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The need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state, such as foreign policy (and that could bind all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements rather than be undermined by a single state's refusal to agree to an international treaty) led to the stronger federal government that was negotiated at the Convention.
We might choose to isolate the following sequence of ideas in this sentence, although there are several other ways of locating the boundaries that would be just as useful in disentangling this complex web:
The delegates identified the need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state. In particular, they saw federal control of foreign policy as a way of binding all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements; until then, foreign policy was frequently undermined by a single state's refusal to agree to an international treaty. This led to the negotiation of a stronger federal government at the Convention.▼
<font color=green>The need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state</font color>, <font color=brown>such as foreign policy (and that could bind all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements<font color=blue> rather than be undermined by a single state's refusal to agree to an international treaty) <font color=purple>led to the stronger federal government that was negotiated at the Convention</font color>.
Each of these ideas could form a single sentence; since the middle two run are particularly close, we could separate them by a semicolon rather than a full-stop. We'll need to carefully change the grammar so that each sentence—including the two segments either side of the semicolon—is a stand-alone sentence. The four ideas are coloured as above, and the extra bits that we've added—either through simple deduction from the context (e.g., "the delegates identified") or to make them fit together grammatically (e.g., "In particular" and "This", which both link to the previous clause)—are in black.
▲The delegates identified <font color=green>the need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state</font color>. In particular, they saw federal control of <font color=brown>foreign policy as a way of binding all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements</font color>; until then, <font color=brown>foreign policy
We started with one sentence of 64 words. We've transformed this into three sentences (four if you count the semicolon in the middle), that is slightly longer in total: 77 words: 23 + 23 + 18 + 13. The new structure is much easier to read, even though it's longer.
===Exercise 3: commas===
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