The Captain’s Log

Consider This Sentence

The following sentence occurs in The Guardian on Apple News. “The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said that Washington is expecting a response from Iran to its proposals for an interim deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, as Iran accused the US of breaching the increasingly fragile ceasefire announced last month.”

Secretary of State is an official title and should be capitalized.

The progressive verb is expecting can be reduced to expects.

The mechanical antecedent of its is Iran not Washington.

The phrase the conflict in the Middle East is insincere generalization. The accurate phrase is the war with Iran.

The present perfect verb has said can be replaced with the past tense said.

If we ditch the definite article that begins the sentence, the commas can be removed that make Marco Rubio appositive. The subject of the sentence then becomes US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Journalists use as as a coordinating conjunction but as is a subordinating conjunction. The subordinate clause modifies the main clause. We should only precede as with a comma when the subordinate clause modifies an entity that is not the immediate predecessor in the sentence.

I am not convinced that the subordinate clause belongs in the summary sentence. I will remove the clause, and include some contextual information from other sources.

Presumably an interim deal is a basic deal with details to be determined subsequently. The interim nature of the deal does not need to be mentioned in the summary sentence.

My rewrite: “On Friday, while in Rome for talks with the Vatican and Italian governments, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Washington expects Iran’s response to a proposed deal to end their war, ‘in the coming hours.’”

Bogus

The adjective bogus means fake. The etymology of the term is a matter of speculation.

“Potential risk,”

is redundant. All risks are potential outcomes.

Liminal

The adjective liminal describes a feature that is a threshold or a border, or liminal describes a state that is transitional between other states. Liminal derives from the Latin limen, which meant threshold, doorstep, lintel, entrance, or beginning. The noun phrase the liminal names that which occupies the borderland.