# Is this a sentence?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-sentence/787336>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [May 24, 2017, 12:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-sentence/787336 "2017-05-24T12:35:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2017, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-sentence/787336/22 "2017-05-28T05:34:42Z")

</div>

> [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](#):
>
> A local newspaper offers a survey in order to continue reading the article. The sentence on top of a few checkable options is this: **“If a company offered these customer care solutions on their website, which would you prefer assuming each was equally capable of providing a resolution to your issue?”**  
> Does that make any sense? FWIW, the options are: Self Help tools, video chat, email, faq, and chat.

It’s missing a comma. “If a company offered these customer solutions on their website, which would you prefer\*\*,\*\* assuming each was equally capable of providing a resolution to your issue?”

The actual main question is just “Which would you prefer?” Then it has two modifying clauses: “If a company offered these customer solutions on their website” and “assuming each was equally capable of providing a resolution to your issue.”

It seems like they overloaded the question with qualifiers to get the type of answer they want. I would have just said. “A company offers the following solutions on their website. Which would you prefer?” If I needed the extra clause, I would write it in parentheses afterwards: “(Assume each option is equally capable of resolving your issue.)”

This is actually a concern I use when I am writing my posts here. (In fact, I just did it right now.) I am aware that too many clauses can make written speech harder to follow. If I just wrote my inner monologue, my writing would be much more full of clauses.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-sentence/787336.md?page=1)