Human experience is such that, if we regarded everything—every thought, every action, every moment—of equal importance, our lives would flatten into an unbearable monotony: quality and worth and value would evaporate, as would the impetus to do anything other than what we’re doing at the moment, because whatever we would choose would be no better than what we have. Instead, it seems to be in our nature that we rise to what stands out.
In the practice of writing, we compose interesting sentences when we take regard of this predisposition we seem to humanly have for dimensionality, for when we put our thoughts into a relationship with one another, giving our sentences a meaningful and pleasing proportion, they become richer and more interesting because they represent more accurately our natural and honest perception of the world: some things, at the moment, are more important, or emphatic, than other things. A fine textbook on writing published over a half-century ago (John E. Jordan’s Using Rhetoric, Harper & Row, 1965) puts this work of bringing “internal emphasis” to our sentences like this:
Internal emphasis, ultimately, is the result of a pattern produced by the writer’s shuffling words around. For all we do when we write is to arrange words in patterns of relationships which give preeminence to certain elements…. The patterns are wrought by such concrete and manipulable things as coordination, subordination, predication, intensification, qualification, repetition, parallelism, position, length, rhythm, and euphony.
Those eleven devices this author lists constitute the very work of learning to write well (and comprise, too, the elements of any good writing course). They are concrete, he says, and that means that we can learn to recognize and employ them to better our sentences and the paragraphs they will build out. The first two, coordination and subordination, are mutually exclusive ideas. To coordinate the elements of a sentence means to put each into a balanced structure, each on the same line across the stage of a sentence for the reader to see and consider in one unbroken light of importance. To subordinate those same elements would mean to put some behind that one line, suggesting to the reader that in either logic or emphasis, certain ideas support others which are regarded, for the moment and in a particular context, as the more important.
Here is an illustration of the second device, subordination: He thought that his client, who, he believed, was not being entirely forthright, would not fare well on appeal. This sentence is making three predications, that is, three affirmations the writer is concerned to communicate, the first nesting the second and the second nesting the third. The chief assertion is that he thought something, and what he thought, the direct object of that transitive verb, is the noun clause that his client would not fare well on appeal. Within the structure of that eleven-word element is another, but subordinate, assertion, that this same client, now referred to by who, the relative pronoun, was not being entirely forthright. And within the structure of this six-word element, lies another subordinate statement, he believed.
Represented graphically, the subordinating structure of the statement would look like this: [He thought that his client, (who, {he believed}, was not being entirely forthright), would not fare well on appeal.] Or, represented symbolically, it would take on this pattern: A B C C B A. We recognize the independent clause by the fact that it needs no other element in the sentence to make its assertion complete. We know, further, that the second assertion is subordinate because relative clauses are always so by definition, and that the third assertion is subordinate by the fact that it is parenthetical, its direct object being that same subordinate relative clause within which it is buried. That, moreover, is why the word who, not whom, is correct here: the verb was needs a subject (represented by the nominative case who), the object of the transitive verb believed being the entire clause who was not being entirely forthright, which is exactly what he believed.
One main thought with two subordinate ones attending. So if push came to shove and we as readers had to say the one thing that concerned this writer (and so, us) most, we would have no other choice but to answer, He thought that his client would not fare well on appeal. The two subordinates stand, therefore, as supernumeraries on the stage behind that chief character, suggesting the reason for this claim. And what would the same sentence put in coordinate structure look like? Something along this line: He thought that his client was not being entirely forthright and he believed that his client would not fare well on appeal. Nothing wrong with that, but the scene is seen from an entirely different angle, straightforward but unclear (or uncommitted) as to the logical connection between the two coordinated elements. And always with matters rhetorical, the criterion of judgment is not correct or incorrect, but effective or ineffective in producing just the effect one wants to strike for the audience. Thus the essential connection between form and meaning.
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Upcoming Short Course
In February, I will offer another section of Writing Smartly’s Reading Closely to Write, this time with new selections from another anthology of classic short stories. Our emphasis will be on the language of the readings—the grammar and construction of sentences—so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own written voice. Please look for details in next week’s post, but email me in the meantime if you have questions or would like to express your interest (ultimo@writingsmartly.com). Happy New Year!
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