It is one of the fundamentals of writing that every word must count. Consider these two sentences: the bank president hired three new people whose job was to guard the guards, and the bank president hired three new people whose job it was to guard the guards. The only difference between the two is the addition of the pronoun it in the second version. Does that violate this principle of good writing?

We should say first that both these sentences are grammatically correct, and so the choice between them is rhetorical. Nonetheless, the sentence structure and the grammar that builds it are essential to understand. Both sentences are complex, meaning they include an independent and a subordinate clause. The independent clause appears first in each (the bank president hired three new people), and so their design is called loose. (By contrast, the design of sentences that begin with the subordinate clause, which would not have been possible in this sentence, is called periodic.) The independent clause should cause little confusion: a simple subject (bank president) joined to a transitive verb (hired), followed directly by the direct object (three new people). A standard SVO (subject + verb + object) arrangement.

The subordinate clause, though, poses a degree or two of difficulty, not because either version is unusual, but because both involve a copulative verb—always a mind twister. A copula (the term derives from the Latin noun for a link or rope) identifies the subject of a clause with a noun or adjective in the predicate. Though two conceptual entities are named, as, for example, I and president in a sentence such as I am the president, the copula is asserting not action, but a logical identification of the two named entities. In language, at least, the human mind has no objection to seeing that two are one (what the philosophers discuss under the title nonduality, a similarly mind-confounding idea).

In the first version, the subject of the subordinate clause, job, is being identified with the predicate noun phrase to guard the guards. That phrase begins with the infinitive to guard, and includes the direct object of that infinitive, the guards. Infinitives may function as nouns (and elsewhere as adjectives and adverbs as well), and so we judge this first version of the subordinate clause more direct because the order of subject + copula + predicate noun is not interrupted in any way. Its structure is as straightforward as the simple example of a copula we looked at: I am the president. This word order is abbreviated SVC, where C stands for a complement, here the predicate noun president, which completes (hence, the term complement) the predication the copula is making.

Now that structure is largely the same in the second version of the subordinate clause, but here the pronoun it has been added. This use of the pronoun is called the anticipatory it, and, the odd nomenclature aside, its use is not unusual. Such statements as it’s interesting that you say he was once very poor, or it will not be easy to find another job illustrate the construction. The former means, logically, that you say he was once very poor is interesting, and the latter, to find another job will not be easy. Notice that both these logically more accurate statements also sound more formal. The anticipatory it construction, on the other hand, is used to soften the blow of saying what’s what by introducing a more discursive, conversational presentation of the ideas. This results in the displacement of the logical subject, thereby also giving it more emphasis when it finally appears where it wasn’t expected. As the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (Evans and Evans, 1957) puts it: “This is not a “weak” construction. It is a device for making the true subject more emphatic by allowing it to be taken out of its normal position.” The term true subject here means the logical subject.

That is an important observation, and it will affect the way we parse the subordinate clause of the second version. In the examples above, we can see that the “normal position” of the subjects has been reversed in arrangement: the logical, or “true” subjects (that you say he was once very poor and to find another job) appear in the predicate position when the anticipatory it construction is used. In the subordinate clause of the second version of our original example, however, the pronoun it does not reverse the position of the subject, but interrupts it. To assert whose job it was to guard the guards has the rhetorical effect of delaying the logical subject (to guard the guards) by giving the reader a pronoun still in need of—anticipating—an antecedent. Thus, the sentence is set up to keep the reader reading, and the answer to the suspense created finally arrives at the end of the clause. The pronoun then does not have its usual antecedent, but a postcedent. The first sentence of this essay is another example of the construction.

Which version to choose? That all depends on context, as is very often (if not, indeed, always) the case when we are writing as carefully as we can. The choice here is between being declarative or suspensive, black-and-white or more colorful, right-angled or curving. There is no rule to decide such things, for they lie in the order of discernment, not precept. And discernment we get only by reading and reflecting, and living.

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Jacob Needleman was an American philosopher and teacher who articulated in clear, straightforward prose the basic questions of philosophy which have preoccupied civilizations from the ancient world to the present. Among his many titles are Real Philosophy: An Anthology of Universal Search for Meaning; Money and the Meaning of Life; and The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders.

In addition to his many books and articles, Needleman once wrote a commencement address which he read to a graduating class of high school students. In it, he tells the story of being recently in Concord, Massachusetts, and visiting the site of the Old North Bridge, where American Minutemen fired the “shot heard round the world,” marking the onset of the American War of Independence. Needleman then explains to the new graduates before him the contemporary implications of that struggle:

There’s a plaque there that speaks about the love of freedom, and I asked myself, when I looked at that, “What do you love when you love freedom?” If you ask yourself that question – “I love freedom, but what is it that I love when I love freedom?”– it’s not just the freedom to buy things, to do what I want, when I want, how I want – that’s for children. But real freedom, for the Founders, and, as the country went on, for those who kept renewing the meaning of the country – people like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the keepers of the Native American tradition – freedom meant the freedom to live one’s life in relation to something higher, within oneself or above oneself; the freedom to search for conscience. And that is still protected by the government, however many mistakes and crimes America has been guilty of over the years. That’s one way of looking at the meaning of some of America’s ideals and values, a way that bases American democracy on deep spiritual and philosophical principles.

Needleman’s address is entitled “The One Great Question,” and you can find it, along with many other essays, articles, audio, and video, at his website, www.jacobneedleman.com. Needleman was concerned from early in his career with explaining and advancing the work of traditional—sometimes called primordial—philosophy, and his foreword to an anthology entitled The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism is very much worth time and close reflection. After a life of intelligent work keeping the road of philosophy open to all, Jacob Needleman died in 2022 at the age of eighty-eight.

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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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