One battle I have when editing people’s writing is whittling down overly complex sentences. Lucky I don’t frequently have to deal with paragraphs this ugly:
The common denominator among the bar-failers in my class at Yale Law School—and there were a few—was a complete inability to comply with senseless rules; they weren’t the best students, but they were the tartest and the sharpest people—and the least likely to accept the constraints of Big Law that make neither financial nor intellectual sense: the fifty-state survey to prove a negative, the memo to nowhere, the repetitive brief that says nothing and gets read by no one. The inefficiency of law and litigation in practice begin with the complete waste of effort that is its licensing ritual.
Really? Three dashes, a semi-colon, and a colon, and 3 commas in one sentence. That is ridiculous. It might be 100% proper, but who wants to read it?