The standard word order of an English sentence is subject plus verb, and that’s called the standard order because it gives us as readers the standard, or norm, from which other patterns deviate in order to convey a special meaning, emphasis, or emotion. Without a standard, we risk losing subtlety.
The subject-verb arrangement announces a declarative sentence, and to convert an assertion to a question, we simply invert the order to verb plus subject: the declarative he was on vacation last week becomes the interrogative was he on vacation last week? To make a question of any simple tense verb other than be (as in those two examples), we add some form of the verb do as an auxiliary, together with an infinitive, to signal that we’re posing a question: he went on vacation becomes the direct question did he go on vacation? Inversion, or transposition as it is sometimes called, is seen most often in the construction of questions.
Sometimes, though, we transpose not only the subject and its verb, but subject and verb, together with some part of the verb’s complement. The complement of a verb comprises those words which work with the verb to complete (hence, the term complement) the picture it’s drawing. In the short and simple sentence he acted confidently, the adverb confidently would constitute a complement of the verb acted, because it denotes the manner in which the subject acted, an idea which we can presume was important to the writer inasmuch as it was mentioned at all. Sometimes, though, the complement of a verb can be quite substantial, as in this example, where the nine words after the verb was make up the complement: he was far from realizing how much he was risking financially.
Let’s say now that we decided in revision to combine these two sentences; a straightforward statement conforming to the standard subject-plus-verb word order would then result: he acted confidently, but he was far from realizing how much he was risking financially. That’s an acceptable sentence in almost anyone’s grammar book. We should note, though, that the conjunction but was added to etch more clearly the opposition between acting confidently while not realizing the risk involved. But let’s say that the context was such, and our intention was such, that we wanted to heighten this opposition even a degree or two more. We could then employ the technique of inversion by taking a portion of the complement from the second predicate and transposing it to the head of its clause, where it would stand right next to the idea to which it is most in contrast: he acted confidently, but how much he was risking financially he was far from realizing.
To most of us, probably, that final clause he was far from realizing, stressed as it stands alone in the final position of the sentence, now sounds a bit overwritten, even dramatic. But sensing that is just an opportunity for another revision: he acted confidently, but how much he was risking financially he never really understood. By changing the distant far from realizing to the more familiar never really understood, we have lowered the diction and brought the emotion of risk (and perhaps even of the subject’s failure) sympathetically to the fore, for who of us has not failed in something we began so confidently.
That humane subtlety was conveyed first by inversion and then by a change in word choice, one step leading to the next in the work of close revision. Some writing manuals call this an echo, the repositioning of the complement of one clause so that it follows closely after the end of a previous clause, and as we’ve seen, in the right written circumstances this designs can add an interest that is revealing of an unsuspected emotion. Here’s a similar example to examine for practice: We took a trip to Maine last summer because we had heard how beautiful the coastline was there, but so many quaint towns and little wooded islands I had never expected to see. A modest elevation in the diction by echo to mark the elevated emotion attending on the real-life moment the words depict.
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