliminating “thats” is a good way to do it, in general.