Writing is a pictorial art. We are to make pictures with the words we choose and the patterns we contrive with them. Our minds, for good or ill, have a habit of depicting what we see in the world as an array of things, each named by a certain noun and each undertaking an action called by a certain verb. And without asking with the philosophers whether all those things really do exist as realities in and of themselves, the writer draws up a sharp-edged scene for the reader to see those things acting in a particular way—in just the way the good writer intended the attentive reader to see them.
Take, for example, this homely, workaday sentence: Have you been hearing a beep go off every once in a while in the basement lately? We can picture the scene without much hesitation and we can surmise rightly enough that some device, probably a smoke detector, needs a new battery. We’re helped to that conclusion and to the liveliness of the event by the grammatical structure the writer has chosen, and though we would likely have come to the same deduction through another, duller arrangement of the words, we would not have arrived there in the same unquestionable manner: Did you hear a beep go off in the basement every once in a while? So what is the difference between this version and the original?
The difference lies, of course, in the way the question is posed. To ask have you been hearing depicts the action as ongoing over time in the past. Structurally this involves here two grammatical devices: the present perfect verb tense and the progressive verbal aspect. English grammar recognizes six tenses, four of which have to do with the past, and though we often like to think of the past as dead and gone and relevant no longer (and oftentimes thankfully enough), English gives us a number of ways that will determine how we remember what has occurred and how we talk about the past in the present. The simple past tense points to the happening itself (did you hear); the past perfect connects a past action to another time in the past already mentioned (had you heard); the future perfect tense refers both to the future and the past (will you have heard); and the present perfect, illustrated in our first example, points to a past which is so recent that it is felt to be almost present.
Our two versions (have you been hearing and did you hear) reduce those four possibilities for a past tense to two (the other two will not fit the logic of the scene), so already we have a way to guide our choice between the versions we’re considering. The nature of the event—the fact that a device like a smoke detector will send out an intermittent sound to alert one of a low battery—happens on the borderline of the past and the present: its recency and repetition are what the question is about, and so the present perfect tense is the right choice, because its purpose as a tense conforms to the nature of the event it is employed to represent. But the pure form of this present perfect tense is have you heard, so why has the writer transformed this standard structure into have you been hearing?
This has to do with the other grammatical device illustrated here called aspect. A grammatical aspect refers to the way in which the reader sees the written picture, the angle of the writer’s point of view we could say, and English recognizes three such verbal aspects: simple, emphatic, and progressive. The simple aspect is just that, simple and unadorned: did you hear? The emphatic normally employs the verb do (I did hear it), but because our example is a direct question, which in English is built using that same verb do, we would have to substitute an adverbial phrase to configure the emphatic aspect to avoid two instances of do: did you in fact hear? And the progressive aspect, the one in our example, uses some form of the verb be (been) together with the present participle of the main verb (hearing) for the express purpose of elongating the verbal action over time: have you been hearing?
And that elongating, or pulling out, of the action corresponds exactly to the nature of the event the writer wants to depict. A perfect match, in fact. But the alternative we’re considering, did you hear a beep go off, is the lesser choice because the reader is being asked to do the work the writer should have taken on, and to impute into the simple past verb in the simple aspect (did you hear) the ongoingness which is at the heart of the event. That is exactly the picture which combining the present perfect tense and the progressive aspect produces.
The second version breaks the bargain always implicit between writer and reader: the writer is to hold the reins while the reader pays attention and is carried along. The minute the reader starts reaching for the reins, something’s gone wrong. And even though all of us are tempted to say, well, we know what the writer meant, that sets the bar for good writing too low. It’s not just a matter of what the writer is saying, but of how it’s being said as well; only those two together—both the logic and the style—can show and share the human moment as alive and moving. This is what is meant by the adage that precision is at the heart of style.
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A New Short Course Begins Next Week
Beginning next Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.
We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences from each story, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.
New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $350, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Tuition this term will include one optional 45-minute session of private instruction where you may discuss your own writing, or learn more about the points of grammar and style we discussed in the course. Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.
I hope you can join us as we all await the spring.
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