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Of course, there are ways to reconcile a the before an unfamiliar item. The best way is to explain immediately after the item. One of the best devices for doing this is a relative clause. Relative clauses, which we know postmodify nouns, can come soon after a word to add description or clarity to it:
Katie screamed and grabbed the diary that her mother had given her.
Ta-da! The little relative clause that her mother had given her tells the reader more than just who gave Katie the diary. It tells the Reader, "Here's your explanation. Here's what you need to know to be up to speed on this diary. Here's why you can now feel some ownership of it, why you can now think of it not as a diary but as the diary."
I realize this is a lot of rumination about one little word, but this stuff is worth thinking about. For one thing, the cuts straight to the heart of Reader-serving writing. A badly used the happens because the writer got too wrapped up in what she was trying to say and forgot to be sensitive to the person she was saying it to.
And if you doubt that the has unique importance, consider this: It's the only word in the English language that is its own part of speech. It's in a category all its own.
The is called the definite article. It's distinct from a and an, which are called indefinite articles, and it's distinct from this and these, which are called demonstratives.
The stands alone.
So, now that I've thoroughly slammed using the to refer to stuff heretofore unknown to the Reader, how can we explain an all-too-common use of the like the one found in the very first sentence of the novel Travels in the Scriptorium, by Paul Auster?
The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor.
Auster has not yet introduced the old man. He didn't say an old man. He didn't say there is an old man. He hasn't told us there exists an old man, or a bed or a floor either, for that matter. This is the first sentence of the whole novel. The the suggests that we've already been introduced to the character and his surroundings, even though we have not. Yet it simply does not have the power to irk the Reader the way our diary did. What's up with that?
Simple. It's the flip side of the same coin. If the suggests familiarity, then putting the in front of something so surely unfamiliar suggests that familiarity will come. It foreshadows. It teases. The Reader knows that the writer is going to explain who the old man is. The writer is asking for the Reader's trust and promising something in return. It's a great device that skillful writers use all the time. It demonstrates the power of the. And it illustrates the importance of staying attuned to your Reader.
In the title of this chapter, "The Writer and His Father Lamented His Ineptitude," it's clear that someone is inept. The problem is we don't know who. His could refer to the writer or to his father. In the context of this book, it's a safe bet that we would be more focused on the writer. So we can guess that Sonny Boy is the one being slammed in this sentence. But the grammar doesn't confirm this. So we can't be sure. The possibility remains it could be Dad whose shortcomings are being lamented.
This problem is called an unclear antecedent. At its worst, this problem can completely ruin a written work:
As the sheriff and the bandit fired their guns, a bullet pierced his heart. He fell to the ground. He was dead.
From the first sentence, we can't know whether it was the good guy or the bad guy who died. From the sentences that follow, it's clear that it will take a while for us to find out. Maybe we never will.
The passage is confusing and annoying and can be enough to make a Reader close a book or put down a manuscript forever.
Happily, these problems are easy to avoid. First, remember the lessons of our chapter on the. The Reader isn't in your head. Second, remember to pay careful attention to your pronouns—especially on the reread. This includes
• subject pronouns: I, you, he, she, it, we, they
• object pronouns: me, you, him, her, it, us, them
• possessive pronouns: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs
• possessive determiners (think of these as adjective forms of possessive pronouns): my, your, his, her, its, our, their
• relative pronouns: that, which, who, whom
Of course, the first-person forms like I and me don't pack as much danger as third-person forms like his, her, hers, their, theirs, and so on. That's because usually fewer people could be I than could be he. So there's less chance of confusion.
Don't let the term unclear antecedent intimidate you. It means exactly what it sounds like: that it's unclear which prior thing is being referred to. In Bubba lost his car keys, the word his is a possessive determiner. Its antecedent—the thing to which it refers—is Bubba. So the Reader can see that you're talking about Bubba's keys.
For pronouns like he and his, unclear antecedents are very easy to create. You know whether it was the sheriff or the bandit who got shot, you just forgot that the Reader does not. It can happen to anyone. Just be sure to catch them when you reread your work. Make it a habit to scrutinize every him, her, and so on, to be sure they're clear.
When they're not, they're easy to fix:
As the sheriff and the bandit fired their guns, a bullet pierced
his the bandit's heart. He fell to the ground. He was dead.
Notice that we left he in the last two sentences. It's clear that he is the bandit. The Reader gets that.
Of course, we can imagine scenarios in which that he might not be so clear. If the bandit got shot just two sentences after the sheriff got shot, then it may not be clear at all to your Reader which one fell to the ground. But again, see how the Reader is your guiding light? It's almost as though he is helping you. Call it paradox, call it karma, call it a variation on AA members' belief that helping others helps them stay sober. Whatever. Just remember its power.
Not all pronouns are as easy to work with as personal pronouns like he and him. Take it. Unlike pronouns that refer to specific people, the pronoun it can refer to vague things like ideas. Compare these two uses of it:
The car is parked. It is in a handicapped space.
Jenna knows math. It is why she landed this job.
It is a pronoun like any other. It stands in for a noun. In the first example, the antecedent of it is clearly the car. But in our second example, what noun, exactly, does it represent? Jenna? Nope. Math? Nope. That leaves just knows, but that's a conjugated verb—an action under way. How can a pronoun refer to a verb? Easy: if, in the writer's head, it stands in for knowing, then that's what it means. The antecedent is implied. It could be the gerund knowing, as in, Knowing math is why Jenna landed this job. It could be an implied noun like
The fact that Jenna knows math is why she landed the job or Jenna's knowledge of math is why she landed the job.
That and which are two other pronouns that create problems:
I went to the movies with my daughter, and though we were late, we caught most of the new Woody Allen movie. That's what life is all about.
What is what life is all about? Spending time with your daughter? Being late? Grabbing what you can out of a bad situation? Woody Allen? The slice of life created by combining all these elements? The writer should be clearer:
This isn't wrong per se, but it causes me to do a double take. The audiovisual industry is what? It takes a moment to realize that the writer omitted part of the second sentence. The industry is among the fields. There's nothing wrong with leaving things implied
as long as the implication is clear and doesn't make your Reader stumble:
Kelly is crazy. Ryan is, too.
Implications only work if the Reader gets them. We don't say what Ryan is. We leave it implied. Yet it's perfectly clear. He's crazy.
When I look at the prior example about health care and education, what's most interesting to me is how the writer set herself up for trouble. Had she aimed for something less wordy than that whole are among the structure, the sentence would have been clear.
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Whenever you use a pronoun or leave a noun merely implied, just be sure it's clear what you're talking about. If there's any doubt, say outright whatever you had wanted to imply. Returning to an earlier example:
A lot of writers avoid stuff like this because they worry it sounds redundant. By all means, if you can find alternative wording you like, use it:
heart. He fell to the ground, spilling his bottle of Guinness. He was dead as the corpse in Finnegans Wake. There'd be no pot of gold at the end of his rainbow—no sweet bowl of Lucky Charms with its yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers.
You get the idea.
Pick any wording you choose. But when you can find no synonyms or other embellishments to point squarely at your antecedent, repetitiveness is better than chaos. It's better to repeat the word bandit than to refuse to tell your Reader which one of your pivotal characters met his demise.
Sammy's Grill is open daily for lunch and dinner and Sunday brunch.
Sunday brunch daily? Awesome.
Roger praised the band's vocalist, bassist, drummer, keyboard, and guitar players.
That was sweet of Roger to praise the keyboard.
Relax in the lounge, the sauna, or by the pool.
Why just relax in the pool or by the pool when you can relax in by the pool?
She was awarded a national book award in fiction as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
I wonder which prize finalist they gave her and what she did with him.
These are all real faulty parallels by real writers who were getting paid real money. They prove that parallels can be tricky. So it's worth taking a minute to master them.
Parallel form relies on Reader expectations. When Readers see something in list form, they expect it to be a list:
Pablo has visited Maine, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New Jersey.
When you include an element that doesn't work like the others, you betray those expectations:
Pablo has visited Maine, Idaho, Pennsylvania, loves Georgia, and New Jersey.
Parallels can be lists of words, phrases, or whole clauses. Each element should be in the same form and should attach in the same way to any shared phrase or clause. Look at this example:
This car runs fast, lasts long, requires little maintenance, and holds its value.
The shared element is this car. Each of the listed items is a verb phrase that, on its own, can make this car a complete sentence. They all attach to this car in the same way. That would not work if one of the items was not a verb phrase, like well in this example:
This car runs fast, well, lasts long, requires little maintenance, and holds its value.
Our structure suggests we meant, This car runs fast, runs well, runs lasts long, runs requires little maintenance, and runs holds its value. But that's not what we meant at all.
There are several ways to fix faulty parallels. You can add bits to the parallel items until they're equals:
This car runs fast, runs well, lasts long, requires little maintenance, and holds its value.
Or you can break up the sentence in a way that signals that the list has ended:
This car runs fast, well, and long, and it requires little maintenance and holds its value.
Parallels don't have to be faulty to be jarring:
I was entertained by the decor, as well as the live piano music.
You could argue that entertained by applies to both the listed items. But it would be clearer if you repeated the by.
I was entertained by the decor, as well as toy the live piano music.
Every parallel poses its own unique dangers. There's no simple formula for getting it right every time. All you can do is proceed with caution and remember the Reader.
If you've come to this chapter looking for a balanced and reasonable discussion of semicolons and parentheses, keep looking. You'll find no balance here. I hate semicolons. I hate them so much that, even though I admit that they can be useful—lifesavers even—I'm comfortable saying that I hate them. I hate parentheses almost as much. They, too, have their place. In fact, I use them. As a Reader, I sometimes enjoy the effect they can create. Yet these reasonable observations don't mean I'm reasonable on the subject. I've seen too many writers abuse these punctuation marks too many times. I can't let go. I won't.
I suppose this is the very nature of prejudice—isolated bad experiences leading to broad and unfair overgeneralizations. But here we are, with me outright hating semicolons and parentheses even as I prepare to discuss them in terms that I hope will let you draw your own conclusions.
We'll start with an open airing of my biases:
1. Semicolons often serve no purpose other than to show off that the writer knows how to use semicolons.
2. Parentheses often let a writer cram in information she was too lazy to explain in a more Reader-friendly manner.
Aah. Feels good to get that off my chest. Now we can take a more academic approach.
Semicolons have two main jobs. First, they help manage unwieldy lists. Second, they separate two closely related clauses that could stand on their own as sentences. This first job doesn't bother me so much. That's because, sometimes, this semicolon really is a Reader-serving punctuation mark:
Brad visited Pasadena, California; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Sarasota, Florida; and Boulder, Colorado.
These semicolons separate items that contain commas within them. The semicolons work like ubercommas. Try replacing them with plain-old commas and you can see that they're crucial for making sense of this sentence. Without the semicolons, Pasadena, California, Cheyenne, and Wyoming would be equally weighted. If this sentence were read aloud, these words would be read in the same tone and with identical emphasis. The semicolons allow us to clearly see the groupings within our list—that is, that Pasadena and California make up one thing and are not two things.
And that's the last nice thing you'll hear me say about semicolons.
This function of the semicolon, while crucial in some situations, gets abused. That is, it gives writers an excuse—nay, an incentive— to write obnoxious sentences:
He wanted to visit Brooklyn, New York; Queens, New York; and Schenectady, New York, and he had already invited his cousin, Pete; his mother's next-door neighbor, Rob; and the neighborhood dog, a terrier, to join him.
This writer is too enamored of her semicolons. She uses them at the expense of her sentence. She would be better off using none.
He wanted to visit Brooklyn, Queens, and Schenectady. He had already invited his cousin, Pete, his next-door neighbor, Rob, and a local terrier to join him.
The second job of the semicolon is worse. This is from an article about spas that I copyedited:
"Now shower; and your skin will feel like silk," she told me.
Allow me to translate: "Look at me! I can use semicolons!"
This semicolon, used to separate two independent clauses, is perfectly legitimate. But independent clauses, by definition, can stand alone. So why wouldn't the writer let them do so? She could have used a comma. She could have made these two sentences. Or she could have used nothing.
Such semicolons are often justified, but they're never necessary— except for showing Readers that you know how to use them. It's the height of writer-serving writing and the root of my prejudice against semicolons.
I try to keep my prejudice in check. If I come across something like this, I leave it:
Holly hadn't had a drink for weeks; she wanted one badly.
If the writer believes that these independent clauses are so closely-linked that they belong in the same sentence, it's not my place as a copy editor to disagree. But when I'm the writer, I just separate the sentences.
Other, more reasonable experts also dislike semicolons: "The semicolon is an ugly bastard, and thus I tend to avoid it," writes Washington Post business copy desk chief Bill Walsh in the book Lapsing Into a Comma. That brings us to another important point: Readability and aesthetics go hand in hand. A sentence r
iddled with semicolons can be hard on the eyes—Readers' eyes.
"My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semicolons!" Kurt Vonnegut said in a 2007 speech. "They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."
Parentheses, on the other hand, can be indispensable. But often they can make a sentence messy and overly busy. And, like semicolons, they tend to get abused. Here's an example:
CarCo's L9 Sports Activity Coupe claims to marry coupe-like handling to SUV-ish utility. Though it's more coupe (the fastest version does 0-60 mph in 5.3 seconds) than SUV (offering less cargo space than CarCo's smaller L4 crossover), the instantly recognizable L9 comes close to the hype.
An article writer's job is to make information easily digestible. But parentheses often amount to force-feeding. They tell the Reader, "I couldn't be bothered weaving all the important facts into a readable narrative, so I just crammed them in here."
Yes, it's more work to craft the facts into palatable sentences, but that's the writer's job:
CarCo's L9 Sports Activity Coupe claims to marry coupe-like handling with SUV-ish utility. It's more coupe than SUV. The fastest version does 0-60 mph in 5.3 seconds, and it offers less cargo space than CarCo's smaller L4 crossover. Yet the instantly recognizable L9 comes close to the hype.
Sometimes, parentheses really are the best way to serve the information to the Reader. Usually, the smaller the parenthetical insertion, the better it works. The more stuff crammed between the parentheses and the more parentheses crammed into the sentence, the bigger the clue that the sentence needs an overhaul.
If you disagree, you're in good company. Some writers love parentheses and use them to the delight of their Readers. David Foster Wallace was king of the envelope-pushing parentheses: