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by It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences (mobi)

  Radoff Entertainment develops feature films and television programs.

  Here's a sentence that you should now know how to improve:

  Another activity at the Family Fun Center is the opportunity for kids to create a journal.

  This has that a blank is a blank structure as its main clause, stating little more than an activity is an opportunity. You'd do better to make the main verb a real action:

  Kids at the Family Fun Center can also create a journal.

  Now that you're getting good at this, we can look at a longer piece. Here's a thinly disguised rewrite of an unpublished story by an amateur writer. As you read it, keep an eye out for words, phrases, and even whole sentences that should go:

  I have done something everyone knows you shouldn't do— that being I fell for a @!#$ friend.

  Slowly over a period of just a few weeks I fell in love with him. I couldn't help myself even though I had known that it was a stupid thing to do and that such actions always have consequences. Now it appears I have just two choices. The first option is the most logical one; I should dump him and sever all contact before I fall even more deeply in love with him. The second option is to try to make a relationship that is serious and exclusive, but I have a feeling that that won't pan out. We're two different people. So of course I have selected none of these choices and simply continue sleeping with him.

  Slowly turning the knob on a Sunday morning, I opened the door to Joe's apartment and peered inside. Joe was seated at his desk with a paintbrush in hand and he dabbed at a paint palette lying on a wooden chair beside him.

  No doubt, the writer figured that every one of these words was needed. But the writer was wrong. The passage is teeming with unnecessary and obvious statements, flabby prose, and wasteful redundancies. If I were editing this story, here's what I would do to it:

  The first sentence was too wordy. That being is especially flabby and unprofessional. So I chopped. Perhaps the word stupid doesn't capture what the writer wanted to say. That's why I'd run all these changes by her. But, be it stupid or wrong or moronic or unwise or shortsighted or childish, somewhere out there is a word that will say what she means in fewer than six words.

  In the original story, @!#$ actually appeared in front of the noun. Bad choice. For one thing, if you're going to swear, fucking swear already. But, more important, any swear word here—explicit or candy coated—enfeebles the information. I fell for a friend has a power all its own. The writer's attempt to add oomph actually weakened her point.

  I couldn't help myself shows that the protagonist was conflicted. The rest just flogs the obvious.

  When you lay out two options, there's no need to first insert a sentence saying that you're about to lay out two options. Also, after the writer said she was about to lay out two options, she dedicated a whole sentence to evaluating one of the options she had yet to lay out. Whenever you find yourself buried under so many words, start by asking: can't I just chop all this out? The answer is usually yes.

  I should dump him, all by itself, makes it clear that she has options and which one she believes is best. Neither of the two preceding sentences was needed at all. They hurt the passage.

  As for I should dump him and sever all contact: Why not dump him and sever all contact and change your phone number and avoid eye contact with anyone who has his hair color and burn every photo you have of him and tell him his mama's a tramp and try to get on with your life and call that cute barista at your local Starbucks? In other words, was it really necessary to dump him and sever all contact? Isn't there a single action—say, dumping—that could cover all the necessary bases here? Perhaps not, but probably.

  Either a serious relationship or an exclusive relationship says enough. Even a serious, exclusive relationship is better than a relationship that is serious and exclusive.

  As worded, this is meaningless. Show me any two people and I'll show you two different people. But even if the writer had found a more logical way to make her point, perhaps with we're too different, this would raise questions she's not answering. If the protagonist suspects the relationship won't pan out, it's clear she has her reasons. To say it's because they're two different people or even too different is a tease. It's better to leave some stuff unexplained than to waste the Reader's time with half an answer or by telling him something he already knew: that people are different.

  On the other hand, the writer could have said, "We're too different. I eat veal topped with foie gras, and he's a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Lima Beans."

  The point is, either explain or don't. But don't half-ass it.

  There were a lot of unnecessary words here. I just continue sleeping with him makes it clear that she rejected the dump-him option and the get-serious option.

  I think I speak for Readers everywhere when I say we're familiar with the mechanics of door opening. No strangers to knob turning are we. So unless how she opened the door was important or interesting or entertaining, spare us the details. You could cut that down even more if you wanted to: On a Sunday morning, I walked into Joe's apartment to find him sitting at his desk. In fact, the act of entering may not be relevant at all: On a Sunday morning, Joe was seated at his desk. It's up to you. Just never fall victim to the idea that every little action in your story is critical. It's not.

  If you have a character who's dabbing a paintbrush into the colors on a palette, is it really worth the words to say the paintbrush is in hand? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no, it's not.

  Of course, none of this is law. Skilled writers can defy all these principles effectively and with grace. But novice writers need to understand the concepts here. Flabby prose, repetitiveness, and statements beleaguering the obvious separate the amateurs from the pros. Make it a habit to seek out such lard in your own writing and start to look for ways in which chopping up or chopping out problem sentences can improve a whole work.

  One theme has cropped up time and again in this book. You've probably noticed it. From the chapter on adverbs to my rant on parentheses, from the long Ian McEwan sentence to the even longer Cormac McCarthy sentence, we've seen over and over that writing rules are made to be broken. That is, they're not really rules at all. They're just baby steps we can take before we learn how to walk then run then jitterbug. They help us when we're struggling. But they need not weigh us down when we're soaring.

  People argue about writing rules. For every teacher who tells you, "Omit needless words," another will tell you that's nonsense, citing examples of top-notch writers whose work teems with "needless words." For every peer who tells you, "Avoid adverbs," someone else will argue that manner adverbs are used extensively by many of the very best writers. For everyone who tells you to use short sentences or avoid the passive voice, someone else will argue that long sentences can be great and the passive can be an ideal choice.

  Don't get entangled in these debates. Just understand the wisdom of both sides. Every one of the writing "rules" you hear is rooted in a good idea with at least some practical application. Yet none of these rules is worth a damn when stretched into an absolute. "Avoid manner adverbs" can be helpful advice for some writers and is worth noting by all writers—even those who disagree. But it's not law. The advice "Keep sentences short" can be just what the doctor ordered for less experienced writers prone to cumbersome sentences. But, clearly, it's not a real rule.

  All the so-called rules are really just guidelines that can help you serve your Reader—or not. If they help you, use them. If not, disregard them entirely. You'll be in good company.

  But remember: These guidelines are always there to fall back on if you get a little lost. Think of them not as rules but as safe havens. If you're getting into trouble with a long sentence, you can chop it into shorter sentences. If your adverb-laden sentence falls flat, you can just ditch the adverbs.

  You're not bound by these rules. But you are subject to expectations. Depending on the Reader, the publication, the subject matter, the gen
re, the context, and the cachet of your byline, Readers may receive your work in different ways. Readers can have prejudices— some far more important than the rantings of a lone anti-semicolonite. A Reader who encounters a very long sentence in the Palookaville Post or in an unpublished manuscript by a new author may label it bad writing. But the Reader might consider the same sentence genius in anything with the name Philip Roth on the cover.

  Perhaps that's unfair. Perhaps not. Maybe it means that Readers expect us to earn their respect before they'll give us the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps abstract painters have to deal with the same thing—they must prove they can draw a bowl of grapes before people will admire their abstract shapes or spatters. Maybe everyone deals with this stuff: stockbrokers and fashion designers and academics—everyone.

  If Readers have prejudices, that's the writing world we live in. We must decide how to navigate it. We can't please all the Readers all the time and we shouldn't try. But we don't get to create our Readers in our own image, either. We don't get to tell them what to value or enjoy. We can write in a way true to our own voice and our own ideas of beauty and substance, and we can hope that some Readers appreciate it. But, even when we aim to serve the narrowest cross section of Readers, we're still working for the Readers we have. We should be grateful that we have them.

  Thanks for listening.

  To know grammar, focus on the parts of speech and how phrases and clauses form sentences. All that stuff you've heard about how you supposedly can't use healthy to mean healthful and how it's supposedly wrong to say "Can I be excused?" in place of "May I be excused?"—that's not grammar. That's usage (much of it pure lies). Further, all that perplexing stuff like whether to write out numbers or use numerals and whether to put a comma before an and—that's called style. One doesn't know usage or style. Like the most skilled editors, you must look these things up.

  For usage matters, have a trusted dictionary such as a recent American Heritage or Webster's New World or Merriam-Webster's Collegiate and a good usage guide such as Garner's Modern American Usage or Fowler's Modern English Usage and look up issues as they arise. For style matters, book authors and most magazine writers should have a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style. Journalists and public relations professionals should have The Associated Press Style-book. Organizations such as the Modern Language Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological

  Association have their own stylebooks. Usually, a professor or an employer will tell you if you need to follow one of these.

  The nitpicky stuff—little matters of usage and style—can be looked up. But the stuff that will really help your writing is the mechanical, analytical stuff we call grammar. Throughout this book, we've touched on a lot of aspects of grammar. Here, now, is grammar long form.

  Most grammar primers start with the parts of speech before moving on to phrases and clauses and then finally to sentence formation. But because we're most concerned with sentence formation, we'll reverse that order, looking first at sentence formation before moving on to phrase and clause structure and finally to the parts of speech, including how to form plurals of nouns and how to conjugate verbs.

  Read or skim through this at least once. Then return to it whenever you need to better understand the mechanics of sentence writing.

  Sentence Formation

  There are five basic structures for simple sentences, which are sentences that contain just one clause. On top of these five structures, optional elements called adverbials can be added. The following table shows the basic structures.

  An indirect object is in essence a prepositional phrase that comes before the direct object and that, in its new position, no longer requires the preposition:

  Robbie made spaghetti for his mother. [His mother is the object of the preposition for.]

  Robbie made his mother spaghetti. [His mother is an indirect object and is placed before the direct object spaghetti; the preposition for is omitted.]

  Jake sends love letters to Mary. [Mary is the object of the preposition to.]

  Jake sends Mary love letters. [Mary is an indirect object and is placed before the direct object love letters; the preposition to is omitted.]

  A complement of a copular verb is not the same as an object of a transitive verb. An object receives the action of the verb, but the complement of a copular verb refers back to the subject:

  Anna seems nice.

  Boys become men.

  Coffee smells good.

  An object of a transitive verb can have its own modifying complement. This is called an object complement (or an object predicative). The object complement can be an adjective phrase or a noun phrase. It describes the object or tells what the object has become:

  Spinach makes Pete strong. [The adjective strong is a complement of the object Pete.]

  Spinach makes Pete a man. [The noun phrase a man is a complement of the object Pete.]

  A sentence with more than one independent clause is a compound sentence. In a compound sentence, the clauses can be coordinated with a coordinating conjunction. Coordinate clauses have equal grammatical status.

  A sentence that contains at least one subordinate clause is called a complex sentence:

  Birds make nests and they sing, [compound sentence containing two coordinated clauses of equal grammatical weight]

  Because Andy is hungry, he eats, [complex sentence containing a subordinate clause and a main clause]

  Subjects and objects can be phrases or whole clauses:

  The dog sees that you are scared [The subject is the noun phrase the dog; the object of the verb sees is the subordinate clause that you are scared.]

  To know him is to love him [To know is an infinitive clause functioning as the subject of the verb is; to love is an infinitive clause functioning as a complement of the verb.]

  ADVERBIALS

  Other sentence elements, called adverbials, can be added on to the basic sentence structures. An adverbial can be an adverb, a prepositional phrase, a clause, or a noun phrase. Though an adverbial may contain crucial information, it is not crucial to the sentence's core structure in the way that subjects, verbs, objects, and complements are.

  For example, in The van followed Harry to the park, remove the adverbial (the prepositional phrase to the park) and you retain a grammatical sentence: The van followed Harry. Like adverbs, adverbials can answer the questions when, where, in what manner, and to what degree, or they can modify whole sentences. Or, like adjectives, they can modify nouns. The following examples illustrate adverbials:

  The van followed Harry to the park, [prepositional phrase answering the question where]

  The van followed Harry this afternoon, [noun phrase answering the question when]

  In addition, the van followed Harry, [prepositional phrase connecting the sentence to a prior thought]

  The van discreetly followed Harry, [adverb modifying the verb followed]

  The van followed Harry where he walked, [whole clause answering the question where]

  NEGATION

  Sentences are said to be positive or negative. Sentences can be made negative by inserting not after the operator, which is usually the first word in the verb phrase but can also be a form of do, which is called a dummy operator and must often be inserted, as well:

  The peaches are ripe, [positive] The peaches are not ripe, [negative]

  William has worked hard, [positive]

  William has not worked hard, [negative; not inserted after

  auxiliary has but before past participle worked]

  Your daughters go to college, [positive]

  Your daughters do not go to college, [negative; not inserted

  after dummy operator do]

  QUESTIONS

  Declarative sentences (statements) can be made into interrogatives (questions) by switching the positions of the subject and the operator, which is the first word in the verb phrase or the dummy operator do:

  Dolphins are clever, [declarati
ve]

  Are dolphins clever? [interrogative formed through inversion]

  Storytelling has been part of our culture for centuries, [declarative]

  Has storytelling been part of our culture for centuries? [interrogative formed through inversion]

  You like cake, [declarative; could also be expressed with a dummy operator as You do like cake] Do you like cake? [interrogative formed with dummy operator do]

  In spoken English, sentences can also be made into questions through intonation. In writing, this can be represented as a positive statement followed by a question mark: That's what you're wearing? You'll he there on time?

  VARIATIONS ON BASIC SENTENCE STRUCTURES There are many possible variations on the basic sentence structures. These alternatives include sentence fragments, cleft sentences, existential sentences, and other structures in which sentence elements have been moved. These all mix up the order of the standard form. Think of them as creative devices at your disposal. A sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence:

  That's what he wanted. Money.

  Incomplete sentences like Money are completely acceptable in fiction and nonfiction—especially in informal contexts.

  Cleft sentences use it + is or was and a relative pronoun like that or who to add emphasis. So,

  Leo saved the day.

  made into a cleft sentence becomes It was Leo who saved the day.

  Existential sentences put there is or there are at the head of a sentence for emphasis:

  Aliens are in the building.

  becomes

  There are aliens in the building.

  Other variations include

  • Left dislocation, in which the subject gets bumped to the left and a repetitive pronoun takes its place: Cars, they're not what they used to he.

  • Right dislocation, in which the pronoun duplicates the work of a subject and the subject is bumped to the right: They have a lot of money, Carol and Bill.

  • Other rearrangements, such as a prepositional phrase moved to the front of a sentence: To the mall we will go.