Re: What does the sentence mean?

"Bill Bonde ( the oblique allusion in lieu of the frontal attack )" 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 18 Nov 2003: 

> 
> 
> CyberCypher wrote:
>> 
>> John  Ings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 15 Nov 2003:
>> 
>> > On 15 Nov 2003 06:26:28 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Liu Ju)
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >>Yellow fever, the disease that killed 4,000 philadelphians in
>> >>1793, and so decimated Memphis, Tennessee, that the city lost
>> >>its charter, has reappeared after nearly two decades, in
>> >>abeyance in the Western Hemisphere.
>> >
>> > To start with, that sentence is very badly punctuated. I will
>> > defer to those more knowledgable than I who may comment, but I
>> > would write it this way:
>> >
>> > "Yellow fever (the disease that killed 4,000 philadelphians in
>> > 1793, and so decimated Memphis Tennessee that the city lost its
>> > charter) has reappeared after nearly two decades  in abeyance
>> > in the Western Hemisphere.
>> 
>> "Yellow fever (the disease that killed 4,000 Philadelphians in
>> 1793, and so decimated Memphis, Tennessee, that the city lost its
>> charter) has reappeared after nearly two decades in abeyance in
>> the western hemisphere" is required: capital "P", commas setting
>> off "Tennessee", and no caps on "western hemisphere". Em-dashes
>> could also be used instead of the parentheses, but I agree that
>> commas make it too difficult to read.
>> 
> This is that multiple levels of comma thing that I've been
> agitating for for years. I would not use parentheses and only use
> dashes rarely when the comment is truly outside of the subject of
> the sentence, a completely wild interjection of other comment.
> Below that is clearly not the case.
> 
> #begin modified quote
> Yellow fever, the disease that killed 4,000 Philadelphia's in
> 1793 and so decimated Memphis, Tennessee that the city lost its
> charter, has reappeared after nearly two decades in abeyance in
> the Western Hemisphere.
> #end modified quote
> 
> I would argue for the above punctuation. In a complex sentence,
> leave out any commas you can afford to go without. This ain't
> German! 

I cannot omit the comma after "Tennessee", but I can drop the one in 
"4,000"; scientific writing tends to drop commas for 4-6-digit 
numbers, so "4000" looks perfectly normal to me: I'm a medical editor 
when I'm not teaching EFL, and I have no problem reading or writing 
Germanic sentences and using as much punctuation as possible, but I 
don't think it's very easy on one's readers.

I think the sentence is too packed with information. It's bad 
journalistic writing for two reasons, IMHO. 

First, it's too long. It has 33 words, and readability statistics 
suggest that 22 words is the longest sentence that is easily 
readable. 

Second, it delays the main point of the sentence until a secondary 
historical point is made. The most important information in the 
sentence is that yellow fever is back. What it did to Philadelphians 
in 1793 is secondary and the kind of background stuff that newspapers 
ought to save for paragraph 2.

If this came from Time or Newsweek, or some other news magazine, then 
it's understandable why it's so long and complex.