Friday 27 November 2015

grammar - A better way to express this sentence to clarify its meaning?

The part of the sentence that seems dubious to me is:




... and in the worse it took 15 years for getting a realization about this.




The part preceding that, 'describes' and all, is completely acceptable (and could be terminated as a sentence before the 'and').



The part afterwards is wrong. Explaining why is harder than stating the fact.



One trouble is 'in the worse' is not an English idiom. I think that 'what is worse' would fit the context reasonably well.



The other trouble is 'for getting a realization about this'; that is not regular English either. Again, in the context, something like 'before people realized that this was a problem'.



Assembling these variants yields:




In this article, he describes how a choice made by three computer science legends 30 years ago produced dangerous consequences, and (what is worse) it took 15 years before people realized that this was a problem.




You might want to insert a 'that' before 'it took', though it isn't 100% necessary.

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