A Final Reading from the Book of John

I have always had a tendency to be longwinded, especially in my writing.  My sentences tend to have lots of clauses so that what could have been two or three short sentences often gets crammed into one.  (In part, I blame my addiction to the semi-colon, which lets me get away with this much more than commas do.)  Below we find two sentences of particularly massive proportions.

Fielding’s ire is particularly aroused by those writers (particularly stage dramatists), who in the final act of a play will spontaneously reform characters who have hitherto been “notorious Rogues” and “abandoned Jades” with no other reason than that the end of the play is approaching (307-308).  It might be argued that Tom Jones himself is reformed over the course of the novel, but Fielding is at pains to make the transformation as gradual as possible so that although the Tom Jones of Book II and the Tom Jones of Book XVIII differ, we do not witness any shift from notorious rogue (if that title can appropriately be bestowed on Tom) to noble gentleman.  

First, there's a bone-headed comma mistake in the first sentence. I blame the parantheses for not making me notice it right away.  Second, I have a relative clause within a relative clause, which is just plain ridiculous.  The second sentence seems to be in good shape but is overly long because I've linked two theoretically independent sentences with a "so that."

Fielding’s ire is particularly aroused by those writers (particularly stage dramatists) who in the final act of a play will spontaneously reform “notorious Rogues” and “abandoned Jades," justifying it only by the approaching end of the play (307-308).  It might be argued that Tom Jones himself is reformed over the course of the novel, but Fielding is at pains to make the transformation as gradual as possible.  Although the Tom Jones of Book II and the Tom Jones of Book XVIII differ, we do not witness any shift from notorious rogue (if that title can appropriately be bestowed on Tom) to noble gentleman.  

I fixed the comma mistake and ditched the "who have hitherto been," thus turning what was a relative clause within a relative clause into a single relative clause.  In the interests of economy, I have also used a participle phrase at the end of the sentence to tighten up the structure at the end.  I've also chopped up that second sentence into two sentences, which makes it easier to digest than it would be in one big chunk.

I think that these changes make the text flow better.  In the future, I'm going to try to avoid cramming so much stuff into each individual sentence.  One major step will be breaking my addiction to semi-colons; although I didn't use any in this selection, they lead me unconsciously towards large, unwieldy sentences.  (And yes, I am well aware of the irony of using a semi-colon in a sentence about not using semi-colons.  It worked well there.)