Every art has its procedure, its way of doing business. The art of writing—or call it the art of composition or of thinking—lays out grammar as its way forward, with signposts and guardrails to keep the force of one’s thinking (the old word for it was mentation) accumulating forward. One such critical guide stipulates whether the verb is singular or plural with certain words called indefinite pronouns.

Pronouns are one of the eight parts of speech in the traditional scheme of grammar, and indefinite pronouns are a subclass whose members refer not to a specific antecedent already named (for example, the dog was barking because he was hungry, where the personal pronoun he refers specifically to the antecedent noun dog), but to a more general or, as their title has it, indefinite referent (as in some of the dogs were barking because they were hungry, where the indefinite pronoun some is referring nonspecifically to the generality of dogs in question). This all seems fairly straightforward, and few writers would be tempted to change the number of the verb in either example.

Nor is it likely that we would change the verb in this example: Some of these angry dogs are fit to be tied because some of this food is rotten. Why is the verb plural (are) in the first clause but singular (is) in the second? Notice in these examples that between the indefinite pronouns and their respective verbs lies a prepositional phrase (of these angry dogs and of this food). Prepositions make up another one of the eight parts of speech, and they always require an object of some sort (usually a noun or pronoun), the resulting group of words being called a prepositional phrase. The sign we are to watch for, then, is whether the object of the preposition is singular or plural: if the prepositional phrase between an indefinite pronoun and its verb is singular, then the verb is singular (some of this food is); conversely, if the prepositional phrase between an indefinite pronoun and its verb is plural, then the verb is plural (some of these angry dogs are).

This rule of the grammatical road applies to many (but not all) of the indefinite pronouns. All is another indefinite susceptible to this standard guidance, but here we can get a glimpse into why there is such a rule at all. In the sentence all of these cats are sleeping, so all is finally quiet for a while, the first clause poses no problem, because the object of the preposition, cats, is plural, and so the verb, are, is plural. Same rule, same application. But why is the verb of the second clause, is, singular? This instance of the indefinite all is really indefinite, because its antecedent is not one of the unnamed cats, but the entirety of the general situation or circumstance created now (and no doubt thankfully) by the fact that the cats are finally sleeping. The writer is, reasonably enough, expecting readers to read between the lines (that is to say, read closely and insightfully) and supply what can be justifiably assumed to be the meaning intended.

But let’s fly the guardrails and see what happens. If we change the singular is of that second clause to the plural are, the intended meaning is overturned: the indefinite pronoun all in all are finally quiet for a while now refers back to the cats once again, and although that is a logically possible set of affairs, it is a meaning at variance with what the writer had originally wanted to say. A quiet house is one thing, quiet cats quite another. This omission of what is otherwise logically necessary is called ellipsis, a rhetorical figure of speech that is everywhere in English, particularly in diction more casual than formal, that is, occasions where it is reasonable and not self-inflicting to trust the reader with finishing your thought.

Likewise, caution is in order with the pronouns any and none. Both of these begin by following the same rule governing the number of the prepositional object. The verb (are) is plural in any of the dogs in this room are adoptable because the object dogs is plural; and the verb (is) is singular in any of this food is suitable for your dog because the prepositional object food is singular. But if the indefinite any means any one (even if followed by a plural prepositional object), then the verb remains singular: any of the dogs in this room is adoptable, thereby emphasizing the number of singular possibilities (any one of) to choose among. So too with none. When none means no, the verb will be plural: none of the cats in this room are particularly friendly means no cats in this room are particularly friendly. But if none means not one (again particularizing the referent), the verb will be singular: None of these cats is friendly means not one of them is.

As is so often the case, this grammatical guardrail is meant to keep us precise—in thought and in the style in which we express the thought. In both grammar and thinking, the point is to avoid being arbitrary, to possess ourselves from wandering off into the vague and suggestive. These insinuating qualities deceive rather than enlighten, but they can be guarded against by keeping to the ways of the craft.

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To think about language is to think about what it means to think. That cumbersome sentence makes defensible sense, in fact, because language is the means by which we think. We take up language to say something about our experience in the world. We form subjects and predicates, sentences and paragraphs, and in doing so we come to human consciousness, a special kind of attention which objectifies the world and ourselves.

It is important to remind ourselves about this bit of philosophy because it stands as the principle of clear and effective writing. To write well depends upon thinking clearly: making distinctions between this and that, saying this, not that, directing our thoughts to a particular audience with a certain purpose in mind, intent on truth and not merely persuasion. In doing that we are thinking objectively, and we give both others and ourselves some measure of distance from the emotional charge which writing (and speaking) otherwise carelessly amplifies. We can, then, come reasonably to an understanding of things.

In the technics of language, this objectivity is accomplished through the linguistic (and logical) device of subject and predicate. The subject names that which the clause intends to say something about, and the predicate, which includes the verb, is the announcement of what the writer wishes to say. This two-headed creation of subject and predicate is the snake in the garden, though, because the distinction it demands we make between agent and action is responsible for both the glory and gore of our human experience. To think in this objectifying way is inescapably to think about things. Even more than that, it is to think things, to make the world into a collection of things, one acting on another. The subject-predicate trick is how we conceptualize. With it we produce a world of mental objects, giving ourselves the distance we need (good or bad) to assume a certain position and take a certain action. Everything’s a thing.

We can see how language works like this most readily in what are called transitive verbs, verbs which require a direct object, which by definition cannot be the same thing as the subject of the verb. For example, in the sentence her friend translated her novel into German, the writer wants to say something about her friend—not about her, not about her novel, not about the German language. We know this because only her friend is the subject of the sentence. The assertion which the writer then makes about her friend is what constitutes the predicate, which centers on the transitive verb translated and its direct object novel. This predicate is then completed by the remaining phrase into German.

And with that we have an otherwise simple and undivided experience sliced and diced and minced and mulched into subject and verb, direct object and complement—all accomplished by and undertaken for the rise of our human consciousness. This is why precision is said to be the heart of style: the more exact we are, the sharper are the images with which we think and write. And the sharper our images, the clearer-cut are our mental objects, which can then act burr-like to catch and bind a reader’s attention. It is no coincidence that the words think and thing are conceptually related. A thing meant originally a pubic or deliberative assembly, where thinking, or deliberation, took place. To think, then, is to see our human experiences as made up of things, one objective reality in some relation to another with a certain effect and consequence.

What’s odd about this propensity of language to make the world into a container of things, however, is that this doesn’t happen with a verb we use countless times every day: the verb to be. In the sentence my friend is a novelist, it may appear that there are two things in the universe of that statement, friend and novelist, but that, it ends up, is a illusion of our conceptualizing, because the verb is (as used here) does not intend to express action on a direct object (as was the case with translated her novel), but rather to predicate an identity between the two things named. Converted into a arithmetical equation, it would be expressed friend = novelist. Verbs that work like this are called copulas, and instead of denoting an action, they assert a state of being: my friend is a novelist ultimately means my friend is in a state of being a novelist. To distinguish things, in other words, is not necessarily to objectify and divide them.

And, finally, midway between the transitive and copula is the intransitive verb, which expresses action without aiming it directly at anything: my friend writes every morning. There we have action, but the subject is not seen to be writing something, just writing every morning. Here the world portrayed is filled with fewer things, and so the reader’s attention is corralled into staying with the action alone, not with the product or result of it. Understanding this allows us now to appreciate a peculiarity of the verb to be, which we earlier noted was a copula, linking or identifying subject with some noun in the predicate. But when there is no noun in the predicate of that verb, as, for example, in the sentence my friend is here, we must understand the verb is to be asserting existence, not identity, which defines it no longer as a copula, but as an intransitive.

All of which points to an interesting observation. These distinctions of kind into which we classify verbs have an importance beyond the academic niceties of wordsmithery. All three—transitive, copula, and intransitive—produce in their respective subjects and predicates the clarifying consciousness we so prize as human beings, but we should distinguish, as do the poets, between consciousness and awareness. To be aware is a matter of insight—not just seeing, but seeing into or seeing through the things which comprise our objective experience. In awareness, something is understood to be behind the factual reality out there. Just what that is, however, it is not possible for language to say.

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The English author, poet, and poet laureate Ted Hughes was, as well, a writer of children’s literature, and in the foreword to Children as Writers 2, a collection of prize-winning pieces in a children’s literary competition run in 1975 by the Daily Mirror newspaper, he made some observations which can only help us adults understand better what makes for writing that is alive and pulsing:

Children’s sensibility, and children’s writing, have much to teach adults. Something in the way of a corrective, a reminder. Theirs is not just a miniature world of naïve novelties and limited reality—it is also still very much the naked process of apprehension, far less conditioned than ours, far more fluid and alert, far closer to the real laws of its real nature. It is a new beginning, coming to circumstances afresh…. Preconceptions are already pressing, but they have not yet closed down, like a space helmet, over the entire head and face, with the proved, established adjustments of security. Losing that sort of exposed nakedness, we gain in confidence and in mechanical efficiency on our chosen front, but we lose in real intelligence. We lose in readiness to change, in curiosity, in perception, in the original, wild, no-holds-barred approach to problems.

These remarks struck my attention because it can be difficult as adults—elementally difficult—to come upon “circumstances afresh,” as Hughes puts it, and to realize that our many complaints in struggling to write more fluently might have a lot to do with how far we have traveled, and necessarily so, from a child’s “naked apprehension” of that same world in which both they and we live and move and have our being. What we oppose to their “exposed nakedness” is our sophisticated conceptualizing, that ever down-pulling, fixing tendency which is part of us now because our language is set up to name things, and so with every noun we fasten tight a world that is in truth ever on the run. Alert, the child’s mind moves with the moving and hits the mark by sighting the center; distracted, our mind freezes and loses that moving focal point, to talk of what’s off the center.

We can see this opposition between action and things, center and perimeter, in many of the sentences we write casually and only occasionally revise. What, for example, might be the difference between he expressed his doubt about the likelihood of the project’s success and he doubted the project would succeed? Or between the company experienced significant loss in revenue and the company lost significant revenue? The first of each is misfocused and inflated: is it really his expressing something that we want to point to, or that he doubted? Is it that the company experienced something, or that the company lost significant revenue?

A child’s mind wants to know what’s really going on, not an idea about what’s going on. That “more fluid and alert” apprehension Hughes is talking about answers why the second version of each of these examples is the better one: without that space helmet covering its head and face—the central site of our five senses, remember—the childlike mind perceives and then states, rather than conceptualizing, as we adults habitually do: we too perceive an image, but then we look around it and state what is peripheral, not central, to it.

All this, though, might amount to a counsel of perfection, and perfection is not, we are thankful, ever possible. We will improve our prose in real measure, though, if we can use Hughes’s insights about the childlike vision of things to change our tendency and to make clear for us again the direction of our unreachable goal, because it is in a right striving that we will better our work. And that striving means to see and say—that’s all. A child’s intelligence, which we should properly distinguish from an adult’s reason, can still sustain the undeflected power of the image, facing it in a direct line of approach and capture without being distracted by related but lesser goings-on. That is why precision is said to be at the heart of one’s literary style—because a fine style sees and says the heart of the matter.

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I’m not really quite sure how to understand the reasoning behind a new phrasing I’ve heard (but haven’t yet read) a few times now recently. Again just the other day, the host of a podcast said to her guest, By the time your and I’s interview appears, this will be old news. It’s a curious and ungrammatical way of simply saying our interview, but it gives us a chance to review and ponder how pronouns are standardly used in English grammar.

The concept at issue here is possession. Language, and more certainly prose language, makes statements about a world it sees, ultimately, to be made up of things. As the very craftsmaster of rationality, this kind of language regards certain things, which include persons and events, to stand in some relationship to other things in a particular scene, and one such relationship is possession: a possessor possesses a possessed. To speak of possession is not necessarily to mean ownership; it may mean that, as in the phrase my house, but possession might also intend to describe something, such as the cake’s ingredients, or to show mutual involvement, as in my wife or my husband.

It is this last relationship that is being expressed in the example we are considering here, your and I’s interview. Both pronouns, your and I’s, are meant to express an involvement each referent holds to the thing interview. The problem, however, is the incorrect (or more permissively, perhaps, nonstandard) construction I’s. The word I is a personal pronoun, and in order to show some kind of possession, the personal pronouns do not use an apostrophe, but have a distinct possessive form of their own: my for I’s, your for you’s, his or her or its for he’s, she’s, or it’s. We use the apostrophe with nouns, where it is placed immediately after the possessor, whether singular or plural: Jane’s interview, the students’ books.

All of this is straight-up basic English, so it’s a bit of a puzzle to understand the whence and why of the neologism I’s. We may dismiss it all and think no more about it (Times change. What’s the big deal?), but if we took the topic to a higher register, one that worried about language as an execution of skillful means, we could argue for a difference between things changing and things changing for a reason. Just as we make a distinction between freedom and license or obligation and duress, may we not also say that there is a difference between change and distortion—change for a reason which produces clarity, and unproductive change for no reason at all? If we regard language as an art—and as an art its precision is all important because the objectivity of precision is at the heart of reason—then what changes we make in skill and style should be to a purpose, to better what has been but which no longer avails. Picasso came to work in a way his predecessors did not because he saw time and space differently, and had to change the manner of painting to accommodate that vision. Change was made necessary, not unnecessarily.

The language arts should be conserving, whether conservative or liberal in their perspective. The old way of saying that was that one worked in or from a tradition as a warrant again idiosyncrasy, that entirely personal way of working that does not invite, but parries, the good thought and attentive comment of others who come to look for meaning in the artifact someone has created, in whatever medium. Always in the language arts there is the clear and present danger of nominalizing, of making something into a noun. With the curious expression I’s, there is the attempt even to make that humble pronoun into a loud noun (the apostrophe proves that), for no discernibly necessary reason. And therein lies a problem of wider importance, because the more we see only other things around us, we risk moving from the properly rational to the rationalistic: things once relatable become unrelatable, isolated individualities. And we humans do not like being alone.

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In 1909—well over a century ago now—the English novelist E. M. Forster wrote a short story entitled The Machine Stops, an underground dystopia, a denatured and artificial environment whose inhabitants (can we call them persons any longer?) “mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

One young person does, however, and when over videoconference he asks his mother to meet with him and hear his doubts, she is impatient and ununderstanding: “’I want you to come and see me.’ Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. ‘But I can see you!’ she exclaimed. ‘What more do you want?’ ‘I want to see you not through the Machine,’ said Kuno.” Our screens today were apparently conceived as plates a century ago.

The mother’s son continues his plea, and the manner in which Forster lays out the boy’s remonstrances can help us as we study more ways to enrich the composition of our paragraphs. Form follows content, and the overarching theme of this section in the story is opposition: fideistic devotion to the Machine and its artificial world versus a critical doubt about its omniscience and omnipresence. In this passage the son, Kuno, makes his protest in a series of sentences which are each constructed and connected to enforce his opposition:

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

The term antithesis is sometimes used more precisely to mean direct opposition rather than a general, or indirect, contrast. The boy denounces his mother’s faith with the classical antithesis between god and man. His first two sentences are straightforward indicatives: you say this and I say that. But with the third sentence, Forster begins to represent his character’s objections in some tightly crafted rhetorical constructions. The first of the two clauses announces the opposing term of men, and the second, imperative clause is abutted to the first not with an expected semicolon, but rather with a comma. Schoolteachers will not like that. We regularly expect a semicolon to replace an omitted conjunction (here and). Forster’s comma, however, preserves the impatience of the son’s retort and leaves the clarifying logic for the next sentence. Great men, but men at once concedes the distinction of the inventors and limits it within the domain of the human. The pinch we feel in reading that fragment is due to its terse ellipsis: there is no verb.

That same adversative conjunction but continues to build opposition between the first and second clauses in each of the following three sentences. Something else, though, begins with the eighth and ninth. Notice that the first of this pair concludes with the word come, and the next sentence begins with that same word: That is why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Repetition always emphasizes. This technique of directly repeating a word (or phrase) one after the other is a rhetorical device called anadiplosis. The expensive derivation of that classical Greek term simply means to double up again. And we see it happen yet again with the pronoun me between the last two sentences of the passage (though necessarily displaced a step by the verb pay): Come and stop with me. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind. Repetition emphasizes a meaning, close repetition secures it.

What disturbs the mother in Forster’s story is her son’s actual life, and that is the “more” he wants from the direct presence of his mother, face to face with her bodily in the same space and time. It is precisely what she does not have time for, and her son hopes that his terse oppositions between you and something like you will make his point and pierce her ersatz heart. The Machine may replicate a presence, but its replication is an appearance, sophisticated in its semblance but absent of the actual and real. The Machine and its acolytes, then and now, do not possess a presence—that exactly through which we humans respond to poetry and prose, music and drama. They reproduce, but do not engender, what, ironically, this now distant mother once indeed did. Earlier in the story, the son told his mother that he had tried to call before, but that she was “always busy or isolated.” “I have,” he tells her, “something particular to say.” Something particular, something human and of its own, something not machinable.

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