Another main use of this construct is to permit the subject of a sentence to follow what would otherwise be its direct object. The problem with a direct sentence is that, while the sentence, "Bill is fat, but James is thin" can compare Bill and James, it does not contain the same emphases as, "The difference between Bill and James is their weight", where the emphasised word is placed closer to the beginning of the sentence, as in "difference" in the former example, which is more important than the fatness or thinness of either individual. One other advantage of this construct is its ability to emphasise the adjective, as in "The least difference between Bill and James is their weight", compared to "Bill is fat, and James is thin, but that is their least difference", which requires an additional clause to perform what the former construct achieves in only one additional word.

Finally, the most academically-valuable, most abused feature of this sentence construction is the ease with which additional prepositional phrases and noun clauses, with yet more subclauses, asides, and commentaries of various kinds, may be appended ad infinitum, so long as the writer is careful to mind the transitions into subclauses and never traverse back up the tree of clauses more than two or three levels, which tends to confuse readers, who might find it difficult to remember which is the branch to which they are returning, although Milton famously used this technique to great success in the introduction to "Paradise Lost", which employs a cascade of dependent phrases and clauses to maintain a sense of forward motion and grand historical scope in the span of divine and human doings he summarizes in the admotion to the heavenly muse found in the work's first canto.