The exercise of revising a rough paragraph of simple sentences can concentrate our attention and sharpen our skills, resulting in a more natural flow of ideas and expression. We should remember that what is called a final draft is just the last iteration in a line of approximating productions. There can logically be no last draft, in other words, without a penultimate, an antepenultimate, and most likely even a preantepenultimate one as well. That should encourage us all, because it lifts the burden of believing that we have to get everything right the first time. No one writes like that, nor should anyone. For the sake of a writing exercise, let’s try revising this choppy paragraph to hone our linguistic chops:
The airplane is an astounding achievement in the modern world. In modern times science and engineering advanced. This made it possible for the airplane to be developed. It has contributed to the complex global economy in which we all now live.
Three of those four sentences are simple, having one subject and one predicate each. (Remember that a subject may be compound, comprising two or more substantives, as is the case with the second sentence here: science and engineering. We can still call this the subject of the sentence.) The last sentence of the group is complex, with the addition of a relative (and therefore subordinate) clause as it concludes. We might very well compose a paragraph like this as an initial draft, with most of the sentences laying down a single thought as we try to assemble the facts we ultimately want to connect for the reader. These logically disconnected statements, though, if left unattended, will produce that choppy effect we are taught to avoid because too much disconnected precision gets old fast, particularly when such isolated statements are not meant to emphasize a dramatic assertion. (When they do so appropriately, the design is called segregated. For example, My career depended on this moment. I walked to the podium. I opened my notes. I began.)
But an initial draft, as we’ve agreed, is not a final draft, and so taking a moment to recognize the structure of what we first wrote will prompt new ideas for the first revision. We might note, for example, the proximity in which we twice use the adjective modern, once as the first sentence ends and then again as the second sentence begins. The idea of modernity seems to have been hanging imposingly in our mind as we began to write, and upon critical reflection, we can see that we’re just duplicating the idea because of its omnipresence. So our revision might be simply to delete it from the first sentence and let modernity present itself in the second sentence: The airplane is an astounding achievement. In modern times science and engineering advanced.
Now that change alone will not, of course, soften the blow of chopping ideas into simple statements. But if we look to the third sentence and see that we are thinking of a cause and effect relationship between the advance of science and engineering and the effect which that advance had on the development of the airplane, we can associate these two statements more closely together: Only in modern times, when science and engineering had sufficiently advanced, could the airplane be developed. Now we have tightened the importance of modernity by adding the adverb only, and we have made it clearer, by adding the adverb sufficiently, that modern science and engineering were, at least, a major cause. Adverbs of degree, like sufficiently, signal the coming of a result clause, which is exactly what could the airplane be developed constitutes. Both adverbs, only and sufficiently, now bring the second and third sentences more closely together.
We might leave the fourth sentence as it stands, but we should be aware of a temptation to avoid. The subject pronoun it refers to the airplane, and therefore it is correct in the initial version as we have it. The assertion of this last sentence involves the contribution airplanes have made to the world economy, and because no one airplane—the airplane—has made that contribution alone, we unconsciously feel the need to pluralize the original subject, as I just did at the beginning of this sentence. That would be a mistake, however, for two reasons.
First, the switch from singular to plural breaks the compositional parallelism good style tries to maintain; and second, it misreads what is called the generic article. To refer to the airplane in a context like this is to be thinking of the category of inventions called airplane. When we wish to refer to a category or class or genus of some objects, we use the definite article to make that reference explicit. We speak, for example, of the printing press when we mean all such devices which reproduce the written word in a certain mechanical way. Or we speak of the electric light bulb as a consequential invention for the advance of civilization, not meaning to refer to one particular bulb in a pack on the shelf.
None of these changes is particularly sophisticated, but together they add up to a more coherent passage. A contrary of choppy is flowing, and because our awareness knows that all things are connected, we respond more vitally when the language we read shows, either outright or subtly, that one thing follows another for a purpose and with effect. The artful composition which results, then, accords as it should with the nature of the world it is representing. It is possible to define artistic style as what remains in the absence of the distortions our overweening self-consciousness brings upon our otherwise clear and original vision of life in our mind. And, ironically, it might just be that chopping analysis which defeats itself in the end and leaves the life-giving flow of composition to itself.
***