| Repeating the clause can be useful, but I don’t think it should be used as a general rule. Avoiding ambiguity does not mean forcing repetition and making dull prose. Example: > The foo program is running on the bar server. Who is in charge of the latter? Though in general that¹ is still weak. Depending on the surrounding context (which isn’t present in your comment) and the main idea, a possibly better example: > Who is in charge of the bar server running the foo program? Without a real use case, we could spend days discussing what is “better”. Though yes, removing “that” can improve the text, thought that² doesn’t mean you need to replace it with anything. Let’s take the first paragraph in the article: > Writing a technical document is surprisingly hard. That is not because of the skill to tell a story. It’s because writing forces a level of clarity that is easy to gloss over while thinking through a topic. An alternative without any “that”: > Writing a technical document is surprisingly hard. Not because of the skill required to tell a story, but because writing forces a level of clarity otherwise easy to gloss over while thinking through a topic. ¹ I don’t think there’s any ambiguity the “that” is referring to the previous sentence. ² I don’t think there’s any ambiguity the “that” is referring to improving the text. |
¹ ;)