This is a pretty minor inconvenience and a nitpick, but i just felt needed to get it off my head by writing it out loud.

Just sometimes, the ruling on cards is not very well structured, in regards to game flow and user experience. There have been several instances, but one stood out as unnecesarily convoluted: Snubnose Revolver.
"You may deal 1 damage to a monster in your space when you forfeit an action while evading a monster". Whoa. Why not make it simpler?

"While evading a monster, when you forfeit an action, you may deal 1 damage to a monster in your space". The structure then becomes this: Most significant condition first, least significant condition thereafter, then freedom of choice clause, then effect.

Which mean you can quickly decode if the effect of the card is valid for your current situation. Because the most significant condition comes first, you have a quick reference to whether the rest could be ignored or should be read. It is a device that makes the gameplay that bit less clunky/more lightweight and fluent. Finding all these little tricks like this and using them consistently can help an ever-growing game have less of a sum of "unnecessary interfacing". This card alone is of course a trickle, but all trickles add up to something in the total experience. My hope is that all future expansion cards and mythos events will follow this structure.

Some other examples (probably not all-encompassing) which weren't optimal in the past:
The axe:
"You may suffer 2 facedown Horror to convert all [Clue] to [Elder Sign] while attacking with this card". Had been easier to follow if
"While attacking with this card, you may suffer 2 facedown Horror to convert all [Clue] to [Elder Sign].

Same goes for Meat Cleaver.

Holy cross, while short enough to pass as easy/quick to decode, is written "Roll 1 additional die while resolving a [Will]" but should for the sake of consistency be "While resolving a [Will] test, roll 1 additional die". Pocket watch is like this, too.

In conclusion, the preferable formula is:
-Condition/Cause/Case if any,
-freedom of choice if any ("may"),
-cost if any,
-Effect.
-Post-effect (for example "then discard this card").

Most other item cards ( gambling dice , all action-requisite cards, etc) already follows the preferable formula, so it'd be more consistent if future cards would too.

Fully agree that a clear and consistent sentence structure really does improve gameplay, but it must also be said that FFG (at least from my experiences playing x-wing) are already rather good at this compared to most other game developers.

I mean, going from being a primarily GW tt games player to playing board games from many developers in general, FFG in particular sticks out because the logical structure behind their rules can often be understood by a casual reading of the rule text. Just compare with say w40k, the FAQ answers can often be stuff that was almost impossible to understand by reading, you had to try and understand the intent rather than the written text to figure out the correct answer. And in many cases, that can be the precise issue, that the rules-as-written produce odd results, and so someone asks, and then the answer is: "The rule as written wasn't the rule we intended! We meant to write something else!"

That seldom happens with FFG so two thumbs up from me for that.

Yeah, it's not as much a complaint as a wish for posterity; as we kind of know the game will grow in complexity with each expansion, i just thought every bit (however little) to make the total experience of handling game components leaner might help. Also, finding things like this to nag about is almost a "work related injury". It's basically in my job description to make interactive systems easy especially for first-time and one-time users, so my eyes are involuntarily set on such points of interest.

I think GW games (at least back when i was a teen; i don't know how things are today) had a reputation of having bulky and ambiguous rules/ruling. I only play the base set of x-wing as a quick pastime over a cup of coffee, a bit like chess, but i'd imagine the ruling on cards would need to be very clear for competetive/tournament play, especially as the game grows (hence the relatively frequent rules updates?).

I think i'm comparing a bit to the Magic the Gathering "heydays", back when they hadn't encoded just about everything as keywords but still had sorted out all the ambiguities that could be found in the earlier editions. Their extensive keywording practice probably helps out a lot in tournaments, but for casual gameplay, writing it out clear but bound to a certain structure helped new players join in quickly which made it a good cafeteria game / less intimidating to try, even for its relative complexity.

I agree that the wording is clunky and could be refined, but I think the main reason for the way that they do word it is for ease of translation to foreign languages. If they keep the same sentence structure, they never have to worry about something getting lost in translation somewhere along the line. Just a theory though.

I don't think that's the case, actually, because sentences on cards are structured in different ways already, from one to another. I think the current philosophy is something like balancing between "straight, spoken english", "clear rules english" and "logic flowchart english" on a case for case basis. If those terms make sense...