Revising with Williams

I chose to revise this sentence with Williams’ suggestions:

Original: Basic undergraduate degrees conferred by the Board of Regents on recommendation of the president and faculty are the bachelor of science (B.S.) and the bachelor of arts (B.A.) degrees, described fully in the introduction to the College of Arts and Sciences.

Revised: The Board of Regents confer that the basic undergraduate degrees are the bachelor of science and the bachelor of arts.  The degrees are fully described in the College of Art and Sciences introduction.

This revision was difficult, because as we see in Williams Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, there are many ways we can go about making this a little clear to the student.  On it’s own, I could not understand this sentence and had to read it more than once before I finally decided that this sentence fits Williams’ description of bad writing.  I thought that if you are trying to inform students on what degrees are, this is NOT the way to start off.

I felt that if I could just reword the sentence first, then I can think of the rules later, and go from there.  My first thought was how could I make this sentence coherent to a student?  I wanted to know whether I could use passive or active voice and thought that the passive was more appropriate.  Williams gives advice on how to choose between passive and active, so after much deliberation on his examples, I settled on using an active voice, maintaining the Board of Regents as the subject.

I noticed that nominalization fits here as well.  The sentence was long and incoherent, and I felt it should be broken apart into two sentences to make it easier on the reader.  In this case, nominalization, which is the subject referring to a previous sentence worked perfectly for what I was trying to do.

As you can see I dropped the bit about the president and faculty recommending the Board of Regents to discuss the basic degrees.  I’m thinking to drop this necessary statement.