English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
From addicted2succces.com the following sentence reads awkwardly in my :opinion
He quickly noticed that all of the other friends he had hated hard work and had no desire to improve themselves.
When I first read it, I thought it meant the person had hated his friends, but then I realized the intended meaning is that all but one of his friends hated hard work. In situations like this, how can the meaning be made clearer without rewriting the entire sentence?
I would replace the "he had" with "his" :
He quickly noticed that all his other friends hated hard work and had no desire to improve themselves.
The "his" eliminates the relative clause that makes this sentence difficult to parse.
