Help reworking a sentence to make it less ambigious
Are there any rules governing what the "which" refers to in a sentence like this:
Every five minutes, the Node.js application posts a JSON document to my CouchDB instance which looks like:
Above, the meaning of "which" was meant to refer to the "JSON document", but I feel that people might interpret it as referring to "CouchDB instance".
I would like to retain the active voice, but feel like rewording it is awkward:
Every five minutes, the Node.js application posts a JSON document, that looks as follows, to my CouchDB instance:
UPDATE: What follows the colon is an example JSON document like:
{ foo: bar,
key: 2
}
Solution 1:
Just make it two sentences. Every five minutes, the Node.js application posts a JSON document to my CouchDB instance. The document looks like this:
{
foo: bar,
key: 2
}
Solution 2:
I'd go for
Every five minutes, the Node.js application sends the following JSON document to my CouchDB
You could also write the number 5 instead of "five". It makes a better impact, at least to me. I'd also try to make it shorter, so something like this would also work, if you are less meticulous.
Every 5 mins, the Node.js app sends the following JSON to my CouchDB