That/Which

[cbooth at ES.COM]

Thomas Paikeday has pointed out what seems to me a pernicious habit of
journalists (or their copyeditors) - the seemingly random deletion of 'that'
complementizers (not relatives) in contexts that either would be clarified
if the complementizers were retained or (for me, anyway) are ungrammatical
without them. Some examples culled from a quick read of this week's local
stories in the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune:
"Pinder testified Valenchia was drunk and the two had scuffled."
"Officials assert the problem is widespread."
"A string of east-side residents complained the development would cause
traffic congestion."
"City staff and planning commissioners said they were concerned not enough
detailed planning had been done."
"Kirk admits the distrust is a serious problem for Hispanics."
"There is no longer a real risk given Congress changed the law several years
ago."
"They fear a large Latino population already underrepresented politically
will become even more disenfranchised."
The penultimate sentence here is unacceptable to me, and the ultimate is a
garden-path sentence that doesn't go where it seems to start going: "They
fear a large Latino population . . ."
I wonder if there's a relationship here between the copyeditor's inflexible
but poorly understood "rule" about relative "that/which" and uncertainty
about complement "that". Or maybe the influence of  a particular journalism
school or professor?
Or perhaps it's simple fear of using a word in the wrong way - if you're not
sure, just delete it. For example, sentences that require ending
prepositions but don't have them are easy to find:
"One of the properties of Unicode is that the character values are in the
order a native speaker would normally type them."
Curtis