Is the following sentence grammatical?
"Here’s the note which I think that he said that she wrote"
Otherwise, I suspect neither that should appear, am I right?
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1 Answer
You have quite a few options for writing this correctly. The simplest would be:
"Here's the note that I think he said she wrote."
Meaning "We were talking about this particular note, now here it is."
There's also this:
"Here's the note, which I think he said she wrote."
Meaning "We were talking about this note earlier. By the way, I believe he said this about its origins."
Ignoring the issue of the first "which" in the original sentence (which would require a comma in order to be correct), there's the matter of the additional "thats," which was the substance of your question.
It is technically an acceptable option to include them, in that it isn't breaking any formal rules. It is, however, breaking best practices. The sentence is clumsy and the extra words are unnecessary. Most writing guidelines would have you eliminate unnecessary words that add neither to the aesthetic value of the language nor the specificity of the sentence; they would definitely do so if the words in question actually subtract from the quality of the sentence, as they do in this case.
Must you remove them? No. But should you? Absolutely.
