- “…officials disagreed … but sought to manage him rather than confront him, as Mattis did, while enlisting other allies, such as the Israelis and members of Congress, to lobby Trump for a reversal.”
Wait. Who enlisted other allies? Officials? Him? Mattis?
The commas before and after “as Mattis did” … what do they tell us?
They tell us the writer was on a roll, and just kept adding phrases, assuming we were rolling too. But a reader isn’t on the writer’s roll. The reader is absorbing all this detail cold. We need each phrase to inform the previous phrase.
“As.” “While.” I officially disagree with the order to use these slippery words.
English Is A Complicated Language 