Let’s take a test. (Always a good way to begin a discussion about grammar and writing.) Do you find anything to complain about, either grammatically or stylistically, in this sentence: Use a different address for your site administrator and avoid future suspensions of your email service. Grammatically, I think it passes the exam. Stylistically, however, it’s clumsy, and understanding exactly why will take us through some grammatical—and logical—territory to a fuller understanding of how subtle language can be.
Let’s begin with this reminder: anything we have to say or write involves us at once in three disciplines: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. We can study each of those subjects individually, but the minute we say or write anything, what we’re saying and how we’re saying it are inextricably interwoven. As the medieval educators put it, grammar teaches us how to say something, logic how to say something that makes sense, and rhetoric how to make sense persuasively. One discipline without the other two brings us up short.
Now when I judged a moment ago that our example is stylistically awkward, I was pointing to this third subject of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, or how best to match content and manner. The first rhetorical question to be answered in revising a document is always, who is my audience?, to whom—and why—am I writing this document? The sentence under examination here is aimed at a customer, and its purpose is to carefully warn that customer that consequences will come down should he not change his ways. The sentence has its eye, in other words, on the future, and on doing something now to avoid that future.
Indeed, the sentence says just that with the phrase avoid future suspensions. But if we look closely at that phrase, so closely that we consider its logical nuts and bolts, we can see that the writer has subtly misplaced his reference to time. The adjective future stands before the noun it modifies, suspensions, and in that position it intends to name an attribute, an essential and inseparable characteristic, of the noun it modifies. But are the suspensions he wishes the customer to avoid future suspensions, in the same way, for example, that they might be disruptive or frustrating suspensions? Or is it more logically the case that these suspensions are to be avoided in the future?
The writer, in other words, has referred to the idea of time as an adjective modifying a noun rather than as an adverb modifying a verb. The sentence speaks of avoiding future suspensions, not of avoiding suspensions in the future. And what difference does that make? Quite a lot, rhetorically, because it softens the tone of authoritative warning which would have come with the more straightforward construction of the transitive verb avoid followed immediately by its direct object suspensions. To have told a customer that he could avoid suspensions in the future would have carried with it a cold legalism; instead the writer buffered that effect by inserting an adjective between the verb and its object, and in so doing bent the logic a little by associating the idea of time with a noun, not a verb. But things don’t have time; actions do.
Whether the writer made this rhetorical move consciously or not, we all do this all the time: we shape our sentences for the audience and purpose at hand. In matters of rhetoric, the criterion of judgment is not right or wrong so much as it is appropriate or inappropriate to what and how we want to communicate an idea. Being sensitive to the covert suggestions of what we read and write and hear keeps us steady before what is now an ever-building wave of words in the world. That protective awareness, though, is rooted in the objective structure of language, a structure we can understand by looking not only grammatically, but logically and rhetorically as well at the sentences which claim our attention from every direction.
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Two Upcoming Online Short Courses
Basic Grammar Review
Tuesdays, August 29 through September 19
6:00 to 7:00 p.m. CT
Need a review of the basics of English grammar? With a confident grasp of sentence structure, you can revise your work more efficiently to make sure what you’re writing is what you really mean to say. This short course begins at the beginning. We’ll discuss how to write a clear sentence, how to choose strong vocabulary, and how to punctuate accurately. Get answers to your questions and get confident to work productively on your own. Tuition for this four-session online short course, including materials, is $300 paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or $310 paid through PayPal.
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Reading Closely to Write
Wednesdays, August 23 through September 13
6:00 to 7:00 p.m. CT
It’s an open secret that we learn to write better and better by reading more and more closely. On Wednesday, August 23, Writing Smartly will begin another short course of four one-hour sessions called Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one or two very short stories (each averaging about 16 pages) written by celebrated authors. We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the language of the readings, so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own written voice.
New selections this term will be from The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco Publishers, 2008), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $300 paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or $310 paid through PayPal.
If you have any questions, please email me directly. I hope you can join us.
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