To think about something critically, to be able to ask questions and evaluate their answers, involves what is called coherence. We pose and reply to questions with words, of course, and in the study of language, whether written or spoken, coherence is of primary importance. We make sense of things by understanding how they belong together, how they stick or cling together, the original meaning of the verb cohere. When someone answers a question with ideas which don’t cohere, their reply may be said to be inconsistent, incongruous—incoherent.

The principle of coherence controls the way we draft sentences and paragraphs because both of those literary devices are means by which we compose and promulgate our thoughts critically. Paragraphs are nothing more than a set of sentences written around one idea, and traditional writing manuals (among them The Technique of Composition by Kendall Taft et al. [1964], which defines a unified paragraph as one whose details “belong together,” and hence my use of that same phrase above) will regularly identify a number of techniques to achieve a coherent paragraph: logical order, grammatical transitions, and repeating phraseology, for example. Since we can learn to do the same by imitating our betters, here is an example from a major twentieth-century philosopher in which we may see how the first three sentences of a paragraph cling tightly together. The result is that we readers can push out from harbor confidently into the open ocean of an unfamiliar and difficult subject:

Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from three defects: it is cocksure, vague, and self-contradictory. The first step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects, not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative, precise, and self-consistent.

These three sentences constitute the opening of a nine-sentence long paragraph by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell in his Outlines of Philosophy (1927). Russell was known for his acute and pristine prose (he was a mathematician and logician, as well as a philosopher), and if we take the time to briefly analyze the way these three sentences cohere, we will understand how the technique of logical arrangement works and how to employ it ourselves.

His first sentence marks the unitary topic of the paragraph; it will stand as what is called the controlling idea, to which the ideas in every subsequent sentence in the paragraph must belong. Philosophy, it says, has something to do with real knowledge. The second sentence then picks up this idea of real knowledge and contrasts it with knowledge in ordinary life (let’s call it ordinary knowledge), identifying three characteristics (defects) of the way we usually think about things: we are often cocksure, vague, and self-contradictory. Notice thus far this order of ideas: philosophy and real knowledge, ordinary knowledge and its defects. Let’s label the scheme A, A, B, B.

Russell’s third sentence, however, is the jewel in the crown over this passage. It begins by connecting the idea of philosophy (A) with the idea of defects (B), using exactly the same two words used previously to tie the first two sentences together. This third sentence, however, continues with the introduction of lazy scepticism as a synonym for the idea previously named ordinary knowledge (B), and the sentence completes its logical arrangement by contrasting the ordinary characteristics of cocksure, vague, and self-contradictory with philosophy’s real knowledge (A): tentative, precise, and self-consistent. Note that these three terms correspond, word for word, as the opposite of the earlier-named three defects. Where the compositional design of the first two sentences is A, A, B, B, a simple arrangement to introduce the ideas which develop the controlling idea, the culminating third sentence rearranges the scheme into A, B, B, A in order to put those ideas into gear.

That’s just beautifully done, and all of it a masterful display of coherence, of choosing ideas that belong with one another and holding them together under an intelligible design. What is unknown will always appear difficult to us at first (here both content and form), but although these technical matters of composition will be important to the conscientious writer, it matters little whether a reader knows of or about them. What the tailor has done to make that dress drape so finely at shoulder, waist, and leg matters to the tailor; it is the integrity of the work that matters to us who observe it. Truth, what Russell calls here real knowledge, must likewise assume such integrity of workmanship. This should be the concern of every craft, but perhaps of the craft of language most of all, because the integrity—the coherence—of what we write and speak reveals the quality of our knowledge, whether it be merely ordinary and vague, or ultimately real and precise.

***

The word seems to be out that we could benefit, as persons and as a nation, of a little more critical thinking. But what does that mean? Emphatically, learning to think critically does not mean learning what to think; that is propaganda or ideology, which are forms of mental slavery and beneath the dignity of what we sense about ourselves as human beings. To think critically is the very opposite of these debasements: to ask questions and look for reasons. Those efforts get us moving in the direction of truth, what is common to all of us sharing an existence together.

One of the reasons the study of language and literature has held its importance in traditional education is that the written word is an artifact, a representation, of an author’s thinking. The words we read—their choice, their combination, their interlacing into sentences and paragraphs—reproduce a writer’s thinking, and that thinking in language can stay before us for however long we might wish until we’re sure we understand it both extrinsically and intrinsically. Grammar and logic and rhetoric worry about the extrinsic; our own experience and the maturity resulting from it depend on this outer understanding of the language, but then press on through it to meaning, wide and deep and consequential.

This primary importance of grammatical and rhetorical structure is why writers and thinkers care about language and work to use it well—and why we should be patient with ourselves in confronting a difficult sentence: it may make no sense to us because it is nonsense; but it may also not make sense to us at first reading because the thought it is expressing demands a more critical attention. And that can be all to the good, because working through a difficult passage will produce a habit of mind which we can apply to every sentence we read or hear, guarding against the easy, uncritical acceptance of thoughts we just want to believe, not thoughts which make sense in and of themselves. So there is much to learn from looking closely at a model of good, clear thinking.

Here’s an example of that, a short passage from a literary critic (Douglas Bush in his collection of essays entitled Engaged and Disengaged, 1966) writing about the humanities, what they are and why we should care to study them. Here he is contrasting the way in which science produces definitive conclusions with the varying judgments the humanities yield reader by reader. The study of Shakespeare gives him an example:

In the nature of the case there can be no final interpretation of the more complex works of art; as the history of Shakespearian criticism makes amply clear, some ages see and emphasize some elements, other ages other elements. Still, with all the cross-currents and eddies and occasional waterfalls, there is a general movement along or toward a central channel; as Shakespeare’s name again makes clear, peripheral fluctuations do not affect the stability of the general pattern.

That’s beautifully crafted, and its craftsmanship, if we read closely, can help us sail over some deep literary waters. Let’s recognize first that the passage comprises two sentences. The opening sentence states the argument: a work of art, say Shakespeare’s, can mean many things to many people. Now left unqualified, one could read that first thought to be asserting that there is, therefore, no objective meaning in any work of art, that since some see one element and others other elements, no central, perduring element exists and all is left to the solipsistic relativity of every ego that engages the work.

To preclude that erroneous conclusion, however, the writer begins the second sentence with the conjunction still. That sends up a flare, telling us to stop if we’re about to wander off in the direction of that relativity. Still is a stronger form of but, and what follows is the clarification: the fact that many may read many meanings in a work of art does not negate the fact that all those meanings still tend “toward a central channel.” Relativism has no central channel, but the writer has first skillfully enlivened his meaning with concrete images: cross-currents, eddies, waterfalls, and a channel, all consistent with the metaphor of river and tributaries which comprises the overarching, though unnamed, metaphor.

But images can have sharp edges, and if they’re not handled well, if they interestingly connote an idea but don’t clearly denote it, then those edges can shred the meaning of a metaphor apart. To prevent that—and this is one reason I judge this passage so well crafted—the writer quickly in the next clause ties the images in strict parallel back to their references: the cross-currents and eddies and occasional waterfalls are peripheral fluctuations, and the all-important central channel is the general pattern, whose importance lies in its stability, its constant truth, no matter time or place or person.

And the upshot of all this? That watching language keeps a guard on our coming to false conclusions. Without that qualifying second sentence, the writer would have risked the reader’s settling with a relativistic idea about the arts which he did not intend to hold. And likewise, without a reader who understands how the language works structurally—that essential conjunction still, the metaphoric images, the layout of the second sentence—another risk obtains: that we’re convinced we understand something we’ve read or heard when in fact we didn’t. We read tendentiously, finding only what we wanted to find.

So much depends on remembering that language is a common medium, one which writer or speaker shares with reader or listener. Propagandists and ideologues do not believe that. They shout to preclude questions and our asking for reasons. The antidote to all that nonsense is to be skilled in seeing how thoughts refine or disfigure themselves in language. There we can watch them, question them, and then say yes or no to them, dispassionately and more temperately, after comprehending their inner meaning by understanding their outer form. And that might just be a very good argument for the study of the humanities, the language and literature of our own priceless human awareness.

***

A reasonable case could be made, I think, to compare the language arts to the building arts. Both proceed on a plan, both involve materials to assemble, and both construct those materials into a design which offers shelter, one for the body and the other for the mind. And the comparison is instructive: if we regard the sentences we write as compositions—constructions we put together, we can set ourselves up to look for shapes which will be able to make our thoughts not only clear, but compelling as well.

Becoming proficient at anything means learning first from those who already know how to do it well. We have to have models and we have to understand them, how they’re constructed and on what design. Let’s look at an example from Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas” (originally published in 1930 and readily available now, along with many other fine pieces, in Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, Dell, 1982). A young woman, Laura, is being sung to by a man who waits for her every night, “pulling at his kinky yellow hair, thumbing the strings of his guitar, snarling a tune under his breath.” Porter then says of this man:

He scratches the guitar familiarly as though it were a pet animal, and sings passionately off key, taking the high notes in a prolonged painful squeal.

Can we not instantaneously sense (I almost wrote sniff) something about this man from that one keen sentence? Perhaps not (yet) of his moral character, but still something about his character in general: unrefined (he scratches his guitar), sentimental if not almost mawkish (his guitar seems a pet), and zealous (he sings and squeals passionately). We compose such a first impression from Porter’s vocabulary, but those individual words comprise only the materials she then must assemble into a sentence which has, if not consciously as we read it, a design perceptible when we analyze it. And understanding how a sentence is built is worth the doing, because it is the design we discover, the intelligible structure, which arranges a collection of words into a picture-producing statement.

We can classify sentences by three types: simple, compound, and complex. Porter’s example here is a complex sentence because it includes a subordinate clause (as though it were). Its other two clauses (he scratches and [he] sings) are independent, and they serve as load-bearing points, to each of which is attached a dependent element: the subordinate clause is affixed to the opening independent clause (he scratches), and the participial phrase (taking the high notes) is fastened to the second independent clause (he sings). As compositional elements, phrases are considered subordinate. The result is a design both balanced and parallel, a simple pattern we could express schematically as A B A B, where the letters A represent the independent clauses, and the letters B the dependent elements. In the terminology of classical rhetoric, such an arrangement is called an interlocked word order.

Balance and parallelism represent respectively steady weight and unfaltering order, qualities which make it easier for readers to mentally redraw the naturalistic image. The parallelism is not grammatically perfect (the first subordination is in the form of a clause, the second in a phrase), but reading with attention, we can still feel the sections crest and ebb, independent, dependent, independent, dependent. This linguistic patterning, like all design, is evidence of intelligibility, that there is something whose significance is to be felt (even if not seen) and understood: something reliable because it is meaningful. Like any self-respecting building, prose is built; it is a construction, not something simply jerry-built to catch an effusion of words. Real design and build as we find it in prose such as Porter’s can reveal the significant in the commonplace, and help us perceive more acutely what we might have overlooked too quickly.

***

Let’s pretend (and pretend we must) that I am a physicist and I open my prepared remarks before an audience like this: I would like this evening to say a few words about string theory, so that you might understand the basics of this complicated but amazing theory about the universe. Writing well involves not only questions of grammar, but also rhetorical choices, choices of style. In this opening sentence, where one decides to position the phrase this evening will change the character of the statement ever so slightly.

We should understand first that the phrase this evening is an adverb, specifically a temporal adverb, because it will be saying something about the time of whatever idea it is ultimately positioned to qualify. We should understand, too, that the temporal adverb is only one of a number of different kinds, each limiting in a different logical way the element it modifies. Adverbs of place, for example, have to do with location: I spoke to him in the lobby. Adverbs of manner concern the way in which something is done: that dog barked furiously at me. Adverbs of degree mark the magnitude of an action: they drove very fast down a country road. Such is the complexity (or probably better, the intricacy) of human awareness that grammarians have found numerous classes of adverbs to distinguish among; a practical number to recognize when revising our work, however, is four: time, place, manner, and degree.

Adverbs most often modify verbs (though they can modify adjectives and other adverbs as well), and where the adverbial phrase this evening stands now in our example sentence makes it unclear whether it is working with the preceding verb phrase, would like, or with the following infinitive, to say. In theory, which means here as a general rule, adverbs are governed by the law of proximity: they stand as close as they can to the word they modify. Whether that will mean before or after or between the modified elements will depend upon the kind of adverb it is. Adverbs of time, such as the phrase this evening, can be moved around quite liberally to rich and subtle effect.

If standing in this ambiguous position produces more uncertainty than I want to suggest, I could move this temporal adverbial phrase to the first position of the sentence: This evening I would like to say…. This, too, is an acceptable choice, but as a writer (or speaker) I should recognize that in this primary position, I am giving a decided emphasis to the idea of time: this evening, this particular occasion. The first and final positions of a sentence are always the most emphatic, and so if I decide that this emphasis is misplaced, I could reposition the phrase to stand immediately after the infinitive: I would like to say this evening…. That, however, might put an equally inappropriate emphasis on saying, as if to suggest I were about to assert something in opposition to something else, almost as if to be defending myself. Or I could decide to finalize the entire first clause with the adverb, establishing a more conclusive tone: I would like to say a few words about string theory this evening….

The point to notice here, then, is that so much depends on the right placing of the elements in a sentence. Not to hear the differences between these many rhetorical choices is to miss the chance both to create and to enjoy more of what lies beneath a simple-seeming thought. We’re often too ready to settle for less. My neighbor’s son, who is four years old, assured me the other day that he doesn’t need to study any more math when he begins first grade this fall because he “already knows math.” Preschool, it seems, was enough. There’s a lesson there, I thought: we all run the real risk of shortchanging ourselves when we believe there’s nothing more to discover. Though we inevitably come to realize how very wide and deep and rich is the world we find ourselves in, that expansive wealth itself can dull us early on into a routine of diminished expectations. Watching closely, as we must in the study and practice of writing, will help us keep our expectations high and wait for surprises everywhere—even in first-grade math.

***

Poetry has been described as a “concentrated language” whose words are freighted with meaning which the reader must take on and carry back to the idea they arose from. That phrase “concentrated language” belongs to the distinguished literary critic R. P. Blackmur, and he goes on to say that “poems remain obscure until the reader takes out what the poet puts in.”

Prose writers, unlike the poets, cannot expect their readers to meditate so deeply on the construction of their language. The contract they hold with their readers captions an entirely different set of mutual obligations. Clear prose must be clear first on the surface, and what may be found more deeply within the grammar should still not be necessary to understand the immediate significance of the sentences, what Blackmur calls “the bare indicative statement of experience.”

Take, for example, this profoundly prosaic sentence: That’s the best cake I ever ate. The surface meaning is clear enough quickly enough. The notions of a cake, of someone called I, of the action of having eaten are all so obvious that we cannot call this poetry in any real sense, because all of those ideas are straightforward, suggesting little beyond themselves. They are the facts they are, not loaded down by hints of deeper meaning. Still, the grammar of prose may be fraught with suggestions of a richer understanding if we take the time to ask questions of style and construction.

One such question might be this: what is the difference between the best cake I ever ate and the best cake I have ever eaten? The material difference lies with the verbs. Ate is the simple past tense of the infinitive to eat, and have eaten is its present perfect tense. The subjects of the two sentences (I) remain the same, as do the direct objects (the best cake) and the adverb ever. But it’s that last grammatical role, the adverb, which changes the cast of the two sentences. Understanding how is the contractual obligation of both the writer and reader.

Adverbs partially change the meaning of a verb or adjective or other adverb. The traditional terminology for this change is modify, and in the Latin etymology of that term we can see the function of an adverb more exactly: making or changing (-fy) the way (modus) in which a verb (or adjective or other adverb) means what it means. The adverb ever represents the idea of at any time, and in each of these two sentences, it is modifying the verb. The phrase at any time is a temporal idea, and a temporal adverb is just one of a number of different kinds: there are also adverbs of manner (well), adverbs of degree (very), adverbs of cause (why), and adverbs of result (therefore). So how does adding the idea of time to the verbs in these two sentences change the implications of each?

The simple past tense (ate) is meant to take a snapshot of a moment, to represent a slice of time in a time now gone. The present perfect tense (have eaten) refers not only to a single past moment, but to a stretch of the past whose effects are felt to continue almost to the present. The simple past makes no more exact a claim about a past moment than that something happened in the past somewhere; the present perfect suggests the possibility of an immediate past, one so recent, in fact, that its effects might still be felt. I can say I ate a piece of cake a month ago, but I can’t say I have eaten one a month ago. That past is now long gone.

So, to add the adverb ever to the simple past ate in the first example is to contort the purpose of that tense by making it try to extend its meaning at any time, even to the very recent past. But that is done better by the present perfect tense in the second sentence, which already has in its design the very purpose of including what might have happened only a moment ago. The character of a sentence depends in good measure on the perceptual character of the writer, but for that to mean something to us, we readers must bring our own awareness of how the language works if we want to gain the most we can from a writer’s words.

***