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?"

My first blog entry on English Club, so I had better introduce myself.

I am Australian born, so my native language is English - if you can call what they speak down here "English".  However, my mother was English (as in "from England"), and my father's parents were British (Scottish and Welsh).

I joined the English Club because I have a huge interest in languages in general, and English particularly - because of its extremely diverse origins.  I speak "school-boy" German, understand quite a lot of spoken German but can read most German newspaper articles without having to go to Google Translate.  I have recently had to pick up my French a bit, as I sometime visit New Caledonia.  I also understand and speak tiny amounts of Japanese, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

One of the real eye-openers to me with my English was being able to spend several days with a translator in Brazil.  His English was better than any other person I had ever met, and English was only one of the languages that he had learned subsequent to his native Portuguese.  That was in 2005, and I have frequently thought about the quality of my own speech since then.

Last night, while walking my mother's dog, I encountered an English subtlety that I thought just had to be shared.

When I returned home with my mother's dog, it started sniffing intently under the back of my caravan.  A few days earlier, I had allowed my dog to sniff around, and it too had sniffed intently at the same location.

That prompted me to comment, "Yes, my boy found something interesting there too."

I then realised that the statement was ambiguous, and that the strongest meaning was not what I meant.  I restated it.

"Yes, my boy found something there interesting too."

I immediately thought about how difficult it would be for me to state the implied difference in German, and for a non-native English speaker to understand that there was a difference.