Improving readability and comprehensibility of sentences in which a relative clause separates the subject and predicate

Solution 1:

The general case

As the question asks how to “bring more readability and structure” into sentences, I think it valid to point out a few consideration that, although not always are in many cases.

• A long sentence may be difficult to understand because it contains too many concepts. The solution is often to separate these concepts into two separate sentences.
• It may be difficult to find a solution to a problem because one is convinced that it should be possible within a particular chosen structure (in this case a clause starting with a relative pronoun, and the use of infinitive phrase). The answer is often to abandon this structure in favour of a more flexible alternative.
• Is word order causing problems? The flexibility of English is such that the key concepts in a sentence can appear in different relative positions which affect naturalness of speech, emphasis, and association of the concepts. Identify which is most important in a particular case and see if changing the order improves things.

The specific case

In my view, the sentence in question suffers from all three of these problems, although the abstract nature of the example makes me unsure whether one of these can be remedied. Let me try.

• I think one problem is the infinitive structure for the subject of the basic idea: “To incorporate A… is important”.

I suspect a wish to place A at the start of the sentence, but this creates a straight-jacket of complexity and an unnatural word order (although unfortunately common in academic and technical areas). Clearer (and nearer to what your mother might say) is:

It is important to incorporate…

• The second problem, in my opinion, is that the clause in apposition to A separates it from D and E, the ideas with which it is conceptually associated.

To deal with this, while still retaining the apositional clause, I would sacrifice placing concept A at the start by changing the word order to:

Because of E, it is important for D to incorporate A…

which is still clear, and place the appositional clause in parentheses, replacing the current paretheses by an em-dash (or a comma):

…(which can be seen as B with something of C — c.f. Sect. X).

This would probably work without the standard solution of splitting the sentence into two, although doing so would allow a more natural word order. Without a concrete example from the poster I am unclear what is actually meant, but perhaps something like the following is possible:

It is important for D to incorporate A, because of E. (A can, in fact, be seen as B with something of C — c.f. Sect. X.)

or perhaps what the poster was after was something like:

Because of E, it is important for D to incorporate A — not B or C. (A can, in fact, be seen as B with something of C — c.f. Sect. X.)

Solution 2:

David wrote "The first problem is that the sentence is too long, in which case the solution is generally to split it in two."

Here is one way:

A can be seen as B with something of C (cf. Sect. X). To incorporate A is important for D because of E.

This entails repeating A, but the context will probably allow you to replace the second A with a shorter phrase while still keeping it clear what you are referring to. For example

The procedure of A1 can be seen .... To incorporate this procedure is ....

Splitting the original sentence into two like this don't stop you from doing what David said in his second bullet point.