While reviewing some notes about software changes, I found the following phrase.
Modified SELECT statement used to obtain next mail message to send to condition on not being complete.
I found myself confused when I reached the "message to send to..." part of the sentence - I had to "re-parse" the sentence from the start before I was able to understand it.
The problem was that "to send to" wanted to stick together as a group of words, as in the following sentence.
I have a letter to send to Julie.
However, the "to send" was intended to be grouped with the previous word.
I realised that the meaning of the sentence would have been clearer is I had written the sentence as follows.
Modified SELECT statement used to obtain next mail-message-to-send to condition on not being complete.
The whole group of words "mail message to send" was intended to be read as an entity, but my familiarity with "to send to" had caused me to try parsing it incorrectly.
Given that I am a native English speaker, I figured that this sentence would be exceptionally difficult for a non-native English speaker to understand.
The big question in my mind is though, "Was this the correct way to indicate the word grouping?" I guess the fundamental question that I am asking is "What is the correct way of indicating word grouping in a written sentence that would otherwise be difficult to understand?"
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