Word Order, Thought Order

I found myself the other day doing what millions of people are doing somewhere every hour: entering an account number for one thing or the other into an online system. And no doubt also like many of those millions, I received this error message: please make sure that the correct number has been entered. This innocuous instruction illustrates, in fact, an important principle of writing, and it will serve us well to analyze it somewhat closely.

The shape our sentences take reveals the way we’re thinking about what we want to say. If we’re writing to inform someone of something, as the error message I received is doing and as the great majority of writing we undertake intends to do, the context is probably complex to some degree; the situation involves a number of things, both concrete and abstract, and the way in which we compose a sentence will evidence how we are organizing those many relevant details in  order to understand the event. The first concern we should always be clear about is the subject: what is it exactly we want to say something about.

There are as many subjects in a sentence as there are clauses, so in revising, we have to remember that the central idea we want to assert may not be in the first or even independent clause we’ve written. In the example here, the opening statement, please make sure, is an independent clause whose verb is a command (gentle though it is). Such verbs are said to be in the imperative mood, and in English we use a subject pronoun with the imperative only for emphasis or clarification; otherwise, as here, it is omitted. The full statement would be you please make sure, and it takes little more than a second to realize that such emphasis would be out of place. With or without the emphasis, though, the chief concern of the writer (human or robotic) is not to tell me to be sure of something, but rather to be sure that I have entered the correct number. The point of the statement, therefore, must lie in the second clause.

That following clause, that the correct number has been entered, is grammatically subordinate, serving to name the object, or idea, about which I am asked to be sure. And here is where we have to be careful in order to learn the lessons, both grammatical and logical, this example can illustrate for us. The subject of this second clause is the correct number, and the predicate (what the writer is saying about that subject) is has been entered; we can put a vertical bar between these two main sections of the clause to see each clearly: the correct number | has been entered. So what the writer is talking about, apparently, is a correct number; that’s the subject of the clause, and the subject identifies for the reader that about which the writer wants to say something—ultimately his or her first concern.

But is it true that I failed to get into my online account because I didn’t use the correct number? Or is it likelier true that I didn’t enter the number I had correctly? In other words, the notion of correctness pertains more to the action of my entering the number than it does to the number itself. And if we can agree on that (for I have used the number many, many times successfully over many, many years), then shouldn’t the adjective correct, which here is modifying the noun number, really become an adverb modifying the passive verb has been entered: that the number has been entered correctly. Now there’s a degree more both of energy and logical accuracy in the sentence, because the reader’s attention is on the verb, both its action and how that action is to be performed.

Clear writing depends on clear thinking. That’s a traditional principle that answers matters of both thought and style. The goal is to align substance with expression as closely as possible as often as possible, unless we deliberately wish to hide behind our words—which, of course, is another story entirely.

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