Say What You See

It can help us in our writing if we remember just how crazy a thing it is we’re trying to do. Imagine putting a word to every last thing we perceive, and then putting all those perceptions together into a self-reflecting kaleidoscope for someone else to look through. We witnessed something, and now it’s in our mind. We saw something happen in the world, we had a thought, we felt an emotion, and now we want to (and sometimes we have to) share it. To share is what the word communicate originally meant, and to do that we have to be adept in a medium, an art, with which to carry it from our own awareness to another’s. To do this, the art of writing comprises the three elements of word, phrase, and clause, and these have to be placed just so if we are to succeed in having one idea reflect off another.

But it’s the vision of what we must say that determines the artful form with which we communicate it. And finding that form is where the winds start to blow, because a vision, an idea, comes clear only slowly, like a light seen far in the distances as we approach it. And if we settle too early on a way to say what we see, our work does not succeed as it otherwise could. Our reader is left with a haze, rather than with our clear sight; but when we take courage to realize that, we go back to our studio, which is our draft, to clear the mist a bit more. Often that next revision need be little more than a change in punctuation. Pointing a sentence, as punctuating used to be called, is a subtle technique in the art of writing, and understanding how a miniscule, black mark in a line can open or close whole worlds will serve us immensely well in clearing the reader’s vision.

Consider, for example, the commas in this sentence: The aircraft, having finally come to a stop, its nose gear had broken on landing. There is little doubt that in the minds of both writer and reader, the raw ideas of an aircraft landing and nose gear collapsing have arisen, but the sentence the writer drafted has hastily confused two thoughts which should otherwise calmly present themselves confidently to the reader, whole and complete. Commas cut; that is their office. But whether an element should or should not be separated from others in a sentence depends on the logic of what we’re saying, and logic always has to do with the relations of things we have named—all those nouns we put to our perceptions. So one way to test the logic, or illogic, of a sentence is to see whether every noun in it is associated accurately with some element of the syntax.

In our example, the noun aircraft appears as the sentence opens, and that suggests to every reader of modern English prose that, more likely than not, it will be standing as the subject of a verb to appear shortly. That, however, does not happen here. No sooner do we read aircraft than we come to a cutting comma, defeating our expectation that a verb will immediately next appear. Whereupon comes the problem with that comma and the difficulty it causes the reader. We must understand the comma after aircraft together with the comma after stop; the two work as a pair to isolate the participial phrase between them. When we continue reading, we come to the phrase its nose gear, which we soon see is the subject of the verb and the rest of the predicate had broken on landing. And there we find ourselves at the period, with the noun aircraft hovering at the start, unassociated with anything else.

There is no intractable problem here—if we recognize there is a problem. The drama of the moment the writer recalled has likely overpowered what we might call the presentational logic of the sentence. As is not always the case in life, the world of expository prose must identify things and put each in its proper relation to some other thing in the scene to avoid what the author Bryan Garner calls (in his indispensable writing guide Garner’s Modern American Usage) “disruptions of thought.” That first comma has separated the noun aircraft from its participle having finally come, and so we can see that the fix is immediate and sure: make it the subject of verb and nose gear the object: The aircraft, having finally come to a stop, had broken its nose gear on landing. Or another possibility might be to convert the original participial phrase into a subordinate clause of its own, changing a simple sentence into a complex one: The nose gear had broken on landing when the aircraft had finally come to a stop. And then we can better the logic of that revision by inverting the order of the two clauses: When the aircraft had finally come to a stop, the nose gear had broken on landing. And better: When the aircraft had finally come to a stop, the nose gear had broken apart on landing. And even better: When the aircraft had finally come to a stop, the nose gear had collapsed on landing. Revision is generative.

Our sentences, we’ve said, are like a self-reflecting kaleidoscope we assemble for someone else to watch the coordination of ideas we hold in our mind, but the simile points up a philosophical peril we should be careful to avoid. The classical position has it that both prose and poetry intend to communicate objective reality, not the subjective manufacturing of mental vagaries. Ideas are as objective as the ground we stand on; both are real, and both are therefore something to get right and to be precise about. The language we write (it’s not strictly quite right to say the language we create, for that would suggest that we are the cause of ideas) can only approximate objective truth, so subtle is the relationship between our minds and the world. But there are degrees of approximation, and we try, as careful writers and readers and thinkers, to approach the truth as closely as we rightly can through the particular art we devote ourselves to.

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