When we think about writing, most of us likely think first of sentences. We write by writing sentences. Little to argue with there, but it can help us to remember that sentences are constructed; they are objects we have put together in a certain way so that our readers can get into the same state of mind we were in as we were thinking what they’re now reading. Our sentences can take on various shapes, and the shapes they ultimately assume are the shapes of our thoughts.
The sentences we write, then, express our thoughts, but it’s not correct, nor is it practically helpful, to define a sentence simply as a group of words that express a complete thought. It is correct, though, and much more helpful, to say that a sentence expresses at least one complete thought, because if one sentence can carry more than one thought, we have to be able to identify those potentially many thoughts within one sentence in order to shape and order them most effectively for our readers. Here’s what I mean.
Let’s imagine these three ideas: an improving housing market, my decision to sell my home, and a quick sale. Notice that each of these statements is a phrase—no subject connected to a verb, each just a group of words related in some way and pointing to an idea. Now we convert an idea into a thought by identifying a subject and joining that subject to a verb—that’s the definition of a clause, and so every clause expresses one thought. From the idea of an improving housing market, we might construct the thought the housing market was improving; from the idea my decision to sell my home, we might build the thought I decided to sell my home. And from the idea of a quick sale, we might produce the thought it sold quickly. Three subjects each with their own verb, hence three clauses and therefore three thoughts. And to communicate those three thoughts evenly, we might at first wrap them all up in one straitly straightforward compound sentence: The housing market was improving, I decided to sell my home, and it sold quickly. Flat, unemphatic, and so simple as to be simplistic.
Why simplistic? Because life unfolds in time, and time implies cause, and cause involves effect, all making for movement and change and the novelty which results from that. The three thoughts in that first compound sentence, in other words, were not logically connected with one another, just placed next to one another. The design of that compound sentence is technically termed paratactic: one thought laid right beside another thought, with no word of how one is related reasonably to the next. Sometimes the occasion calls for just such a sentence design, but we surely want to know what other choices we have to order our thoughts into a hierarchy of some sort, the better to have them conform to the complexities of life as most of us feel it, sometimes serenely, sometimes anxiously.
And it’s right here that distinguishing between a phrase and a clause can be so practically helpful. The opposite of a paratactic arrangement of clauses in a sentence is called hypotactic, where we subordinate one thought to another, thereby producing a richer, more involved—and so likely more interesting—written scene. We could, for example, transform the first independent clause of our paratactic design into a subordinated one, putting the third thought into a sentence of its own: Because the housing market was improving, I decided to sell my home. It sold quickly. The subordinating conjunction because now expresses the cause of my deciding to sell my home, and that grammatical change has produced a mental movement from one thought to another. Movement, change, is irresistibly interesting to us humans always and everywhere, and so we have a fuller, more conforming expression of our thoughts.
Or we might decide to emphasize not the cause but the effect of the event we’re writing about, and add the coordinating conjunction so to the second clause: The housing market was improving, so I decided to sell my home. It sold quickly. Or we might reverse the order of the first two clauses in order to emphasize the effect in subordination to the cause: I decided to sell my home because the housing market was improving, and it sold quickly. Notice that this choice gives us the opportunity, should we wish, to incorporate the third thought back into a single sentence.
All of these revisions (and many possible others) change the order and balance of our conceptions, and communicating our conceptions, our thoughts, is the very reason we are writing sentences at all. Once again, thinking about the form of what we’ve written in a rough draft can yield new possibilities of design and effect in our final presentation.
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