Gaining control over your contract verb structures requires that you be familiar with “throat-clearing.”
What’s throat-clearing? It’s when a drafter sticks a redundant verb structure at the beginning of a sentence. As my gift to you, here’s part of the MSCD section on throat-clearing.
The reason for this post is that recently I realized you can have throat-clearing that uses abstract nouns instead of relying solely on verbs.
Here’s one example, with the throat-clearing (using the abstract noun intention) highlighted:
And here’s another that uses the abstract noun agreement:
It’s best to recognize the different forms of throat-clearing, so you can delete it from your drafts and from the other side’s drafts. Because it’s redundant, throat-clearing wastes time and brain cells. And it can also cause confusion. I say the heck with it.
(If you want more about throat-clearing, see this 2019 blog post and this 2020 blog post. And if you want to know why in my training I sporadically declaim, “Abstract nouns bad, verbs good!,” see this 2021 blog post.)
