It may surprise you to realize that if you worry about how well you write, you have the instincts of an artist. An artist is someone who believes that shapes and forms carry meaning, that making something with skill, a sentence or a paragraph for example, is one of the ways we humans share our thoughts and ideas with others. And when that communication is important enough to us, we make the time and effort to learn the elements of a particular art.
We can say that, for its part, the art of writing has three primary elements: words, phrases, and clauses. We shape those three forms in various ways to produce many different sentence designs. Each change to our first draft constitutes a revision, and through a number of such changes we arrive at our final artifact. And that is precisely the word for our final draft, because an artifact is literally something skillfully made. Rarely is our first draft a final one, and it is in the revisions between those two points that we manipulate these three elements to compose language that befits our ideas. The way is rarely smooth. Here’s an example.
A student explained to me recently that he had written this sentence in a draft and was not pleased with its predictably plain and level structure: My neighbor is remodeling his apartment, and the hammering and sawing are driving me crazy. Instead of this balanced, compound sentence which presents two thoughts to the reader in equal weight and force, he wanted a subordinate arrangement which would place the hammering and sawing in the background, giving sole prominence to the first clause. He analyzed his draft and composed this revision: My neighbor is remodeling his apartment, the hammering and sawing driving me crazy.
That revision does not work. My student knew that, but he wanted to know why. And knowing why, of course, is what skill is all about. The original compound sentence comprised two independent clauses, and in order to push the ideas of the second clause into the background, the writer converted that clause into a participial phrase. That phrase retained the compound subject hammering and sawing, but deleted the verb was to retain just the present participle driving. That created what is called a nominative absolute phrase, the purpose of which is to describe the circumstances in which the action of the main verb is occurring—exactly the ostensible arrangement my student intended to construct.
The reason this construction does not work here is logically subtle but effectively real. We might call the nominative absolute a scenic technique, a way to paint in words the scene in which an event is unfolding. The unfolding event in the sentence is that a neighbor is remodeling his apartment, and it could be the case that while he is remodeling, he is raising a lot of dust. All that dust would be part of the scene, and so we could compose a sentence like this: Dust rising everywhere, my neighbor is remodeling his apartment. Or it could be that what is part of the scene is intangible and only in the mind of the neighbor. We could then write Money always being a concern, my neighbor is remodeling his apartment himself, adding the intensifying pronoun himself to tighten the connection between the worry over cost and labor.
But using the phrase the hammering and sawing driving me crazy as a nominative absolute steps outside the scene: the writer (or the narrative voice, whoever that might be) is not part of the scene, physical or mental, in which his neighbor is remodeling his apartment. The craziness to which all the hammering and sawing is driving this poor soul is in effect offstage, and that is exactly why this revision doesn’t work. Here, then, is a revision on the way, so to speak, the final artifact still to be found on the road ahead. But that is just the artist’s way, and if we can accept that, we will gain both patience and confidence in our work.
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