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There’s Some Problems Here

We remember, of course, the basic rule of grammar that a verb agrees in number with its subject: a client is, but clients are. Standard English word order requires that the verb follow the subject in declarative sentences, and that is what we have all come to expect: The client is in the conference room. Reverse the order, and we end up asking a question: Is the client in the conference room?

It’s easy to forget that straightforward rule, though, when we begin a sentence, as we very often do, with the phrase There’s. Take, for example, a casual exchange like this: “I can’t find anything to write with.” “There’s some pens in the top drawer.” Sentences like the latter are heard and spoken a thousand times a day; the meaning gets across, and the world doesn’t falter on its foundations.

But written language is, by definition, more formal than the spoken word, which means it pays closer attention to the elements and structure and arrangement of a sentence. Written language has settled down, so to speak, gotten a touch more mellow, and it wants to express ideas with that very care for exactitude that we normally throw to the wind as we live our days talking and shouting and running about. Formality, in writing, means being specific and precise; it doesn’t mean being stiff or stuffy or rule bearing.

So in the sentence There’s some pens in the top drawer, what exactly is wrong? The word There’s is a contraction, so we should first undo that and restore the full statement (it is always a good idea to do this before beginning an analysis): There is some pens in the top drawer. If next we ask ourselves just what is in that top drawer, we certainly would answer some pens, and we would just as certainly hear the plural. But the sentence has employed the singular is, and therein lies the problem. We can quickly correct the sentence, then, by changing the verb to its plural form to accord with the plural subject: There are some pens in the top drawer.

Why is this such a common mistake? The word there is an adverb, a word that expresses the idea of place or location, and when it is used like this to begin a sentence, it loses some of its adverbial strength. We might think of it as a springboard we use to jump into the real thought we want to say. In this first position, There serves simply to fill out the sentence by pointing to a general situation. So far so good, but in doing that, it also upsets the normal order of words. We usually expect the subject before the verb, but now the adverb has displaced the subject to assume a later place.

The real trouble begins, though, when the initial There swallows the verb to form a contraction. It muffles the sound of the verb, particularly in conversation, rushing us on to the subject and tricking us into using the wrong number of the verb, probably because it’s so much easier to say that one slurred syllable There’s than the jaw-jutting two-syllable There are. The grammar and logic of it all must predominate, though, because we are in fact referring to many particular pens.

Caution is in order, then, when we begin a sentence with There’s. Look for the subject to be sitting after the verb, and make sure the two agree. It’s a very common slip-up, and you’ll see and hear it a thousand times a day—which, of course, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable, just frequent.

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Actions, Not Things

Writing manuals will often talk about something called nominalization, the habit we have of too often preferring nouns to verbs as we construct sentences. It’s a prevalent phenomenon in modern writing, and why we do it has fascinating philosophical implications, because it points to the idea that we seem to perceive ourselves more and more to be living amidst a world of things rather than participating in a world of action. In an earlier post (Life Moves), I tried to show how one writer brought vigor and force to a descriptive passage by depicting what something is doing rather than what it is. The subject is important, and merits a few more words.

The term nominalization means, broadly, making nouns from verbs and adjectives, and as is so often the case, it’s a fine thing in its rightful place. Discursive prose is an instrument of reason, it’s how we make rational sense of the world we find ourselves in, and indeed the first principle of logic recognizes that the world is made up of things. But when we go so far as to regularly write sentences like My hope is that we can come to an agreement when we really mean simply I hope we can agree, things have taken a turn for the worse. The problem lies not in the grammar (both sentences are faultless) but in the rhetoric, the manner in which I am positioning an idea for the reader to observe.

In the sentence My hope is that we can come to an agreement, the subject of the main clause is my hope, and the thing called hope is apparently what I want you, the reader, to think about above all else; if not, I would not have placed that noun as the main subject. In doing that, however, I have transferred the action of hoping to its noun hope, putting myself in a position where I can only next say what that hope is; I am then only implying that I am hoping, not boldly asserting it. I am not, in other words, standing up with the courage of my convictions and speaking my mind directly; I’m sidling and wending my way timidly around, gently suggesting what perhaps I fear actually saying outright. And that is why this kind of sentence construction, if it becomes a habit, is so infuriating: it’s diffident and cautious and over-careful—all respectable things in their proper place, but determinedly out of place when we are writing to engage someone’s attention and say straight up what we believe and mean.

The problem, once again, lies not in the construction itself, but in its frequency. We cannot write English well without this arrangement, but we can choose it so often that we neglect other, stronger patterns. The trigger that fires it off is the verb is (notice there I just employed the construction myself). This verb and its many other forms (among them was, were, has been) predicates a condition or circumstance, the scene in which objects are seen. When used in this way, a noun will follow the verb is, and bring the whole construction into being: My hope is…. We end up bringing the reader’s attention to a situation, not to an agent acting in a situation, and therein lies the weakness we want to avoid.

All this, of course, should not allow loud bulls to roam freely in fragile china shops; caution and care are important in matters subtle. It does point our attention, though, to the indispensable importance of balance. If we revised every sentence we wrote, tying down every noun to its nominally proper role as subject or object, we would not be writing in the natural and forthright voice that is our aim. But if the balance is akilter, as it so often is in modern writing (and particularly in current business writing), then keeping our eye on the is + noun pattern can alert us to make an effective revision.

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Possessing the Apostrophe

A doubt that seems to bedevil the confidence of many writers is where, if anywhere, to put the apostrophe. Is it my dog’s collar or my dogs’ collar? It’s or its? The problem lies in the many duties we ask the apostrophe to perform, and sorting out two of the more common may begin to exorcise the trouble.

Very commonly, the apostrophe is there to show the possessor of something. If I complain that I cannot find the dog’s collar, I mean to tell you that I cannot find the collar that belongs to the dog. It may be true that I’m the one who put down the cash for it, but I bought it for the dog, and now he is the one to whom it belongs. I stress this point because the idea of possession is actually a little trickier than it may at first appear.

Possession always involves at least two entities: the possessor and the possessed. In English, the apostrophe points to the possessor (not all languages express possession that way), and remembering this can clear up one apostrophic problem quickly. So if the reality is that I have one dog and I cannot seem to find the collar that belongs to that one dog, then the dog’s collar is correct: the apostrophe is pointing back, so to speak, to the possessor. If, though, there had been a sale on collars one day and I had bought three of them for my one dog—and I cannot seem to find any of them, then my dog’s collars would be correct: the apostrophe still points to the possessor, my singular dog.

But the plot thickens. If I have a pack of dogs and I cannot find their collars, I would have to change the position of the apostrophe to point to the many possessors: the dogs’ collars, which means the many collars that belong to the many members of the unruly pack. And the only time it would be accurate to write my dogs’ collar would be to have only one collar for more than one dog (which, although one can never say never, would preclude my walking them all at the same time). To show possession, then, the apostrophe points to the possessor—most of the time.

But not always. Take the ruinously common confusion between its and it’s. Given all that we have just said about the apostrophe showing the possessor, one could reasonably infer that it would be correct to talk about my company’s family leave policy as it’s policy. But the word it is a personal pronoun (some others are I, you, he, she, they), and, as life would have it, English personal pronouns never use an apostrophe to indicate possession. So its policy it is.

It remains, then, to explain it’s. The apostrophe does more in English than simply indicate possession. It is often (very often) used to construct a contraction, the shortening of a word, phrase, or clause by omitting a letter, sound, or syllable. We see this use in words like can’t and don’t and haven’t. Thus, it’s is the contraction for it is, and it’s perfectly correct in It’s great to be on family leave.

Possession and contractions are two uses of the apostrophe. The mark is also used sometimes to form the plural of abbreviations (M.D.’s), and then there’s the matter of the possessive with the gerund. But that’s a longer story whose tale (or is it who’s tale?) will be told another time.

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However, the Conjunction

As a part of speech, the conjunction is said to join elements of a sentence, but we should remember that join means here to bring into some kind of relationship, whether that is to connect (as in, birds and squirrels) or to separate (as in, not in the tree but on the grass). Connecting and separating, associating and disassociating, is the gearbox of rationality, and generates the power of the language we write and speak every day.

Conjunctions are organized into two large groups, coordinating and subordinating, and the conjunctions within each group take on a specific logical role. Some, like and, are called additive conjunctions, because they increase the number of things seen to be related: I saw birds and squirrels in the tree. Other conjunctions, like but, are called adversative, because they contrast certain ideas: The squirrels were not in the tree but on the grass. And still others, like if, are called conditional, because they predicate a circumstance in which something else may or may not be true: If the squirrels were in the tree, the birds were on the grass.

Two conjunctions that are worth our attention for matters of style and punctuation are the adversatives but and however. These conjunctions, like all the others, can join nouns to nouns, phrases to phrases, and clauses to clauses, but it is in this last configuration that practical problems of composition often arise. In the sentence The grass needs to be cut, but the lawnmower is broken, the conjunction but is contrasting, or putting into some kind of opposition, the assertions of the two clauses (notice that a comma almost always precedes but when it joins two clauses). The two clauses are brief and uncomplicated, and so the simple monosyllable but does the job nicely.

If I expand the two clauses, though, and complicate the situation a little, I have the opportunity to use another adversative conjunction, however. Notice in particular the punctuation: There’s no doubt that the grass needs to be cut; however, the lawnmower I just bought won’t start. Because the adversative however is generally used to contrast longer, more involved ideas, it requires that the two contrasting clauses be separated by a semicolon (not a comma), and that a comma follow the conjunction. It is extremely common to see a comma here where the semicolon is required, but there is no way grammatically to justify that because the construction results in a run-on sentence. (This is explained in more detail in an earlier post, Running On and On.)

If I now choose to expand the statement even a little more, I can place the conjunction not at the head of the second clause, but somewhere within it. In this design, called a postpositive construction (postpositive derives from the Latin meaning put after), I isolate the conjunction with a pair of commas: There’s no doubt that the grass needs to be cut; the problem, however, is that the expensive lawnmower I just bought won’t start. This construction raises what is called the diction of the statement, the choice of words that produce a style appropriate to the audience and purpose at hand. By delaying the appearance of the conjunction, which is the signal of the logic, the reader is briefly held in suspense as to what the connection between the two clauses really is, and this uncertainty draws them more attentively into the run of the ideas.

Conjunctions are integral to the design of our sentences, particularly as we associate clauses one to the next and compose a context of ideas. The conjunctions we choose in joining clauses depend first on the logical connection we want to show, and then on the style of the document we are writing. The finish, as is ever the case with language, lies in such details of arrangement and punctuation.

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An Intricate Introduction

Here’s an example of an imaginative way to open a serious discussion. This is the first paragraph of the chapter entitled “The Age of Show Business” in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, an intelligent and thoughtful commentary on modern culture, published originally in 1985 and still in print—because it’s still relevant—today.

A dedicated graduate student I know returned to his small apartment the night before a major examination only to discover that his solitary lamp was broken beyond repair. After a whiff of panic, he was able to restore both his equanimity and his chances for a satisfactory grade by turning on the television set, turning off the sound, and with his back to the set, using its light to read important passages on which he was to be tested. This is one use of television—as a source of illuminating the printed page.

The thesis of the chapter, the point that Postman will ultimately make, is that “television does not extend or amplify literate culture.” He wants to stand in opposition to the idea, common at the time, that television could promote literacy and distribute its benefits to ever more people. Now that’s a heady subject, and the author decided to begin with this interesting (and perhaps a little snarky?) anecdote before beginning his sustained argument against the vaunted benefits of television.

Manuals of writing regularly tell us to find an interesting way to introduce our subject, and a story of using a television screen to light the printed page of a book is certainly an interesting innovation. But how does this unusual use of a television set make for an interesting introduction to a chapter about television and literacy? Understanding the connection here can open up possibilities for us as we begin our own expository compositions and as we read the work of others more closely.

Language (and some would say the arts more largely) works by putting things together, seeing one thing, seeing another, and then finding how the two are related in some way. When we compose a sentence, we are putting together (the Latin componere means exactly that) words and the associations they carry. But composing, of course, is more than just a matter of randomly picking and placing this word and that to form sentences. The images we choose must have some characteristic in common that will open us onto new meaning. When you bring the reader into another world, as Postman does here, you surprise them—and surprise is always interesting.

So in this opening anecdote, we have as principal images the words television, light, and printed page, and of these three, the word light is the common bond that bridges the other two, because a television emits the physical phenomenon of light, and the printed page, a book, can emit the light of knowledge. When Postman says, then, that the student used the light of the television only as a means to read, he is suggesting we think more deeply about the value of the mere light that television produces; it is, he is saying, only instrumental, and not the real light of knowledge that will enlighten us: we think the light of television is the light of knowledge, but it is not.

In reflecting imaginatively on the meaning of light, Postman defeats our expectation of the way something is commonly used, and thus turns our attention away from the object that everyone is saying is valuable, television, and directs it to what more and more people, apparently, believe is of diminishing value, the book. And that is right where he wants our attention to be, as he is about to launch into an extended argument in favor of reading, not watching.

To look so closely at the images we are reading or writing is to see different levels of reference. It seems to be intrinsically interesting to all of us as human beings to see a point of connection in our experience, to find in common things an unsuspected meaning that will transpose our experience into another register. And when we find such connections, the world we encounter in language becomes richer, more intricate—and more interesting.

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