Let’s return to a question of grammatical craft. Here are two sentences, identical except for one comma: He knew, and said nothing. He knew and said nothing. Does the comma make any real difference? In fact, that simple piece of punctuation makes quite a lot of difference, and understanding how can make us more sensitive to the implications of what we hear and read. Let’s analyze each sentence and see what the two structures reveal.

A sentence is a statement of at least one thought, and we identify a thought by noting a subject joined with a predicate. Each of these two sentences, therefore, has logically two thoughts: he knew and [he] said nothing. For purposes of analysis, we bracket the pronoun he in the second clause to mark the ellipsis of the subject. An ellipsis is the omission of a word, for reasons of style, which is otherwise necessary to the grammar or logic. Here, given the brevity of the sentences, it is clear that the subject of the first clause is to be assumed as the subject of the second clause, and so the writer has omitted the obvious reference in order to gain a more casual, or conversational, style. As we will see, this will affect how the two statements differ in their implications.

The first clause, he knew, illustrates what is called an absolute transitive verb. A transitive verb is one which employs a direct object, best understood as the entity (person, thing, or idea) which the verb is targeting. To write, for example, that he knew the situation, or that he knew what had happened, the transitive verb knew, in both instances, would have a direct object: the noun situation and the clause what had happened. Either of these direct objects might well apply logically to the sentences we are examining, but neither is stated, and so the transitive verb knew is understood to imply an object, not expressly denote one. The verb, in other words, is working in isolation, or absolutely. This is not the case with the verb of the second clause, said, which has a clearly stated direct object, the noun nothing.

If it is true that a comma cuts, which is to say that the principal function of a comma is to separate elements which could otherwise be read together, what is the comma of the first sentence separating? The two clauses, which means each is to function sufficiently on its own—and that makes it clear that the verb knew in the first sentence must be acting absolutely, for there is no other noun in that clause, cut to a close by the comma, which could be its direct object: He knew—something, we’re not told what, and with that ambiguity, the writer has set us to imagine what the subject knew and in the face of which he said nothing. The absolute transitive verb has thrown the burden of knowledge onto the reader, producing a sarcastically insinuating tone.

But notice now how very different is the design of the second sentence. There, no comma separates the clauses, and that combines what are two distinct clauses in the first version into what can be understood now as one clause with a compound predicate. Thus it is entirely possible to read the noun nothing in this second version as the direct object of both the verb said and the verb knew: He knew nothing and [he] said nothing. This statement is insinuating nothing whatsoever, and the only revision one could make to strengthen it stylistically would be to restore the ellipsis of the second subject to make the logic unmistakable.

The very different readings which result from including or excluding the comma in these statements arise because the verb knew is transitive. No ambiguity would exist, for example, in a sentence like He smiled, and said nothing, because smiled is intransitive, and so cannot grammatically associate itself with the noun nothing. A comma might nonetheless be included for purely rhetorical reasons, to separate the first clause in order to isolate it and thereby strengthen its emotional consequence. But all of these revisions depend on one essential requirement: a clear awareness of what might be said—and not said.

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The way to do that, the only way to get something square into something round, in fact, is by sheer and deliberate unrelenting force. An act of willfulness, in other words. And what you will always have afterwards is a shambles of pieces and fragments and nothing at all that fits together harmoniously.

So what does this have to do with writing? Forcing ourselves to think of something to say—trying to make words mean something—is a common way to try to write, and an even more common way to try to revise what we’ve written unsuccessfully. We convince ourselves that we can build ideas with sentences, and since sentences are made up of words, well, it’s just a matter of finding another noun or verb, we believe, to pound our square thoughts home.

The language that results from this way of writing, to say nothing of the frustration and displeasure from working this way, is labored and studied and intensely self-assertive. We are trying to do something, when we should instead be allowing something to happen. But something happens, an insight arises, a thought comes, only when our attention is turned receptively, not graspingly, toward an idea we have in mind. And when we have trained our inner eye long and gently enough on the idea that has come to us, the expression of it takes form of itself—to the degree, that is, that we have readied ourselves beforehand to use the language adroitly. Fortune, as the classical world used to say, favors the prepared.

This misunderstanding of what writing is about centers around a confusion between ideas and thoughts. In casual conversation, we use these two words synonymously, but in the art of writing (and, in fact, in any art), an idea is the object of a thought, it’s what a thought is trying to give expression to. Ideas are quite alive in and of themselves; they are those mental pictures we carry in our heads, and it’s a mystery where they really reside and how they decide to arrive. But when we turn our thinking minds in their direction, they will play themselves out before us, giving us a picture all at once of what we mean to say. The action and initiative resides with them, and if we let them have their play and give them ground, they will take root and increase and fruit. But we must watch and not interfere, until it’s time to harvest the best of them.

And harvesting just might be another word for thinking, because when we harvest, we take and trim and prepare something to be consumed, which is just what we’re doing when we find the words and phrases to transform an idea first seen whole with our mind’s eye into a digestible thought. Ideas appear in language as nouns or phrases; the phrase finally speaking about it, for example, might be an idea that comes to us as we ponder a difficult moment with a friend. Recognizing that phrase as the idea, we could then turn to the actual circumstances in which that idea, we remember, had taken real life: after so long, he finally put down his fear and spoke to me about what had happened. All that is the linguistic structure composed of subjects and predicates, the dual mechanism of any thought, that renders the idea into a visible shape. Ideas have no time or space, but thoughts do. And as we begin to write, we begin really to compose, to put subjects to verbs, describing the one and finding a tense for the other, making a place and time for the idea that came to us to live again in our words. And with ideas made manifest like this comes their illumination.

Ideas, we might say, are round, and our thoughts square, and never will the two fit together perfectly. But art, including the art of writing, is not about perfection, but harmony: welcoming ideas to shape and fit, not shaping and fitting words to make the ideas we want. When we find ourselves processing words (the irony of the phrase cannot escape us), we’re wasting our time and energy both. Better to pause and look away, attend again to the mental picture before us, and simply and naturally speak our mind. Then, and only then, should we begin the more deliberate, assertive work of analytical revision.

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Every art has its special vocabulary: think of painting’s chiaroscuro and impasto, or dressmaking’s basting and bias. The art of writing, too, has its peculiar terms, one of which is the unusual verb appose, meaning to place one element (a word, phrase, or clause) immediately after another element in order to amplify the meaning of the first. As tangled as that definition might sound, we compose our words like this all time, as when one might say, for example, that my best customer, an independent bookstore in Maine, has enjoyed record sales this past year. The phrase an independent bookstore in Maine is being apposed to the subject phrase my best customer in order to tell the reader, almost as an aside, a little more about the best customer without constructing an entirely new independent clause.

From this verb appose we get the nouns appositive and apposition, both also part of the technical lexicon of writing. Analyzing our example further, then, we say that the phrase an independent bookstore in Maine is an appositive to the phrase my best customer. When the information the appositive carries is merely descriptive, as in this example, we call it a nonrestrictive appositive; when the information is not merely descriptive but actually defining or identifying, as for example in the sentence the author Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925, we call it a restrictive appositive—restrictive because the subject author has now been specifically named as Flannery O’Connor. Remove that restrictive appositive, and the reader would not understand what author was being referred to—many were no doubt born in 1925. (These two examples, by the way, illustrate a still non-negotiable rule of English punctuation: nonrestrictive appositives are set off by commas; restrictive appositives, never.)

But as helpful and sometimes essential as appositives are, we have to be careful about where we place them. Here’s a sentence I modeled off a longer one I read recently which was exactly similar in structure: Many rare works can be found in the town’s small library, of unusual character, which one would not normally expect to come upon even in the large collections of major universities. What was of unusual character, the rare works or the small library?  The key to successful apposition is proximity, so a strict interpretation of this sentence would conclude that the writer meant to point to the small library’s unusual character: the two phrases stand next to each other, and the second, set off by commas, adds descriptive information to the first.

But logic (or what is sometimes called the universe of discourse) also has to be considered, and because the earlier noun works had already been heightened by the adjectives many and rare, a reader could reasonably understand the writer to mean that these same works were not only many and rare, but of unusual character as well. Under this interpretation, we would have to understand that the appositive unusual character as been displaced from its logical referent by eight words purely for the sake of emphasis; the writer would then be expecting the reader to take the first eleven words as one syntactic group, with the appositive at some distance and set off with commas, modifying the central idea of that group, many rare works. This would produce a more conversational tone, because we often simply append thoughts to our sentences as we create them in speaking them.

So should we say that this second example is emphatic or ambiguous? Without having a context, the larger paragraph in which the sentence sits and probably the paragraph before it as well, we really can’t render a judgment. But we can take the caution that the line between emphasis and ambiguity can be fine at times. Some good writers will deliberately want the ambiguity in order to create a richer world of meaning: both those many rare works and the small library itself were of unusual character. But the standard to use both in controlling the sentences we write and in interpreting the sentences we read, is that the appositive immediately follows its referent. From there, we can move things around, carefully.

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It is a common misconception that a good writer doesn’t begin a sentence with a conjunction. Here’s a very nice passage that will illustrate that the truth is otherwise. Gilbert Highet was a Scottish-American classical scholar and teacher of the last century, and these two sentences are from his grand The Classical Tradition, published by the Oxford University Press in 1949. Note how the conjunction but begins the second sentence, alerting the reader to the contrasting (and perhaps surprising) idea to come. He is speaking here of Greco-Roman civilization:

It was, in many respects, a better thing than our own civilization until a few generations ago, and it may well prove to have been a better thing all in all. But we are so accustomed to contemplating the spectacle of human progress that we assume modern culture to be better than anything that preceded it.

A conjunction is one of the eight parts of speech of traditional grammar. Each part of speech names how a word is working grammatically in a given sentence, and the specific function of a conjunction is to connect, or associate, one word or phrase or clause to another. A simple enough idea, until we realize that things can be connected in many different logical ways. I might say, for example, that I have to go to the store to buy bread and lettuce, and the function of the conjunction and in that phrase would be merely to add one thing, one noun, to another. But the idea of addition, or accumulation, is different from the idea of contrast, or opposition, which is the distinct purpose of the conjunction but, as we can see it working, for example, in the sentence It’s sunny but cold today. I could have written sunny and cold, but if my intent was to contrast the actual cold temperature with the thought of warmth commonly associated with the sun, then the contrastive but would serve my purpose better (because my thought will be more accurate) than the additive and.

Now contrast, or opposition, is just the idea Highet intended to signal by beginning his second sentence with the conjunction but. His first sentence carries two assertions: that Greco-Roman civilization was “in many respects” better, and that it might ultimately prove to have been better in every respect. Two clear, parallel assertions. And so when the next word we read is but, understanding that the function of that conjunction is to mark an upcoming contrast, our attention is thereby placed perpendicular to the two parallel ideas and we are readied for this opposing thought: our assumption that modern culture is better than anything before it might not be correct, no matter how dazzled we are by all we’ve invented and enjoy.

Highet’s passage is compositionally involved, and his choice to array the opposition across two sentences helps him control his thoughts as he presents them. But it can help us to ask what other choices he might have had. Could he have replaced the period before but with a comma, combining the two sentences into one? Read the passage again with that change and you’ll see that the two opposing ideas slur together, buffing away the emphasis. He could, though, have used a semicolon where that same period is, still combining the two sentences into one, but now one so stately, almost statuesque, that its style would not have matched the general audience he was addressing.

Choices like these depend ultimately on the relationship one assumes to the ideas being expressed. Style is character, and character is a deep mystery. It can help as a basis, though, to understand the current rules of grammar together with their reasons, and there’s no argument against beginning a sentence with a conjunction—for all the reasons just mentioned.

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When we think about writing, most of us likely think first of sentences. We write by writing sentences. Little to argue with there, but it can help us to remember that sentences are constructed; they are objects we have put together in a certain way so that our readers can get into the same state of mind we were in as we were thinking what they’re now reading. Our sentences can take on various shapes, and the shapes they ultimately assume are the shapes of our thoughts.

The sentences we write, then, express our thoughts, but it’s not correct, nor is it practically helpful, to define a sentence simply as a group of words that express a complete thought. It is correct, though, and much more helpful, to say that a sentence expresses at least one complete thought, because if one sentence can carry more than one thought, we have to be able to identify those potentially many thoughts within one sentence in order to shape and order them most effectively for our readers. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s imagine these three ideas: an improving housing market, my decision to sell my home, and a quick sale. Notice that each of these statements is a phrase—no subject connected to a verb, each just a group of words related in some way and pointing to an idea. Now we convert an idea into a thought by identifying a subject and joining that subject to a verb—that’s the definition of a clause, and so every clause expresses one thought. From the idea of an improving housing market, we might construct the thought the housing market was improving; from the idea my decision to sell my home, we might build the thought I decided to sell my home. And from the idea of a quick sale, we might produce the thought it sold quickly. Three subjects each with their own verb, hence three clauses and therefore three thoughts. And to communicate those three thoughts evenly, we might at first wrap them all up in one straitly straightforward compound sentence: The housing market was improving, I decided to sell my home, and it sold quickly. Flat, unemphatic, and so simple as to be simplistic.

Why simplistic? Because life unfolds in time, and time implies cause, and cause involves effect, all making for movement and change and the novelty which results from that. The three thoughts in that first compound sentence, in other words, were not logically connected with one another, just placed next to one another. The design of that compound sentence is technically termed paratactic: one thought laid right beside another thought, with no word of how one is related reasonably to the next. Sometimes the occasion calls for just such a sentence design, but we surely want to know what other choices we have to order our thoughts into a hierarchy of some sort, the better to have them conform to the complexities of life as most of us feel it, sometimes serenely, sometimes anxiously.

And it’s right here that distinguishing between a phrase and a clause can be so practically helpful. The opposite of a paratactic arrangement of clauses in a sentence is called hypotactic, where we subordinate one thought to another, thereby producing a richer, more involved—and so likely more interesting—written scene. We could, for example, transform the first independent clause of our paratactic design into a subordinated one, putting the third thought into a sentence of its own: Because the housing market was improving, I decided to sell my home. It sold quickly. The subordinating conjunction because now expresses the cause of my deciding to sell my home, and that grammatical change has produced a mental movement from one thought to another. Movement, change, is irresistibly interesting to us humans always and everywhere, and so we have a fuller, more conforming expression of our thoughts.

Or we might decide to emphasize not the cause but the effect of the event we’re writing about, and add the coordinating conjunction so to the second clause: The housing market was improving, so I decided to sell my home. It sold quickly. Or we might reverse the order of the first two clauses in order to emphasize the effect in subordination to the cause: I decided to sell my home because the housing market was improving, and it sold quickly. Notice that this choice gives us the opportunity, should we wish, to incorporate the third thought back into a single sentence.

All of these revisions (and many possible others) change the order and balance of our conceptions, and communicating our conceptions, our thoughts, is the very reason we are writing sentences at all. Once again, thinking about the form of what we’ve written in a rough draft can yield new possibilities of design and effect in our final presentation.

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