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I have to change a description for something in our app, and I was given this sentence:

Create, edit and delete camera assignments and camera and DVR settings.

Now the lack of an Oxford comma is obviously going to need to be updated, but I'm having some trouble with the subject of the sentence. camera assignments is one subject, but camera and DVR settings seems to be another, compounded from camera settings and DVR settings.

So far my fix for it would be:

Create, edit, and delete camera assignments, camera settings, and DVR settings.

Is this sentence grammatically correct? It still seems like a repetitive mouthful. Could something be done with camera assignments and camera settings (both being a property of a camera) to compound this more neatly?

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  • You're communicating a lot of information in a single sentence, so there will be bound to be a trade-off between clarity and conciseness. I wouldn't worry about the style of your fix; it works.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 22:18

2 Answers 2

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What you've written is correct. "Camera assignments, camera settings and DVR settings" are objects of "Create, edit and delete."

You need the qualification on settings because you have both camera settings and DVR settings.

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Perhaps you could re-word the sentence for clarity; I might use something like this:

You can create, edit, and delete various settings [including|such as] camera assignments and settings for both the camera and DVR.

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  • That's a good suggestion, but the sentence is a subheading to a link. The link itself is the subject and the subheading is a fragment describing what can generally be done there, so I don't think the second person POV would fit.
    – joh04667
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 19:12
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    How about: Create, edit, and delete camera and DVR settings as well as camera assignments? But, if you really just want a fragment, your fix is a good one.
    – Roger Sinasohn
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 19:33

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