First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

by Joe Moran

I don’t count how much writing I have done each day, but if I did I wouldn’t count words, I’d count sentences.

A sentence is the largest domain over which the rules of grammar have dominion.

A sentence is a small, sealed vessel for holding meaning. It delivers some news – an assertion, command or question – about the world. Every sentence needs a subject, which is a noun or noun phrase, and a predicate, which is just the bit of the sentence that isn’t the subject and that must have a main verb. The subject is usually (but not always) what the sentence is about and the predicate is usually (but not always) what happens to the subject or what it is. This [subject] is a sentence [predicate]. A sentence must have a subject and a main verb, except when it leaves out one or both of them because their presence is implied.

When John Betjeman began a BBC radio talk with the sentence ‘We came to Looe by unimportant lanes’, he must have known it sounded better than ‘We drove to Looe via the minor roads.’ His version is ten syllables with the stress on each second syllable: a perfect iambic pentameter.

A nominalization makes a verb (or sometimes an adjective) into a noun. It turns act into action, react into reaction, interact into interaction. It gives a process a name.

A nominalization implies that a process has stayed still long enough for us to name it. It turns a live event into a sedentary thing. Scientific language sees the world like this, as a series of things to be identified and classified. It breaks up nature’s ceaseless flow into inert parts, as if it were dismantling a clock and laying out its cogs, gears, weights and springs neatly for inspection.

This noun-ridden language – stale, self-proving, sleepwalking from one big noun to the next – has become the argot of modern managerialism. To measure its staleness, count the nouns. The nouniness of a piece of writing is a sure sign of lack of care for the reader and lack of thought in the writer. For writing is not just a way of communicating; it is a way of thinking. Nouny writing relieves the writer of the need to do either.

Instead of saying that x is not working (verb and participle), they say that there has been a loss of functionality (two nouns) in x. These words are not even trying to illuminate; they are immunizing themselves against the world. The aim, even if unknown to the writer, is to bore the reader into not looking closely at the words. Instead of inviting a response, as writing should, it shuts it down.

Turn weak verb–noun phrases into verbs. Puts emphasis on: emphasizes. Gives the impression: suggests. Draws attention to: notes. Turn other parts of speech into verbs. Verbs born of adjectives – we dim lights, tame hair, muddy prose – can be especially cinematic.

drive. A neat way to meet this desire is to use the mediopassive instead. The mediopassive looks like an active clause, but the subject is really the object, so it shows an action without an actor. This sentence reads well. English can use the mediopassive because it does not need to mark an active agent – unlike, say, French, which needs a reflexive pronoun. The mediopassive has grown in use over the past century, especially in ad copy, because it brings inert things to life. This butter melts on the tongue. This car handles like a dream.

The passive may be less vigorous than the active, but it may also be more truthful. A sentence should feel alive, but not stupidly hyperactive. We live a lot in the passive voice, since reality is an authorless poem being written without our help.

An adjective and preposition added to is means wasted words, ones that can be saved with stronger verbs. Is applicable to: applies to. Is indicative of: indicates. Is able to: can. To be goes with nouny writing. When you bury a verb in a nominalization, a weak verb like to be often follows it. An action with a strong verb (Rutherford split the atom) becomes a static noun phrase (Rutherford’s splitting of the atom), which then needs a weak verb like was, or maybe led to or resulted in, to solder it to the rest of the sentence.

Too much to be makes for wordy set-ups like what is crucial here is. These can sometimes give the reader a helpful running jump before the real subject arrives. But academic writing hides too often behind them. This is reflective of. It could be said to. It is evident from the data that. Nervous public speakers clear their throats before they start speaking, something every actor or singer knows not to do because it just inflames the vocal cords. There are and it is are a sort of textual throat-clearing that succeeds only in blocking the airways more. When joined to a relative pronoun like who or that, they can always be cut. There are three poets who have given drunken readings at our college. Three poets have given drunken readings at our college. Some writers, in an effort to paper over the problem with informality, turn it is into it’s. The only cure is to use it is less.

A complete sentence needs at least one finite verb. A finite verb must agree with a subject and have a tense. My brain hurts. Like other finite things, a finite verb has limits. The limits are time (my brain is hurting now, but hopefully not for ever) and the subject to which it is linked (my brain hurts, no one else’s). Non-finite verbs – infinitives (the basic form of a verb, usually beginning to), participles (verbal adjectives) and gerunds (verbal nouns) – do not need a tense or need to agree with a subject. Without a subject and tense, they have lost some of the heat of finite verbs. They can also create confusion about who is doing what to whom and when – hence that common problem, the dangling participle, which comes at the start of a sentence but forgets to refer to the subject. Strolling along London Bridge, the Shard loomed above us. Another problem is that both present participles and gerunds end in -ing. If you use lots of -ing words, it may be unclear if they are participles or gerunds or some other word ending in -ing. The result is samey-sounding -ings and temporal confusion.

Verbs do not just put events in the past, present or future (tense); they say whether they are complete or ongoing (aspect). English has just two aspects: the continuous and the perfect. The continuous means that something is still happening. We are having a sword fight. The perfect means that it is all in the past. We have had a sword fight.

The past perfect (or pluperfect), a mix of tense and aspect, refers to something that occurred further into the past than some other, aforementioned past. As the past tense of the past tense, it declares something to be truly over and done with. Shifting between it and the simple past lets the writer move along the arrow of time with great control.

English has lots of tenses but, apart from the simple present and past, it needs auxiliary verbs to make them. Auxiliary verbs are the little words – do, have, will – that fine-tune other verbs. They add depth and shade but have the same drawbacks as to be, giving off low heat and stuffing sentences with repetitions. Auxiliaries accompany mealy-mouthed admissions and soft-soaping safety-speak. We do apologize for the late running of this service.

A subset of the auxiliary is the modal verb, such as might, could and shall. Put beside stronger verbs, modals let you speculate on whether something is possible, certain or even real. Academic writing, which is all about sifting fine distinctions, is thick with modal verbs. Too many modal verbs hold up the writing with non-committal mights and coulds.

sounding irresolute may also be the price we pay for honest uncertainty. Life is modal. Sometimes it helps to think of the world as slightly blurred.

We do not need to like each other, but we had best keep our less convivial impulses to ourselves. ‘The social engine is oiled,’ Sennett concluded, ‘when people do not behave too emphatically.’

The indicative mood, the standard way of saying that something has happened, is clear and the style guides prefer it.

the subjunctive also lets us say sparingly whether something that hasn’t happened is possible, desirable, necessary or real. Modal verbs do this as well, but the subjunctive calls up this alternative reality with elegant brevity, without always needing an auxiliary verb or a relative clause. The word lest is sometimes thought fussy, but lest he get upset is less fussy than so that he doesn’t get upset. The subjunctive adds a layer of conjecture to a sentence without weighing it down. It makes the possible seem plausible. Too many modal coulds and mights leave writing sounding fuzzy. The subjunctive sounds clear and sure.

Nouns and verbs are the two poles of the sentence. Nouns keep it still; verbs make it move. But nouns and verbs also live on a continuum. At one end, the nouniest nouns are the nominalizations, the names for abstract, inert things. At the other end, the verbiest verbs are finite and transitive, showing animated subjects acting on the world. In the middle, the nouny verbs mix with the verby nouns. To be is nouny because it says that something is equal to or has the quality of something else. To have is almost as nouny – its literal meaning, ‘to hold’, having long been submerged by its abstract meanings, such as ‘to relate to’ or ‘to own as a trait’. Linking verbs are nouny when they form phrases ending in nouns, like remain a mystery or make a decision. Gerunds are nouny – actual nouns, in fact, albeit ones with verbs buried inside them. Participles are verby because beneath the adjective burns the verbal heat of an action. Infinitives are nouny when they form the subject: To cry is to know that you are alive. But they are verby when they form the predicate: I started to cry. The bare infinitive (without the to) adds a one-word boost of verbiness, often at the sentence’s end. You did nothing but cry. You’d better leave. I will return. You needn’t bother.

Short words have something else going for them. A sentence has more sonic force if there are more stressed than unstressed syllables. When we speak, we stress one syllable of each word. Even polysyllabic words stress only one key syllable, so the more long words there are in a sentence, the fewer stresses it has. Hence poetic lines composed of short words are ‘long’, because with all the stresses, and the mouth-stretching vowels, they take longer to say. Not many writers bother to count the number of stressed syllables or even strive to vary the vowel sounds in their sentences. But there is an easy way to get a higher count of both: use short words.

Most competent writers know how to make every word count in a basic way, by not lazily repeating words – the most common symptom of absent-minded writing. But fewer writers notice a bigger problem: repeated sounds. The careful ones notice not just words but word kernels, the sounds that live inside words.

Cut syllables where you can. Blindfolded: blindfold. Unnecessary: needless. Begin: start. Eyesight: sight. Previously: hitherto. Genteel words suffer from syllable flab. Individual: person. Sufficient: enough. Ascertain: learn. Shape is better than structure because it has one less syllable (and no schwa), and feels more solid than structure. Let is better than allow, because it is one less syllable and does not need to be paired with to.

cutting words is also writing. We make meaning not just by adding words but by taking them away.

The plain stylist singles out two word types as especially ripe for cutting: adverbs and adjectives. These parts of speech often betray a nerviness that the point has not been made. Or they are trying to prop up a verb or noun too weak to stand up for itself, or muscle in when the verb or noun is strong enough on its own.

The worst offenders are degree adverbs, which specify to what extent a verb applies. The worst of these are mere intensifiers, like immensely or extremely. Intensifiers have been declining in use for hundreds of years. The number of verys in Jane Austen’s novels sounds absurd to modern ears until we learn to tune them out, as her contemporaries presumably did.

An adjective should make a noun more specific, or vivid, or both.

What the plain stylists really mean by scorning adjectives and adverbs is that sentences come alive through word order, not strained effect. The plain style draws its power from the sequence of the words and the way that it drives the sentence onwards to its full stop. Needless intensifiers slow that journey down.

The monks abandoned scriptio continua, put spaces between words and added the graphic marks that became punctuation.

the semicolon was a late bloomer, devised by Venetian printers only at the end of the fifteenth century. It came out of the search for a more finely attuned pause somewhere between the colon and the comma,

I do not think of semicolons as just neurotic commas; I can see they have their uses.

Colons are just as guilty: they, too, can patch up weak syntax with punctuating sticking plaster.

Sentences are getting shorter. At the start of the seventeenth century, the first great age of English prose writing, the average length of a sentence was forty-five words. This length held steady in the eighteenth century and then began to fall. In the nineteenth century it was in the thirties; now it is in the twenties.

On something else, though, readability research is clear: there is nothing wrong with long sentences per se. Average sentence length, not some arbitrary maximum, is what counts. Long sentences and long words are fine so long as they bump up against short ones.

Write a plain sentence. Spiders are loners. Then just add a phrase, and keep adding. Spiders are loners, working at night to build their webs, cross-hatched creations best seen on dewy mornings, each silken strand shining with water beads, the whole edifice flimsy enough to be destroyed by a stray human leg, and yet, in its filigree and symmetry, a thing of beauty, and also of utility, for this lone spider will spend its whole life in contact with its self-made silk – tightening its lines, slinging lassoes and awaiting its prey.

A cumulative sentence starts with the simple thing and then unwraps the more intricate things in little, manageable layers.

Appositives are nouns or noun phrases that rename the noun or noun phrase alongside them. The park bench provides solace, a moment of stillness in the stir of city life. Unlike a premodifying adjective, the appositive comes after the noun and propels the sentence forward – just as we do in speech, clarifying as we go along. Do you remember that guy, the one we saw in the cafe with the man bun and the neck tattoos? On the surface the appositive is just renaming the noun, but underneath it is refining, adding texture and telling a little story, like an elongated adjective.

Sometimes the shift between a main and a relative clause is too abrupt. I finally faced my dread of the email inbox that had lived with me since the weekend. An appositive smooths it out, providing a little bridge from the clause to the phrase, so that is not doing all the heavy lifting. I finally faced my dread of the email inbox, a tight knot of fear that had lived with me since the weekend.

A trickier modifier to master, but even more flexible, is the absolute – from the Latin absolūtus, meaning ‘free and unconstrained’. The absolute combines a noun phrase with a participial phrase and stands syntactically apart from the rest of the sentence, linked only by that thinnest of threads, a comma. I gaze at the dead leaves, their yellow-brown mulch littering the gutters. Absolutes are useful for doing away with weak linking verbs and conjunctions. My work for the day was done and I raided the fridge. My work for the day done, I raided the fridge.

The longer the sentence, the more crucial the commas.

The problem with the comma splice is simple, it is not emphatic enough to join two independent clauses like this. The comma splice sounds wrong because it marks off part of the sentence (The problem with the comma splice is simple) that should end with a stress. A comma can’t create stress, because it has so many possible roles that we have to read beyond it to work out what it is doing there. A comma says, simply, ‘read on’. It hurries us forward into what follows.

habitual comma-splicers can’t tell the difference between a clause and a phrase. A clause needs a subject and a main verb, and can form a sentence as long as it is not subordinate to another clause. A phrase cannot form a sentence on its own but can, if linked to a main clause, extend one.

Overused, though, brackets and dashes can make writing feel as if it is permanently interrupting itself.

Ending your sentence with a list of three also lands it well. For neurologically vague reasons, the human mind is fond of framing reality thus.

Have faith in the reader. Do not underestimate her ability to assume an innate unity in a group of sentences and to follow unaided the unfolding thought. Where she needs help, light connectives such as yet, so and still will link up thoughts just as well as heavier ones like however, therefore and nevertheless. What’s more and then again do the same job as in addition and on the other hand but with fewer syllables.

Flow should feel natural but almost never is.

A good trick, when drafting a piece, is to press enter after every sentence, as if you were writing a poem and each full stop marked a line break. This renders the varied (or unvaried) lengths of your sentences instantly visible.