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Performance is poor as losses have increased and are projected to remain negative going forward as the company works through problem assets and realizes related expense.

Is this sentence correct? If not, why? I couldn't find much on the internet in regards to utilizing multiple "because", multiple "as" or multiple subordinate conjunctions in general but I feel that this sentence is a bit "off".

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It's correct, but awkward and hard to follow. I'd do a quick fix by employing more parallel constructions, like this . . . "Performance is poor: losses have increased, and are projected to remain negative going forward, until the company finishes working through problem assets and realizing related expenses." – StoneyB Aug 20 '12 at 14:30

closed as general reference by MετάEd, FumbleFingers, kiamlaluno, Matt Эллен, tchrist Sep 11 '12 at 0:01

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3 Answers

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It's a grammatical sentence, but whether it's an effective one is another matter. If its purpose is to obscure what has gone on in the company, then it’s certainly successful, because its meaning isn’t clear. What presumably happened is something like this: ‘Increased losses have led to poor performance. Those losses are likely to continue until the company has sold off its unwise acquisitions.’

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up vote 1 down vote

Grammatically, it's fine. Stylistically, it's poor.

It seems like you're trying to squash too many ideas into one sentence just because you can. With so many conjunctions, and so few signposts to indicate what is conjoined with what, you make the sentence much harder to read than it needs to be.

Break it down into chunks, and add signposts to show what is referring to what. In this rewrite, the "signpost" words are marked in bold:

Performance is poor and losses have increased. The company still has problem assets to work through and has to realise expenses related to these assets, so this negative trend is projected to continue.

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I think your claim that negative losses are profits is unsound. If one takes the point of view that losses are negative or zero and profits are positive or zero, then saying "losses remain negative" is just a pompous or roundabout way of saying that losses continue. – jwpat7 Aug 21 '12 at 0:58
@jwpat7 OK. I've deleted that paragraph. – Pitarou Aug 21 '12 at 5:56
up vote 0 down vote

Performance is poor as losses have increased and are projected to remain negative going forward as the company works through problem assets and realizes related expense.

Interestingly, the first instance of as stands for 'because'; while in the second instance it means 'while'.

Therefore, it is not a case of two instances in the same sentence. However, to avoid possible ambiguity, and more importantly, to improve readability, one of them would better to replaced with its synonym: it is certainly not advisable to use a word with radically different meanings in the same sentence, other than for creative/ poetic effect.

Performance is poor because/since losses have increased and are projected to remain negative going forward while the company works through problem assets and realizes related expense.

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