☃️ Sentence clinic ☃️

Take a look at this sentence from an academic essay and try to figure out what needs to be fixed.

📝 Original:
"First of all, especially if you are aspiring to reduce your weight, a vegan diet consisting primarily of fruits, vegetables or grains and of dishes made from these plants, such as a lentil pasta or a spinach risotto, can be of great help."

First, the sentence starts from a specific condition "especially if," which delays the introduction of the subject. Second, the subject "vegan diet" and the verb "can be" are very far away from each other, which also makes the sentence hard to understand. Both of these can be great techniques in more creative genres because they can create suspense and thus keep the reader engaged, but in academic writing we need to know what we are reading about very soon.

But my next question is - what is the purpose of the part between the subject and the verb ("consisting primarily of fruits, vegetables or grains and of dishes made from these plants, such as a lentil pasta or a spinach risotto")? Do we expect the reader not to know what a vegan diet is? OK, we can imagine a vegan diet that consists of pasta and meat-alternatives alone, without any vegetables or fruit. Such vegan diets are possible, but they are by far not the first association that comes to mind. So I'd say if we had to explain the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy vegan diet, we should explain the latter.

Finally, we need to get rid of "you."

📝 My rewrite:
"First of all, a vegan diet offers a whole host of health benefits, especially to those who are trying to lose weight. This, however, is only true for a traditional vegan diet, one that consists primarily of vegetables, fruit, and grains or dishes made from these plants."

Now we can enjoy a smoother introduction of ideas.