Precision, concision—confusion. Being precise and concise are hallmarks of good writing, but too much of any good thing turns into its opposite. I saw recently a community board posting on social media similar to this one, and it offers a review exercise for us to figure out just what went wrong. Here is my facsimile of the original post: Looking for help. It’s my friend’s birthday next week and there’s too much to do. He is a big hunter and wanted to have animal cookies made. So did the writer want to have animal cookies made, or did the hunter friend want his party to include a whimsical treat?
What’s going on grammatically here at the point of confusion is called a compound predicate, and if such arrangements are not constructed and punctuated correctly, confusion will result. We remember that every thought we wish to communicate in expository prose is composed of a subject and a predicate. The subject is the notion we wish to say something about, and the predicate, which is where the finite verb will appear, states what we want to say about the subject. The whole project of rationality is a function of naming and asserting, naming and asserting, over and over again as we build up sentences into a paragraph. Each time we combine a subject with a predicate we produce a clause. Sentences, then, are composed of one or more clauses.
From a logical point of view, strictly speaking (and very strictly so), we can only say one thing at a time about one notion, which means we should only have one idea (called a substantive) in the subject and one verb in the predicate. Such bare statements are called in logic categorical propositions, and they are useful as laboratorial ways to isolate the exact idea someone is predicating something of. Were we to limit our natural language to such an extreme analytical way of expression, however, our readers and interlocutors would soon swoon and fall from the unrelieved tedium of it all. There is, thankfully, a sharp difference between a writer’s sentence and a logician’s proposition. The latter is a steely analytical tool absent of rhetoric; the former is a representation of our thoughts in language both logical and rhetorical.
The grammar and composition of natural language tell the laboratorians to get on with it, giving us all the okay to compound both the subjects and predicates of our sentences in a display of diversity, should the set of ideas under discussion be manageable enough to avoid misunderstanding. To say that I will have a birthday party for my friend is to make a single assertion with a simple subject and simple predicate, simple meaning only one notion in the subject and only one finite verb form in the predicate: I a personal pronoun naming the substantive, and will have, the future tense of the verb to have making an assertion.
Let’s take this theory now and apply it to the example under consideration. When the writer of the post says that He is a big hunter and wanted to have animal cookies made, the subject is simple because only one notion is named (he), but the predicate includes two finite verbs, is and wanted, creating the compound predicate (the phrase to have is a infinitive form of a verb; infinitives do not form part of the mechanics of a clause). On the face of it, this construction intends to assert that the subject he should stand as the subject for both the two verbs: he is a big hunter and he wanted to have animal cookies made. We are justified in coming to this conclusion (the unexpected possibility notwithstanding) because there is no comma separating the two verbs of the compound predicate.
In all likelihood, however, the writer’s intention was different. He or she had begun the post with the plea looking for help, and the sentence immediately before the one we’re analyzing suggested that time was running out, there being too much to do. That circumstantial evidence is sufficient for us to reason that it was the writer, not the hunter friend, who wanted the animal cookies made for the party; that, however, is not what the sentence says. So what to do?
The fix could not be simpler: add the pronoun I before the verb wanted: He is a big hunter and I wanted to have animal cookies made. That’s the obvious correction, so what more can we learn from this slip? First, that compound predicates are condensed statements of otherwise discrete, simple assertions: is and wanted mean he is and I wanted, two distinct predications which logical thought will require to be differentiated; second, that compound predicates are a fine and common way of creating sentences as long as ambiguity does not result; third, that a compound predicate usually does not separate its verbs with a comma when the subject is simple (he is a hunter and travels to the north woods); and fourth, in such sentences, however, we may nonetheless place a comma between the two verbs if one of them (usually the latter) is long and involved (he is a hunter, and travels to the north woods every fall to meet up with friends at a camp on the border). Such punctuation is called a rhetorical comma: it works to separate semantic groups, not for logical accuracy but for readier comprehension.
One final point. Some readers will notice that I did not include a comma between the two independent clauses of the revised version (He is a big hunter and I wanted to have animal cookies made). The standard rule is to insert a comma between independent clauses when the subjects are different (as here), but one is at liberty to omit it, as the Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “if the clauses are very short and closely connected.” As frustrating as it can be at times to know what to do, especially in matters of punctuation, an acquaintance with the rules and knowing when to suspend them lie at the heart of art, and this surety requires that sixth sense which only comes with reading and more reading, writing and more writing.
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