ClearTips: Stunning sentences

Slipped-in modifiers (often as asides)

Some writers put a modifier in parentheses to inject their opinion or offhandedly highlight something about what's being modified.

Two scraggly fifteen-foot palm trees in white trashcan planters have been brought in for the occasion with the (unsuccessful) idea of a festive touch.

Consider this without the parentheses or without unsuccessful. The idea of a festive touch suddenly becomes the UNSUCCESSFUL idea, with the aside far noisier than a mere modifier.

Durkheim offered an even more specific (and more dynamic) and less crystallized concept that is also a nonmaterial social fact-social currents.

Naturally, the anti-smoking ideology presumes (wrongly) that both conditions are true.

Like Chelsea [Clinton], they actually seem to like their dysfunctional parents. Unlike her, they don't know (or care) much about politics, and their main civic passions are local: jobs, families, and community.

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