Confusing writing

The other day in class we discussed suspending a sentence. Adding too much information between a pair of commas or dashes, can be confusing to the reader. Instead the sentence should be broken up or the extra information should be at the end of the sentence.

Offsetting information between commas and dashes can be confusing in other ways. A good example was posted on the message board, Testy Copy Editors. In the following article, the organization of the sentence and use of commas makes for a very confusing story.

MATTHEW KEMENY, Of The Patriot-News
Wednesday February 04, 2009, 4:30 PM

A woman who was killed Monday night as she was trying to cross Interstate 83 south near the Harrisburg Mall was on the highway because she had gotten into an argument with the driver of a car in which she was a passenger earlier that night, state police said today.

Dorothy M. Spikes was in a car traveling south on I-83 shortly before 10 p.m. when she abruptly got out of the car following an argument with the driver, Karl Schmidhamer, a state police spokesman, said.

Spikes, 47, of Harrisburg, was struck by the right front bumper of a Pontiac Grand Am driven by Randall R. Kurtz, police said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

A reader cannot tell if Karl Schmidhamer is the drive or the state police spokesman. The writer or editor should have made this clearer by writing:

Dorothy M. Spikes was in a car traveling south on I-83 shortly before 10 p.m. when she abruptly got out of the car following an argument with the driver, according to state police spokesman Karl Schmidhamer.

When writing a sentence it should be as clear as possible. Writers should be careful when using pairs of commas and dashes to add details. The point of the sentence is to inform, not cram as many facts as possible.