Revisiting that question - Emphasis

Revisiting that question Revisiting that question Write Now reader Simon Lewis joins the great that debate: Definitely one of my bugbears, that. Take this example: The teaching medical students receive also leaves them with an incomplete picture. I started interpreting this as The medical students who teach and then obviously realised [that] it was supposed to be interpreted The teaching *that* medical students receive. Im all for brevity, but not at the expense of clarity, and definitely not at the expense of causing the reader to re-start the sentence! Thanks, Simon. So it looks like there needs to be a context-specific clause added to our rule. If the that doesnt add any clarity to the sentence, as in the watch [that] my father gave me, then cutting it is fine. But if the that distinguishes the word preceding it as, for example, a noun (as it does for the word teaching in Simons example) rather than an adjective (which is how Simon interpreted the word to begin with, as a way of defining the medical students) then for goodness sake leave it in. This does, at least, reinforce the importance of another thing we stand for: proofreading!