Traditional wisdom has it that we are to worry over missing the forest for the trees, missing the meaning, that is to say, by too close an examination of the details. Sound advice, of course, but it is also true that forests are made of trees, that meaning is read by looking at something. Reading and writing well depend on understanding what makes up the ideas we think about, the form that is appropriate to a particular audience and purpose.

The three basic types of sentences—simple, compound, and complex—each have many shapes, or designs. One more elaborate such design is called the centered sentence. Here is an example from Franz Kafka’s psychologically troubling short story The Judgment (quoted from James Daley’s 100 Great Short Stories, Dover, 2015):

For these reasons, if one was to maintain communication by letter at all, one could not send him any real news, as one would unhesitatingly do even to the most casual acquaintances.

This sentence follows a long paragraph in which the narrator is debating whether his friend, away and struggling in a foreign country, would be any better off returning home. He thinks not, and so does not wish to tell the friend any real news, which might in fact attract him back. The context of this centered sentence, then, is involved, thick with the psychological intricacies and the almost tortured self-consciousness we might expect from Kafka. Such a weightier scene supports the more complicated form of the centered sentence. Or better, the complicated shape of the centered sentence helps to make us feel the complications of the narrator’s interior deliberations.

Centered sentences are a kind of subordinated sentence, that is to say, their pattern includes substantial stretches of elements that support, but do not state themselves, a complete thought. They are, moreover, well named, for their principal assertion takes up position in the center of the sentence, with subordinate elements both before and after. Thus, in Kafka’s example, the main clause at the center is one could not send him any real news. Before it are two subordinate elements, the prepositional phrase for these reasons and a conditional clause beginning with the subordinating conjunction if; after it is another subordinate clause, this one beginning with the conjunction as, which announces a comparison of some sort. We might roughly see the outline of the design, then, as: condition (if), result (one could not send), comparison (as).

The presence of the conjunction if points to another defining element of this sentence. We can step away from our analysis of the compositional design of Kafka’s sentence and approach it again from a different angle, this time looking for the logic of the statement. The subordinating conjunction if introduces a conditional sentence, and indicates the proviso, the circumstances, in light of which something else might be true. Conditions and results and how the two are related are all ultimately matters of logical, not grammatical, concern. Logic has to do with statements making sense, rational sense. But in natural language, that logical sense is communicated by the grammatical form of a sentence, and so the two subjects, although academically separable, are little without the other if we wish to understand the deeper implication of what we read.

Close examination of this sort can teach us something important about analysis generally. The strength of analysis lies in its intense focus. We analyze one thing at a time, which means anything worth close scrutiny, like the language of literature and exposition, is likely to appear quite complicated. But the way past this difficulty is to remember not to confuse one line of analysis with another. Let there be a hundred things to be said about a sentence or passage; if we investigate one path at a time, resisting the temptation to take the cross paths, confusing grammar with logic or either with rhetoric, then we can steadily accrue a body of insights which, when we put them all back together, will give us a better understanding and deeper appreciation of the forest, the work at hand.

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Let’s assume I wrote a sentence like this in my first draft: It was important to me to talk with him about his plan to drive that far alone. And let’s assume next that in beginning my revisions, I decided it just didn’t say in the right way what I wanted to say. I wasn’t sure why, but the sentence didn’t feel right; I sensed that it was off center, out of balance, but I didn’t know what changes to make to better it. How can we work, in other words, in an orderly way to shape and sharpen our first perceptions?

First, a reminder. The incontestable, unarguable, unchallengeable truth is that we ultimately learn to write by reading. So mysterious and subtle and complex is the art of writing (and of all true arts, in truth) that no library of books, no program, no set of clear instructions will ever outline a protocol to make us better writers if only we followed it step by step. Reading means putting ourselves in the hands of models, sitting down before others who know how to do what we want to be able to do. It involves watching their work attentively, not merely allowing ourselves to be affected by it, but trying actively to understand how we have come to see or feel what comes to our mind as we read a sentence or passage.

The answer to how involves technique, and now we come to the work—the pleasurable work—of revising. I say pleasurable because most of us dread the nothingness of a blank screen or wordless piece of paper more than a confused jumble of something. At least a jumble of something is something. So it is helpful next to remember that we should rarely start over entirely if we’re not pleased with what we’ve written. Let stay what has managed to get in the door; welcome it however it has managed to present itself, knowing that you can likely shape it and fit it to the purpose at hand. So if the sentence we began with (It was important to me to talk with him about his plan to drive that far alone) just doesn’t look or feel quite right, how to refashion it?

Right here is where all the technicalities of grammar play their defining role. For all its length, our sentence has only one clause, one combination of subject and verb (it was important), and being able to identify that will help us see that the subject of this one and only clause is not specific and clear: what exactly is important? For that we have to wait until we come to the phrase to talk with him, and so we discover that the grammatical subject is not the logical subject; what is important to me is talking with him about his plan, not it; the pronoun merely tells the reader to anticipate the real thought yet to come. This is called, appropriately enough, an anticipatory subject; we let the reader anticipate, or expect, that the real subject, what we’re really talking about, will come as the sentence unfolds. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes it just produces a wordiness that is helpful to no one.

So a good first refitting of the sentence would be to use the logical subject as the grammatical subject of this one main clause: Talking to him about his plan…was important to me. And if the context of the sentence was any degree higher than a casual conversation, that would be a good change to make. But there could be another. If I look more closely at some of the other words I wrote in that first draft—his plan, for instance, or alone—perhaps those ideas were really what concerned me. My worry was such that it made me begin the sentence by declaring it was important, but importance was not the real issue, although that’s the idea that found its way into the opening main clause. If I then attended to these other words, my perspective would change, and the result might be: His plan to drive that far alone was dangerous and I told him so. Here is a sentence to be contended with. It stands up straight, says forthrightly what is on its mind­—and does so twice between two clauses: a compound sentence that fires two clear shots, not a simple sentence of one hesitant main clause.

We are able to make changes like this when we exercise ourselves in the habit of looking and looking again. What we wrote in our draft is often, very often, not in its best shape, and so we accept and welcome what we have, and then revise on the assumption that the weight and balance and proportion can be changed, transformed even. Accomplished writers, because they are always looking and looking again, are able to make the hidden seen; they are able to put form and shape to what they really see with their mind’s eye. That form, the words and phrases and clauses, is susceptible to technique; how they see is not. Their seeing is a matter of who they are, what they’ve thought and done. But by reading closely, by observing the form they have given to their perceptions, we can see how they bring an idea to life—how they are creative, and so become more creative in our own writing and revising.

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My local high school district mailed out a flyer recently whose headline read Effectuating Collective Efficacy to Impact Student Learning. Not confident, apparently, that this assemblage of abstractions would immediately mean anything crisp and clear to the citizenry at large, the writer felt the need as early as the second sentence to acknowledge the riddle by asking, “What does this mean in basic terms: it’s when an organization creates conditions to support each of its members, in this case teachers and students, to be their best.” What in fact this means in basic terms is—exactly what?

Intelligent people are prone to this kind of unmeaning language because intelligent people like ideas. Ideas are abstractions, notions that arise in our mind when we pull our attention away from the common world of things to think more generally about what the actual things and events we encounter might mean. Some schools of philosophy maintain that this ability we humans have to abstract from the reality of our senses is what distinguishes us from other living things around us, but no school of writing would ever warrant such language exclusively, or encourage us to compose sentences so far from the common world we all share. Our known world, what is in our hands and before our eyes, is the very ground and source of our ideas. It is the only place from which abstractions arise, and good writers know that no matter how high their conceptions might soar, they must always keep the known world of recognizable images in view.

It seems too that the good school district has from its abstracted heights lost sight of a common and standard rule of grammar. To write it’s when in an attempt to define something (it’s when an organization creates conditions to support each of its members) is to forget that we are to keep subject and predicate parallel in grammatical construction when we are trying to say what something is. It’s, of course, is a contraction for it is, and the verb is intends to show the defining identity between the subject (it) and some other thing in the predicate. That means that the grammatical form of the predicate must be a noun of some sort, because that is the part of speech that names things.

But to write it’s when an organization creates conditions is to identify the subject it with an adverb, not a noun. The word when is a subordinating conjunction; it introduces a clause of time, and time is an adverbial idea. Adverbs show a relation between things, not an identity. They bring our attention to the circumstances in which things exists or events are happening; they don’t name or define the things themselves. We readers want to know what effectuating collective efficacy is, not when it happens, and so the writer’s adverbial clause should be changed to some kind of noun, perhaps an infinitive (it is to create conditions), a noun with an adjective phrase (it is an effort to create conditions), or arguably even a gerund (it is an organization’s creating conditions). Any of these will keep the subject and predicate grammatically parallel and thereby, more importantly, keep the logic clear.

All of this matters—and should particularly matter for educators—because language is a sign or symptom of our thinking. We are under an obligation to be clear-minded in ourselves and clear with one another. Thinking precisely does not come naturally to any of us, and the parts and procedures of the art of writing—subjects and predicates, nouns and adverbs, parallelism and abstraction—are meant to ensure that we are really saying what we really mean, and sometimes whether we are even saying anything at all. The American essayist Emerson said that “the language of the street is always strong.” The street is a place of life and action, and if we can remember to embody our ideas in the familiar images of life, we will be as honest as we can be with one another.

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Let’s consider a twist to the infamous grammatical construction called the passive voice. We would be hard put to find a manual of English composition that doesn’t warn us off using this design too often, but understanding a little more about it might alert us to other possibilities we could cautiously employ.

First, what is the passive voice? Voice is a property of a verb, one of a number of essential characteristics that make a verb a verb. The voice of a verb is meant to tell the reader how the subject of a clause is related to its verb: if the subject is the one actually undertaking the action that the verb indicates, it is called an agent; if not, we have substituted some other word in the statement to assume the role of a grammatical subject. So, for example, I could tell you that my insurance company sent an explanation of benefits to me. The phrase my insurance company stands as subject of the verb sent, and we are to understand, by both the position of the subject and the construction of the verb, that this subject was the one who did the sending, that my insurance company was the agent, the doer, of the action named by the verb.

But what happens if I arrange the words differently: an explanation of benefits was sent to me by the insurance company. The subject of this clause is now an explanation of benefits, and it is clear that the explanation of benefits is not doing anything at all; if fact, it is the recipient, not the agent, of an action. The real agent, the insurance company, has been displaced to the end of the clause and made the object of a preposition: by the insurance company. And it is right here that we can see why the passive voice is so often censured: not only does it work against our propensity to want to know who did what, but it also sets up the construction of prepositional phrase, too many of which will weaken the vibrancy of a paragraph. The right place for the passive voice is in describing situations and scenes; beyond that, we should be cautious yet not frightened away.

The passive construction, then, most commonly takes the direct object of the active construction and makes it the subject: instead of the insurance company sent an explanation to me (where an explanation is the direct object of the transitive verb sent), we have an explanation was sent to me by the insurance company. But another form of the passive construction is possible. Notice that both these versions include the prepositional phrase to me, which is meant to indicate the indirect object, the person involved in the sending but not the one actually getting sent. If we now make the indirect object the subject and keep the direct object where it is, we produce a passive construction called the retained object: I was sent an explanation of benefits. According to the authorities, this retained object construction is a centuries-old and well-established habit of English.

The observation to be made, then, is that we have more choices for our revising than we might at first think. Knowing some essential parts of a sentence—subject and verb, direct and indirect objects, active and passive voice—gives us something to look for when we take up our draft and begin to shape it more finely. Every art has its nomenclature, its system of terms that organizes its material and makes working in it efficient and practicable. The retained object is a variation on the theme of the passive construction, and when used knowingly, can serve us well.

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