If an acquaintance happened to mention to you casually one day that my house in Florida needs a new roof, you would be right to wonder just how many homes he in fact has. You would be right, that is, to infer that he had at least one other home, but what about the sentence structure of his remark would make that inference possible?

To infer means to conclude by reasoning (it is often confused with imply, meaning to suggest, which we may do reasonably or unreasonably); to reason means to move logically in our minds from what is known to what that something known entails. The problem with life, however, is that not everything ultimately knowable is immediately visible. Reason, therefore, involves analysis. The terms reason and analysis are close synonyms, but we can see better how this way of using the mind works by understanding the derivation of the term analysis.

In its original Greek, to analyze something means to loosen it apart, to isolate the components of something and see how one part works in relation to another. This is why the traditional way of studying language and composition has put so much emphasis on sentence structure. To be able to see the composing elements of a sentence and then be able to understand how one element connects grammatically to the next—this entire analyzing, or loosening, procedure matches in reverse the synthesizing, or binding, procedure by which the writer originally put the sentence together.

Reasoning and analysis can be, then, like a game of hide-and-seek. Something is lurking behind what we obviously perceive, and the game, the play of consciousness, is to look both at and behind what we are aware of; sometimes they are physical entities, called objects, and sometimes mental entities, called ideas. But the point, like the game, is always to find existing what we reasonably suspected was there all the time but didn’t immediately realize, to come upon what is connected in some way to what we already know to be true.

So when that acquaintance referred to his house in Florida, enunciating those words with no pause at all between the words house and in, he intended to use the prepositional phrase in Florida to define or differentiate the house to which he was referring. We can see this better if we remember that the phrase house in Florida is an elliptical variation of the clause house that is in Florida, and in that full grammatical statement, we can see that the noun house is being modified by a restrictive relative clause, that is in Florida. A relative clause is one which begins with a relative pronoun (here that), and a restrictive relative clause is one which is defining its antecedent (house) by attributing essential, characterizing information to it. The relative pronoun that can only be used restrictively, and such clauses are never set off with commas.

Thus, the house this person is referring to is his Florida house, as opposed, we may surmise, to some other one or many houses he might own elsewhere. We may infer this, then, because the speaker with his voice (or the writer with the pronoun that absent the commas) has taken the trouble linguistically to define, not merely describe, the house he is referring to. If the facts were otherwise, that the person had only this one home in Florida, then in speaking the sentence, there would be a brief (very brief) pause before and after the phrase in Florida, or in writing it, there would be the relative pronoun which, with commas isolating the relative clause: my house, which is in Florida, needs a new roof.

An analytical knowledge of sentence structure gives us the decided advantage in understanding not only what is explicitly heard or read, but what such explicit information implies—an important position to hold when we realize how much power what remains unspoken, as with the proverbial naked emperor, can really command.

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It is possible to think about the way we write and speak as the way we see the world. After all, we write and speak about something, and whether it’s ultimately true that there is an independent and real and lasting world outside our own minds (our commonsense notion which, surprisingly, not everyone has always believed), that is the view our language sets up for us: a noun as a subject confronts the world through a verb whose action pounces on another noun as object. According to this linguistic structure, every last person and thing and event stands in some kind of active or passive relation to some other agent.

So it is, then, that our prosaic world requires prose. Or could it be that we make the world prosaic with our prose? I might wish to tell you, for example, that the sun is rising, and if my intention is to say that there will soon be light enough to take out the garbage and feed the birds, then that simple sentence of subject and predicate gets the job of referring to such an ordinary routine done and done well. But at another moment, in another circumstance that is not quite so utilitarian, I might be wishing to turn your mind elsewhere to perceive realities our ordinary attention precludes. I might, for example, say not that the sun is rising, but that the sun, our light, is rising, and in doing so be evoking, and not simply indicating, realities that are more than sensible. There would be, after all, no reason to add the noun light if I wished you to see only what your eyes could see.

Language as fact, then, turns toward the logical, but language as evocative bends toward the poetic. But what does the logical or the poetic really mean? To our logical, reasoning, everyday mind, the world is made up of things. In such an indicative, factfinding configuration, our attention sees this thing and says that about it. We visually perceive the three dimensions of length and breadth and depth, but seem to register only two, length and breadth: the depth of things, where they resonate and produce their peculiar timbre, is often silent. Such would be the case if I told you that the weather is cold, the branches are bare, and the birds are gone, three thoughts across three clauses, each as frozen and frigid as the scene I see.

But if I stood before the same circumstance and bent instead poetic, I might, were I Shakespeare, say this of those cold, denuded trees as winter approaches: When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang (Sonnet 73). What has happened now to all the facts? The cold weather of my logical mind has become the time when yellow leaves hang on shaking boughs, and my factual bare branches without birds have become bare ruin’d choirs. All of this poetic language marks a poetic vision, a kind of sight, or more properly insight, which restores and resounds the dimension of depth which my logical, factual, indicative prose statement remained deaf to.

But where does this depth (and we could just as rightly call it height) lead? Or where does it originate? The poets will tell us they are still here with us in this familiar world, but seeing through it to something else, or, better, seeing the same familiar world from an angle different from the one which both they and we take while on our daily rounds. They will tell us they have to twist the language a bit in order to strike the spark from the stone. Where we must speak of dimensions, they will smile and tell us in so many words that what they can see from their poetic angle is right here—hidden or hiding, but right here nonetheless, an open secret published when nouns and verbs work together with a twist, which is to say with image and irony.

The poetic is the depth of prose, something we recognize because we too have known it. Poetry at its best, as the English poet John Keats said, should “strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” And if we ask, a remembrance of what? we flump for a moment back down into prose, where all those ordinary things obscure our insight and leave our world bare again indeed.

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An early obstacle one comes up against on the road of grammar and style is the towering habit English has of using a string of words as one part of speech. The science of grammar, as opposed to its art, is meant to give us the rationale by which to revise skillfully what we have managed to get down in a first draft. Without a working set of principles in our mental kit, we are like the proverbial monkey pounding playfully at the keyboard: yes, he might, just might, through the reaches of infinite time compose a Rachmaninoff prelude, but it’s the long way home. A little science can shorten the artful road quite a bit.

Take, for example, this not uncommon sentence: He denies that he ever said that. How should we go about analyzing it in an effort to become more comfortable (because more conscious of principles and techniques) in revising our work? We begin, always, by isolating what we are about to examine in order to focus our attention and limit the number of possible questions we could ask. We can do this by rewriting the sentence, by speaking it aloud, by placing brackets around it—whatever works to keep our eyes on just this specimen we’ve put under the grammatical microscope.

Next, we frame out the sentence by placing a vertical bar (literally or mentally) between the subject and predicate of every clause we find in the sentence. Here our framing would look like this: He | denies that he ever said that, and with that simple device we discover that the predicate is fairly elaborate, comprising six of this seven-word sentence. That observation will help us in our analysis, because after identifying such an unelaborated subject, we can focus our attention another degree more precisely on the heart of the statement. Whereupon we now find that denies is the verb, the central axis of a predicate; and finally we determine  that this verb is transitive, which means it will require a direct object to complete its predication.

Now things get logically interesting, because how, really, are we to answer the question what did he deny? Or to put the query grammatically, what is the direct object of the transitive verb denied? Our temptation, no doubt from our school days, is to look for one word, perhaps because we were taught that every word must take on a grammatical role in a sentence. That, of course, is true, but the practical work of revising (and the logical work of comprehending) is very often accomplished from some altitude over the grammatical ground. That is to say, we cannot answer what he, the subject, denied by any one of the remaining five words of the predicate alone. He did not deny that, he did not deny he, he did not deny ever: he denied that he ever said that, which in grammatical composition is a noun clause.

A noun clause? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? We think of a noun most often as one word, and we have learned that a clause is a group of words with a subject and verb of its own. How could a clause, then, be a noun? The answer, practical and practicable, is that grammatical analysis is always twofold: we must account for both form and syntax, or grammatical element (word, phrase, or clause) and the acting part of speech (one of the eight categories of noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, verb, conjunction, preposition, interjection). Realizing, then, that we can only know how a sentence is operating by understanding both these modes—what we are looking at (form) and how it is functioning grammatically at the moment (syntax), the contradiction of the term noun clause is only apparent. All of those five words, that he ever said that, are cemented together into the form of a subordinate clause as the direct object of the transitive verb denies. We have, thus, reduced a quintuple problematic to a unitary answer.

And that bit of grammatical science can yield other artful possibilities: he denies he ever said that, he denies ever saying that, he denies his ever having said that—or perhaps simply he denies it. The choice is now the writer’s, but it will be an informed choice made confidently.

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Students of the Chinese martial art tai chi learn a pose in which they extend both hands, cupping them into the shape of a sphere while each hand (each half of the sphere) remains separated from the other. They are then told to imagine that both their hands are pushing on a rubber beach ball which they will carry and present to someone else. They are to imagine, that is to say, a resistance between their two hands held some distance apart.

I just described the posture of the hands in two ways: to imagine a rubber beach ball between them and to imagine resistance between them. Which of those images is the more effective in representing what needs to be done? Which would help you hold your hands in the intended shape more easily? Most of us, I think, would say the image of a rubber beach ball. But why? The answer can help us write in a livelier way.

The study of writing has traditionally been associated not only with grammar, but with the discipline of logic as well. That study (and even just the word logic itself) has never enjoyed a particularly robust reputation, but since logic has to do with thinking and thinking has to do with writing, we are well served to understand some of the basics of this long-standing subject. Logic in its traditional rendition (also called classical or Aristotelian, in contrast to modern, logic) begins with what it calls the three acts of the intellect: simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning. The first is concerned with how we put words to the things we perceive in the world, the second with the statements we make with those words, and the third with the conclusions we come to in thinking about the connection, or implication, of statements when they are considered together.

It is the first of these acts, simple apprehension, that concerns us here. Grammar will talk about the difference between a concrete and an abstract noun, but behind that distinction is logic’s more complete understanding of the way we put words to our perceptions. Traditional logic maintains that the ideas we have in our minds, and about which we compose sentences to think and to communicate with others, come in the first place from the things we perceive with our senses. We do not arrive on the human scene, so to speak, with any preconceived notions; what we come to understand and to put into words first and foremost comes to us by our looking out on the world, sensing it, and then forming an image—an idea—of what we’ve gotten tangled up with in living our lives. The traditional understanding has it that we conceive an idea by observing an object.

Now when we observe an object by seeing or hearing or touching or tasting or smelling it, grammar calls the word we use to name that thing a concrete noun. But when we observe an object—say that beach ball—very closely, we can identify certain qualities, or characteristics, it possesses. The air inside a beach ball prevents my hands from touching each other as I try to push them together. Something resists my effort to unite them, and that fact which I feel working against my intent I call resistance, an abstract noun because I have drawn away (abstracted) with my mind some quality, some attribute or peculiar habit of the beach ball from the ball itself. And my mind is the only place where abstractions are possible. An abstraction, therefore, is an idea about an idea. We also know it as self-consciousness.

And that observation can make all the difference in how precise and how forceful are the sentences we compose. If it is true, as traditional logic has it, that every last idea there is has originated in objective things in the world, then the closer I can stay to the concrete nouns which name those real things, the stronger, the livelier, the more pungent will be the sentences with which I communicate my ideas to others. And that is why it will be easier for the tai chi student to assume that basic pose with his hands by conceiving of a concrete beach ball and not of an abstraction named resistance: the concrete noun stands closer to the object that generated the idea in the first place.

All of which is to say that we as writers are to prefer the concrete to the abstract, recognizing at the same time that this is ultimately a counsel of perfection, an unrealizable ideal in every instance, but a standard nonetheless at which we should always aim. Not I noticed his anxiety, but I saw his hand trembling. Not I saw an impression of anger in his eyes, but he glared at me. Events, as this second example shows, are concrete too. At our best we live close to the world of things. That is where our thinking arises, and to write well, we should try as best and as often as we can not to slip away too far from our simple apprehension of that creative and creating source.

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The agreement we hold—human to human, citizen to citizen—is that we are telling one another the truth. So obvious is this that even those who know they are not speaking the facts are telling their lies on the presumption that they are true, because no one believes what a liar says is a lie. Truth backs even what is untrue.

That same tacit and civil agreement of saying things as we truly see them stands also behind the relationship between writer and reader, in nonfiction of course, but even in the fictional world of novel or short story. What a writer writes will stay silent on the page unless and until there comes along some trusting someone who is willing to give the writer the benefit of the doubt and begin to read what one presumes to be the truth. That is to say, we must allow ourselves to be ushered into an unfamiliar world, the world the writer has conjured for one of any number of possible reasons: merely to entertain, or to expose, or to teach. But then we must give ourselves over on the presumption of truth and coherence until incoherence or bad faith reveal themselves.

Hence the very great (could we ever say too great?) importance of understanding how language works. In 1925 and so after the First World War, the American novelist Earnest Hemingway wrote a very short story entitled “Soldier’s Home.” Hemingway is known for his peculiar style, “clipped and staccato, colloquial, with short sentences and monosyllabic words, often repeated in a free-verse effect, and an extremely simple, detached, ‘hard-boiled’ narrative technique” as Benet’s indispensable Reader’s Encyclopedia succinctly puts it. And indeed the second paragraph of Hemingway’s story illustrates that idiom:

There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with two German girls and another corporal. Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms. The German girls are not beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the picture.

Such a style can make it easy for us to give ourselves over to the verisimilitude of characters and events Hemingway is drawing out. There is little not to understand there, and this series of straightforward subjects and predicates continue for another paragraph and a half until we learn that Krebs, a soldier who has returned home later than most others in his town, could not get a hearing about his wartime experience unless he lied by embellishment about it: “his town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities.” And so Hemingway has raised the enduring question of memory, and whether, as the story unfolds, our deliberate lying about our past comes in the end to belie ourselves. In order to depict such moral confusion, Hemingway’s short, clipped sentences give way to this one long and winding and confusing twofold predication which takes us off guard on first reading:

All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

So as close readers, what are we to do when we suddenly come upon a difficult passage like this in a story whose much simpler language has made it attractive for us to let down our critical guard and trust? Ideas, simple or complex, are carried in forms, and so if we are prepared to analyze the language, we can find the ideas and their connections, no matter how tricky the sentence structure might be. Sentences are made up of clauses, and every sentence which is not a fragment must have at least one independent clause. Every clause, in turn, has a bony structure, a skeleton of subject and predicate which carries the weight of the meaning it wishes to communicate. In this long, sixty-three-word, un-Hemingwayesque sentence, that skeletal notion is nothing more than the one subject the times, and the one compound predicate for that one subject lost their quality and were lost themselves.

That is not an easy sentence, hardly the cool and clear structure typical of Hemingway. Rather, it is a distorted rhetorical statement: the first twenty-two words to the semicolon go nowhere grammatically, a figure of speech known as anacoluthon, the want of grammatical sequence. With such grammatical confusion, Hemingway might very well be mirroring Krebs’s own disarranged interior life, which may be prompting his readiness to lie as he rehearses his memories from the front lines of war and tries to secure the acknowledgement of it he so desperately needs. But literarily, we are supposed to stumble over that sentence, whose meaning will hit us all the more dramatically because we had first given ourselves over, in the civilized presumption of coherence, to an ordered world the author had invited us to enter.

We cannot say that Hemingway tricked us, because he did not write in bad faith. But we can remind ourselves that to expect always the simple and unvarnished truth plainly expressed (Then why didn’t he just say that if that’s what he meant?) is to forget that even what is true, literally or fictively, can be at times cunningly hidden under cover of conflicting desires and duress. In literature and life both, a critical spirit will serve us well.

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