If you swiftly deliver the main news of the sentence, the subject and verb, then the rest of the sentence can unfurl itself less hurriedly. Christensen called this the “cumulative sentence.” In class, he gave his students a simple subject and main verb and got them to attach “free modifiers” to it. He called them this to distinguish them from bound modifiers, like adverbs and adjectives, which fit in specific slots in the sentence.
