Winning Words

Scott Nearing was a writer, teacher, and social activist whose preoccupations in the last tumultuous century were not too different from our own. Born in 1883 he died in 1983, and in his one hundred years he promulgated economic and political ideas, some far from the commonly accepted, whose consideration depended on his ability to state his positions and reasons with effective force. His name might be familiar to some in connection with The Good Life Center in Maine, an organization which his wife, Helen, later founded to promote their work for “social justice and simple living.”

In his autobiography, entitled The Making of a Radical, Nearing describes the “annihilative monsters” of nuclear weapons, their threat, and yet too the possibility of our taming them. Here is a short passage, written in the 1960s, in which he is exhorting his readers to understand the fight and victory:

The danger is obvious. The issue is urgent. The perilous fight has escalated to a climax. Decision and action are the order of the day. Despite the danger, in the face of the urgency I believe that the perilous fight can be won now, today and tomorrow, at several levels.

Energy builds across these five sentences, and it will be instructive for us as writers (if not too as citizens) to understand the compositional structure of this passage and how the energy this creates helps Nearing exhort his readers to consider the risk and opportunity of the political moment present then and present still.

The passage constitutes a single paragraph in the original chapter (entitled “The Dawn’s Early Light”), and to begin with we should note that the first four sentences are each simple in their construction (one subject phrase with one independent predicate), together totaling twenty-five words, or exactly one-half the paragraph. The fifth sentence alone and in its own right makes up another twenty-five words, evening the balance of the paragraph’s weight. This fifth sentence is complex in structure, with one main clause and one subordinate noun clause, and it is shaped very differently from the previous four, as we’ll see in a moment, by adverbial phrases fore and aft.

The juxtaposition of the first four simple sentences makes up what is called a segregated style, the notion being that the single assertion of each simple sentence is being set aside, or segregated, from what otherwise could be construed and written as a compound sentence: The danger is obvious, and the issue is urgent; the perilous fight has escalated to a climax, and decision and action are the order of the day. The isolation of one thought in a simple sentence of its own heightens the conviction of each, as well as the assembled force of the aggregation. And that force increases gradually as the subjects of the four sentences become more complex: the first two subjects (danger and issue) are entirely simple, the third adds an adjective (perilous), and the forth expands into two subjects (decision and action). (We should note too that the fourth sentence is also to be classed as simple, even though its subject is compound. Sentence types are determined by the properties of their predicates, not their subjects.)

Those first four sentences each beat down, drumlike, on one idea, and their simple grammatical make-up makes it easy for us to hear and absorb the meanings. If we imagine each a vertical downstroke, the fifth sentence works horizontally, first sweeping across the landscape of circumstances with two prepositional phrases (despite the danger, in the face of the urgency), then rising to say what it has to say (I believe that the perilous fight can be won), and then swooping down in finishing with temporal and spatial adverbs (now, today and tomorrow, at several levels). Because the main idea is positioned between the subordinate elements, this design is called a centered sentence. Although there is much to be said for the arithmetical balance of twenty-five words plus twenty-five words, could the fifth sentence have gained more energy by deleting the last, vague prepositional phrase (at several levels)? I think so.

Such close analysis, though, can be too close sometimes, here because this last prepositional phrase might very well stand as a transition to the paragraph following, in which Nearing details the many ways individuals may fight, as he calls it, the perilous fight. But as a study of composition, we must isolate a passage and say what we can about it as it stands, the better that way to learn how to write such fine work ourselves. We can feel Nearing’s conviction in the way he assembles his thoughts, and that inweaving of form and content remains ever the goal to achieve.

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