stacking

Definition:

The piling up of modifiers before a noun. Because clarity may be sacrificed for conciseness, stacked modifiers are generally considered a fault, especially in technical writing.

Examples and Observations:

• Stacked modifiers are strings of modifiers preceding nouns that make writing unclear and difficult to read.
  • Your staffing-level authorization reassessment plan should result in a major improvement.
  The noun plan is preceded by three long modifiers, a string that forces the reader to slow down to interpret its meaning. Stacked modifiers are often the result of an overuse of buzzwords or jargon. See how breaking up the stacked modifiers makes the example easier to read:
  • Your plan for reassessing the staffing-level authorizations should result in a major improvement.
  (Gerald J. Alred, Charles T. Brusaw, and Walter E. Oliu, Handbook of Technical Writing, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006)



• Be careful of stacked modifiers (adjectives and adverbs). . . . Be especially careful of cases in which the first descriptor could modify either the second descriptor or the noun. For example, what exactly is a "buried cable engineer"? (And how does one breathe?)
  (Edmond H. Weiss, 100 Writing Remedies, Greenwood, 1990)



• Stacked phrases range all the way from supposedly simple combinations like "the then district attorney" to complex combinations like "the Halloween-night multiple-gunshot killing of a 30-year-old woman."
  
  The "then district attorney" is presumably a person who was district attorney at that time, and the murder must have occurred on Halloween night when someone shot a 30-year-old woman several times. . . .
  
  Newswriters who adopt this technique sacrifice clarity and may not save time. . . . Concise prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses are usually more neutral.
  (R.K. Ravindran, Handbook of Radio, TV and Broadcast Journalism, Anmol, 2007)

Also Known As: stacked modifiers, jammed modifiers, long adjectival phrase