Use parallel structure to remove ambiguity.

I regularly read Thy Will Be Done for spiritual inspiration. Today that wonderful blog also provided a little writing lesson. Today’s post included this sentence:

We might accept the Savior as the one who helps, but we’re afraid to mention his name and remain silent.

That last clause, “remain silent,” is ambiguous, or at least can cause a miscue. Does it mean that we remain silent, or that we’re afraid to remain silent? From the context, we can figure out that the former is what the writer means. But for expository prose, a sentence that can be figured out isn’t as good as a sentence that doesn’t need figuring out. To eliminate the need to figure out this sentence, we need to add only one word and one punctuation mark:

We might accept the Savior as the one who helps, but we’re afraid to mention his name, and we remain silent.

Notice what we’re doing here. We use parallel structure to put “remain silent” on the same level as “are afraid.”

Comments

[Stephen R. Diamond]

Without endorsing the following alternative (yours is better), I think a smaller change would disambiguate the sentence:

"We might accept the Savior as the one who helps, but we're afraid to mention his name[,] and remain silent."

This version doesn't have parallel structure, but it does make clear that we aren't afraid to remain silent. (The parallel structure is desirable, but I don't think it performs the actual work of disambiguation, which the comma actually performs.)