The exercise of revising a rough paragraph of simple sentences can concentrate our attention and sharpen our skills, resulting in a more natural flow of ideas and expression. We should remember that what is called a final draft is just the last iteration in a line of approximating productions. There can logically be no last draft, in other words, without a penultimate, an antepenultimate, and most likely even a preantepenultimate one as well. That should encourage us all, because it lifts the burden of believing that we have to get everything right the first time. No one writes like that, nor should anyone. For the sake of a writing exercise, let’s try revising this choppy paragraph to hone our linguistic chops:

The airplane is an astounding achievement in the modern world. In modern times science and engineering advanced. This made it possible for the airplane to be developed. It has contributed to the complex global economy in which we all now live.

Three of those four sentences are simple, having one subject and one predicate each. (Remember that a subject may be compound, comprising two or more substantives, as is the case with the second sentence here: science and engineering. We can still call this the subject of the sentence.) The last sentence of the group is complex, with the addition of a relative (and therefore subordinate) clause as it concludes. We might very well compose a paragraph like this as an initial draft, with most of the sentences laying down a single thought as we try to assemble the facts we ultimately want to connect for the reader. These logically disconnected statements, though, if left unattended, will produce that choppy effect we are taught to avoid because too much disconnected precision gets old fast, particularly when such isolated statements are not meant to emphasize a dramatic assertion. (When they do so appropriately, the design is called segregated. For example, My career depended on this moment. I walked to the podium. I opened my notes. I began.)

But an initial draft, as we’ve agreed, is not a final draft, and so taking a moment to recognize the structure of what we first wrote will prompt new ideas for the first revision. We might note, for example, the proximity in which we twice use the adjective modern, once as the first sentence ends and then again as the second sentence begins. The idea of modernity seems to have been hanging imposingly in our mind as we began to write, and upon critical reflection, we can see that we’re just duplicating the idea because of its omnipresence. So our revision might be simply to delete it from the first sentence and let modernity present itself in the second sentence: The airplane is an astounding achievement. In modern times science and engineering advanced.

Now that change alone will not, of course, soften the blow of chopping ideas into simple statements. But if we look to the third sentence and see that we are thinking of a cause and effect relationship between the advance of science and engineering and the effect which that advance had on the development of the airplane, we can associate these two statements more closely together: Only in modern times, when science and engineering had sufficiently advanced, could the airplane be developed. Now we have tightened the importance of modernity by adding the adverb only, and we have made it clearer, by adding the adverb sufficiently, that modern science and engineering were, at least, a major cause. Adverbs of degree, like sufficiently, signal the coming of a result clause, which is exactly what could the airplane be developed constitutes. Both adverbs, only and sufficiently, now bring the second and third sentences more closely together.

We might leave the fourth sentence as it stands, but we should be aware of a temptation to avoid. The subject pronoun it refers to the airplane, and therefore it is correct in the initial version as we have it. The assertion of this last sentence involves the contribution airplanes have made to the world economy, and because no one airplane—the airplane—has made that contribution alone, we unconsciously feel the need to pluralize the original subject, as I just did at the beginning of this sentence. That would be a mistake, however, for two reasons.

First, the switch from singular to plural breaks the compositional parallelism good style tries to maintain; and second, it misreads what is called the generic article. To refer to the airplane in a context like this is to be thinking of the category of inventions called airplane. When we wish to refer to a category or class or genus of some objects, we use the definite article to make that reference explicit. We speak, for example, of the printing press when we mean all such devices which reproduce the written word in a certain mechanical way. Or we speak of the electric light bulb as a consequential invention for the advance of civilization, not meaning to refer to one particular bulb in a pack on the shelf.

None of these changes is particularly sophisticated, but together they add up to a more coherent passage. A contrary of choppy is flowing, and because our awareness knows that all things are connected, we respond more vitally when the language we read shows, either outright or subtly, that one thing follows another for a purpose and with effect. The artful composition which results, then, accords as it should with the nature of the world it is representing. It is possible to define artistic style as what remains in the absence of the distortions our overweening self-consciousness brings upon our otherwise clear and original vision of life in our mind. And, ironically, it might just be that chopping analysis which defeats itself in the end and leaves the life-giving flow of composition to itself.

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The traditional study of the language arts finds its justification in the belief that self-reflection is the special characteristic of human beings, and that this ability to recognize oneself as a person is possible—or even begins to be possible—through the cultivated use of language. One department of language study is called etymology, and under that title are included such topics as the parts of speech, the various forms a word may take to signal its grammatical function, and the derivation, or source, of a word. While etymology studies individual words, syntax studies how words work together in a sentence.

Many, maybe even most, find learning about the derivation of a word interesting, perhaps because the source-meaning sheds light on the originating idea or material, psychic or even spiritual, from which the word was first constructed. One such word of unsuspected background is our word school. We mean by that unremarkable noun an organization or institution that provides education, but the original meaning was, of all things, leisure. The noted German philosopher Josef Pieper explains:

Leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English “school.” The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “leisure.” “School” does not, properly speaking, mean school, but leisure. The original conception of leisure, as it arose in the civilized world of Greece, has, however, become unrecognizable in the world of planned diligence and “total labor….”

That quote is from Pieper’s important work Leisure: The Basis of Culture, written in the years shortly after the end of World War II. He was conscious of the fact that calling into question the idea of “total labor” and living “in a world of nothing but work” at a time when there was no choice but to rebuild a fractured world, could be difficult to understand. But leisure, he says, is not idleness:

Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of…work as activity, as toil, as a social function.

This true, or etymological, meaning of our word school (the term etymology derives from a Greek adjective meaning true or real, hence original) points, says Pieper, to “the conception of the contemplative life.” He continues: “Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.” And because leisure is a mental attitude, a point of interiority, it has more to do with the manner in which one acts, rather than what one is occupied doing. It is, as Aristotle framed it, “the center-point about which everything revolves”; and Aristotle’s meaning of leisure is, says Pieper, at the historical source of our distinction between the liberal and the servile arts, what we do freely to be free and what we must do under tedious compulsion.

We may think of work as the opposite of leisure, but the Greeks thought of it as the absence of leisure: askolia—not something in its own right, but the insubstantial privation of that reflective disposition which can finally reveal to us the truth of things—which to the classical eye was the original purpose of a school. Leisure in Latin is otium, and when we negate our leisure, we have negotium, the carrying on, or negotiating, of business. And the immensely suggestive etymology of the English business is busy-ness, that habit so unlike the silence of leisure.

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Here’s another chance to sharpen our grammatical tools. Is this sentence correct: he is one of those persons, who is always on time. We will need either two knives or one double-edged sword to examine this deceptively simple sentence, one blade for grammar and the other for punctuation.

When we revise our work, we should revise clause by clause, not sentence by sentence. Every clause (that is, a group of words with a subject and verb) is an assertion, which means its words must cohere in structure in order to say something, not necessarily something complete, but something both logically comprehensible and grammatically sound. Every clause we write asserts a thought, so when we revise by clauses, we give ourselves a chance to confirm both what we are saying and how one thought connects to another in the same sentence. Thus, a sentence has as many thoughts as it has clauses.

We remember that there are two kinds of clauses, independent and subordinate. The first clause in our example is independent (he is one of those persons), and the second is subordinate (who is always on time). Any clause which begins with a relative pronoun (here who) is by definition subordinate, and such clauses have the special designation of relative clauses. These relative clauses act most often as adjectives which modify the antecedent of the pronoun; this requirement will be material to our analysis as we proceed, because adjectives either define or describe their referent and each involves a certain punctuation.

A sentence with at least one independent clause and at least one subordinate clause is defined stylistically as a complex sentence. The independent assertion in our example intends simply to identify the subject, he, with a certain kind of person (one of those persons). Had the sentence ended there, we would certainly have wanted to know more about just what kind of person the subject he is. Logically, or sensibly, we could say that this independent clause is not complete, but grammatically it is, and so we are right to call it an independent clause. Still, any reader will want to know more, and here is where two difficulties arise with the example sentence as we have it.

The writer has placed a relative clause in the sentence to define the class of persons the subject of the independent clause belongs to: he is one of those persons. The relative clause then steps in to define those persons (not just one) as those who are always on time, but as we can see, the writer has used the singular verb is instead of the plural verb are. The antecedent of the relative pronoun who, in other words, is the plural noun persons (not one), and since who is representing persons in the relative clause, the verb of that clause must be plural to match the number of its subject. Verbs accord in number with their subjects.

A problem remains, though. We said that the relative clause here is defining its antecedent, persons. But when a relative clause (or any other element) is defining, and not simply describing, its antecedent, it is considered a restrictive clause, and such clauses are never set off with a comma. The function of a comma is to cut, to separate what is logically inessential or separable from something else. To define some word, however, is at the heart of logical clarity, and so the punctuation rule is to be met in order to keep the grammatical structure of the sentence in sound logical order. The correct version of our sentence then is: he is one of those persons who are always on time.

That might sound odd to our ears, but our ear responds to what it hears, not to what the structural requirements of the sentence are. The ear has its place, but at a much higher level of rhetorical design, where the thought and logic of clauses begin to blend into feeling and emotion. But that’s another story.

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To keep our technical skills sharp, let’s look at a sentence which presents a second-order grammatical question. We know that every preposition has an object, and when that object is a pronoun, it often assumes a unique form, because some pronouns vary their spelling to indicate their grammatical function. This change in spelling (or position) is called inflection, and the conceptual scheme that organizes inflection with nouns and pronouns is called case. English has three cases, nominative, possessive, and objective, and prepositions are said to govern the objective case.

The objective form of the personal pronoun I is me, and the objective form of he is him. So if I wanted to construct a phrase beginning with the preposition between, I would have to write between him and me (not between he and I), because between as a preposition must have its object (here there are two) in the objective case form. Despite the number of times we might read or here between he and I, this rule of prepositions requiring the objective case remains unconquered even in contemporary English.

And so too with the relative pronouns who and whom. There is no mysterious difference between these two words; whom is simply the objective case of who, and so if this pronoun stands as an object of a preposition, it too must appear in its objective form: the person for whom I was working at the time had been quite successful. Here, the preposition for has the relative pronoun as its object, and therefore, in more formal writing at least, we must employ the objective case, whom. Contemporary usage is not quite as strict with who and whom. Much will depend on the degree of formality required for the setting, and determining that requires a sense of discernment—all of which makes the study of grammar more than a merely mechanical application of imperious regulations.

Now, though, comes the second-order problem. What do we do when the object of a preposition is not a word or phrase, but a clause? For example, in the sentence when I heard the news, I worried about who would be fired, shouldn’t the preposition about require the objective whom, not who? In fact, who is correct here because the object of the preposition is not the relative pronoun, but the entire clause which the relative pronoun is beginning. Who is the form we use to represent the subject of a clause, so here the verb phrase would be fired needs that pronoun to indicate its subject. That need trumps the government (again, the traditional terminology) of the preposition, and though there is no way to show the inflection of the clause as the object of about, we must conclude that by inference.

The grammatical analysis we’ve just survived shows how important theory is to practice. An old and venerated college text on logic entitled An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, by Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel and published in 1934, makes an important observation about the study of logic which applies in full measure to the allied study of grammar:

A theoretical science is the basis of any rational technique…. Actual attainment of truth depends, of course, upon individual skill and habit, but a careful study of logical principles helps us to form and perfect techniques for procuring and weighing evidence.

The science of any study is the theory upon which its practice is based. We might think of that science as only a collection of rules arbitrarily imposed, but that is not the case. There is a distinction to be made between rules and regulations: rules arise from within the nature of a subject, regulations are imposed from without. Curiously, the noun rule derives from a Latin verb meaning to direct, and that is all we should want and need to learn from the rules of both grammar and logic: how to proceed in orderly government without confusion. From there we can each undertake the thinking on our own.

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If a dictionary defines words, what does a thesaurus do? The word means treasury in Latin, and the basic answer, of course, is that a thesaurus synonymizes, that is, it suggests words close in meaning to one another. Some thesauri merely list groups of related words, others discern the subtle shades of meaning between them. It’s the latter we want as writers. If the high achievement of composition is clarity, then finding the right word for the right place in a sentence is an inherent part of writing precisely. Or is it an intrinsic part? Let’s produce our own synonymy for a moment to develop our critical eye.

Something which is inherent is a permanent element of something else, but something which is intrinsic is so inherent that it makes up the very nature of that which it is a part. The etymology can help us see the difference: inherent derives from a Latin verb meaning to cling, and intrinsic derives from the Latin adverb intra, meaning within. We speak of the inherent goodness of human nature, but of the intrinsic radiance of the sun: one may not be good despite one’s human nature, but the sun cannot but always be radiant to be the sun. Both adjectives are related to the more general term essential, and right there—the fact that essential is more general in meaning—is why that word would have made the lesser choice in pointing to the part precision plays in writing clearly. But did my sentence mean that finding the right word was a permanent feature of writing clearly, or did it mean even more than that: that such precision was of the very nature of writing itself? Perhaps the latter would have been a step too far unless I had confined my definition of writing to expository prose. For what of the suggestive heart of poetry?

There is always the danger, certainly, that we chop the logic so fine in finding the variances among words that we end up with little more than a page of linguistic tatter, making distinctions without a difference, or worse, bandying with words for the pointlessness of it. What guards against these faults is the belief in truth, the conviction that what we are articulating corresponds to the truth as we see it, not to the specious as we spin it. And with the conviction of truth comes the imperative to make it known as it is as precisely as we can. As Aristotle said, we humans desire in our very nature to know.

We have our life, however, in a world of appearances, and the universal medium we use to understand that world, language, can be intrinsically ambiguous. The writer’s proper but heavy burden to be precise, as a result, is often transferred to us as listeners and readers to do the hard work of thinking. And prosaic examples abound. What, for example, does this sentence mean: Since the city removed all the parking meters from the central commercial district, business has improved dramatically. Certainly we will say that because the city removed the meters, business has improved, but certainly does not mean solely. The subordinating conjunction since can be used not only causally but temporally as well: from the time the city removed the meters, business has improved—the cause of which might have been an aggressive advertising campaign, lower inflation, higher consumer confidence. Cause and time are different relations between things which must be kept distinct.

And that is not an unindifferent conclusion. Unindifferent? Another synonymy presents itself, this one to exercise our critical skills too. To differ means to draw apart, to notice the way in which one thing is not another of its kind. To be indifferent, then, (the prefix in– often, but not always, means not) is to be impartial, unbiased, not noticing anything which would distinguish one thing from another. And so to be unindifferent is not to be impartial, which is, through the double negative, to be partial, which is what I am saying is not the case in maintaining that cause is one thing and time another. Thus we should beware of too much negativity.

If we cannot distinguish between truth and appearance, it is in the very nature of things that unrest will arise, within us and among us. And that is why so much emphasis has traditionally—anciently—been put on the study of language. Words fasten things down for a moment and help us get our bearings in the world. They constitute, though, a double-edged sword, because trying to hold down life cannot be done. Still, as the philosopher and teacher Richard Weaver said in his essential Language is Sermonic, “the word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances,” and it seems that an intrinsic part of our need to know is to know stability amidst all that worldly change as well.

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