If it rains tomorrow, I won’t go to the beach; but if the sun shines, I will. A perfectly good sentence with a perfectly wonderful thing to do in the world if, in fact, the sun shines. But what if someone had put it all this way instead: If it rain tomorrow, I would not go to the beach; but if the sun shine, I would. Those two sentences, in fact, are not saying the same thing, and although the second one is now antiquated, its grammar is just as correct as the first. For that second version, we might nowadays hear something like If it should rain tomorrow (or just should it rain tomorrow), I won’t go to the beach; but should the sun shine, I would. So what’s going on with all these versions of the same sunny idea?

In an earlier post (Present, But Not a Fact), we looked at what is called a conditional sentence and we examined in particular the contrary-to-fact condition. We noted there are three types of conditional sentences, and one traditional classification names them as logical, ideal, and unreal. A sentence such as if it were raining, I would not go to the beach is an unreal, or contrary-to-fact, condition because it implies sotto voce that it is not in fact raining. And a sentence like the opening example above (If it rains tomorrow, I won’t go to the beach) illustrates the first type, the logical condition. It is the second type, the ideal condition, that will concern us here for a few paragraphs. An ideal condition may be worded either in the now somewhat dated manner (If it rain tomorrow, I would not go to the beach; but if the sun shine, I would), or in its contemporary form (If it should rain tomorrow, I won’t go to the beach; but should the sun shine, I will). We should note too that we often hear and read a conditional sentence without the opening if conjunction, as in the second clause of this last example.

An ideal condition is so named because what it says is pointing to a potential world, not to a world of fact, as does the logical condition, nor to a counterfactual world, as does the unreal condition. What is possible (or not) can exist (if it can be properly said to exist at all) only in our minds, exactly where ideas—ideals—exist. To say if it rains is to employ the indicative mood of the verb (which we can recognize instantly by the presence of the letter s on the third-person-singular verb). The indicative mood states a conception as fact, and so the writer wants the reader to conceive of an almost mechanical, ineluctable connection between the condition and result: if it rains, I won’t go to the beach. We should sense a meaning close to whenever it rains, I don’t go to the beach. No question about it, no doubt, no go. All inevitably and necessarily logical.

The ideal condition, however, is not quite so sure that it will (or will not) rain tomorrow. What the future will bring—and oftentimes even what is going on in the present—cannot be known for sure. There’s a chance it will rain, there’s a chance it will not. There’s some chance, yes, but who’s to know whether the rain will come down in actual fact? All that uncertainty is a part of our common conception of life, but where, we wonder, is that hesitancy coming from? From nowhere else than the writer’s mind, the place where life can live without being factual. Life may be or not be, but it may also only maybe be, and to express the intriguing subtlety between being and the possibility of being, English (and other languages too) changes the mood of the verb, from indicative to subjunctive, in order to announce the move from the world of things to the world of the mind where all things are possible, but which are able to be brought into the factual world only under some degree of probability. The change in verb form tells the reader, then, to proceed in connecting the ideas of an ideal conditional on the assumption of probability, not on the presumption of existing fact.

The old way of forming the subjunctive, using the spelling of the infinitive for all persons and numbers, sounds odd to us now; instead, today we often use subjunctive auxiliaries like should and would (called inflectional auxiliaries) to form the same ideal conception: should it rain instead of if it rain. We will see the former construction in much of earlier English (it was alive and well in some places even less than one hundred years ago and on some occasions still present even now: the idiom rain or shine derives, in fact, from the ideal condition if it rain or if it shine), but whether the older simple verb or the newer auxiliary phrase is used to form the subjunctive mood, the subtlety of a world midway between fact and fiction remains to fascinate us.

Some linguists and cultural critics observe that without a more regular use of the subjunctive, we might be making it easier for ourselves to think merely in black and white, a world devoid of the variegated shades of meaning and possibility. Perhaps so, but perhaps not if we don’t lose our sense of the ironic, that things are never only what they seem to be because their roots ultimately lie deep in our minds. And yet, to worry over the impoverishment of our language, the articulating instrument of the mind, is the best way to preserve a healthy sense of this saving irony.

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Let’s tackle, or at least try to wrestle to the ground, a slippery topic in English grammar: the conditional sentence. Entire volumes could be (and have been) written on the subject, so here in the space of eight hundred words or so, our goal is just twofold: to get a bird’s eye view of the topic and to look more closely at one part of it that causes some trouble, the contrary-to-fact condition. There are subtleties here to appreciate.

To say something conditionally means to say that something is certainly true, or perhaps true, or certainly not true—depending on certain circumstances, called conditions, which are also given in the sentence. To say if it is raining, the stairs are slippery means that on the condition of there being rain, it is certainly true, it is certainly a fact, that the stairs I am referring to will be slippery. If we change the verbs just a bit and say, should it be raining, the stairs would be wet, we have introduced some doubt into the assertion: perhaps it is true that the stairs are slippery, but then again perhaps not, because there is some doubt whether the conditions that would certainly make the stairs slippery has in fact been fulfilled. Finally, if we change the verbs one more time to say if it were raining, the stairs would be wet, we are positively asserting that it is not true that the stairs are slippery, because the condition, that it is raining, is now understood as a supposition, not as a certain or even probable fact.

That is a synoptic view of a conditional statement. This kind of sentence, then, has two parts, a conditional clause and a principal clause. The conditional clause (technically in both grammar and logic called the protasis) generally begins with the conjunction if, and the principal, or concluding, clause (technically called the apodosis) says what ensues, given the conditional clause connected with it. The order of the two clauses is not grammatically important (though rhetorically very important), and sometimes the conjunction if is omitted, the writer assuming the reader will supply it. If the if-clause begins the sentence, a comma must follow it.

Now let’s concentrate on the contrary-to-fact condition, because this involves the difference between the assumption of fact and the outright denial of it while imagining it true. If not observed, this distinction can cause much pointless misunderstanding, because conditional sentences, strange to say, make no actual assertion about anything at all; they only say something about the connection between two ideas. What is factual in the statement if it is raining, the stairs are slippery is the inevitability of the slippery steps in the presence of rain. Whether or not it is in fact raining at the moment is something the writer does not know, for if he did, he would say, it is raining and so the stairs are slippery. That sentence is not conditional but merely the regular combination of two indicative (that is, factual) assertions. The latter is the result of the former, and the former is not a necessary condition of the latter, at least as far as the sentence is concerned. In reality, however, that is almost certainly the case.

Compare that now with the contrary-to-fact sentence If it were raining, the stairs would be wet. How do we know upon reading that sentence that the writer means to assert that at the moment it is not raining, but something would result from the rain if we imagined, or hypothesized, that there was rain present? The answer lies in the way the verbs are used. Notice that in this contrary-to-fact sentence, both of the verbs, were and would be, appear to be in the past tense, but are still referring to the present time. Read the sentence again and you will sense that right away. Compare that now with the factual statement, if it is raining, the stairs are slippery and you’ll see that both verbs there, is and are, appear to be in the present tense.

The grammatical sleight of hand that makes the contrary-to-fact condition possible is this: when the past tense form of a verb refers to the present time, it constitutes what is called the subjunctive mood of the verb. That subjunctive mood is used in contrary-to-fact conditions, but not in factual, or what is sometimes more accurately called logical, conditions (though it is also used in the second kind of conditional sentence that involves the verbs should and would, past subjunctive forms of shall and will respectively).

Making the past tense presently open up an imaginary world is an ingenious linguistic device, a kind of magical open sesame or once upon a time, whereupon we can find ourselves in the unhindered world of the imagination, what some still believe to be the priceless pearl of human beings—and being human. There in that immaterial world (or is it?) we can think out things before getting caught in the predicaments of factual existence, and save ourselves much trouble indeed. Such is the subtlety of grammar and the shades of meaning it can convey.

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Scott Nearing was a writer, teacher, and social activist whose preoccupations in the last tumultuous century were not too different from our own. Born in 1883 he died in 1983, and in his one hundred years he promulgated economic and political ideas, some far from the commonly accepted, whose consideration depended on his ability to state his positions and reasons with effective force. His name might be familiar to some in connection with The Good Life Center in Maine, an organization which his wife, Helen, later founded to promote their work for “social justice and simple living.”

In his autobiography, entitled The Making of a Radical, Nearing describes the “annihilative monsters” of nuclear weapons, their threat, and yet too the possibility of our taming them. Here is a short passage, written in the 1960s, in which he is exhorting his readers to understand the fight and victory:

The danger is obvious. The issue is urgent. The perilous fight has escalated to a climax. Decision and action are the order of the day. Despite the danger, in the face of the urgency I believe that the perilous fight can be won now, today and tomorrow, at several levels.

Energy builds across these five sentences, and it will be instructive for us as writers (if not too as citizens) to understand the compositional structure of this passage and how the energy this creates helps Nearing exhort his readers to consider the risk and opportunity of the political moment present then and present still.

The passage constitutes a single paragraph in the original chapter (entitled “The Dawn’s Early Light”), and to begin with we should note that the first four sentences are each simple in their construction (one subject phrase with one independent predicate), together totaling twenty-five words, or exactly one-half the paragraph. The fifth sentence alone and in its own right makes up another twenty-five words, evening the balance of the paragraph’s weight. This fifth sentence is complex in structure, with one main clause and one subordinate noun clause, and it is shaped very differently from the previous four, as we’ll see in a moment, by adverbial phrases fore and aft.

The juxtaposition of the first four simple sentences makes up what is called a segregated style, the notion being that the single assertion of each simple sentence is being set aside, or segregated, from what otherwise could be construed and written as a compound sentence: The danger is obvious, and the issue is urgent; the perilous fight has escalated to a climax, and decision and action are the order of the day. The isolation of one thought in a simple sentence of its own heightens the conviction of each, as well as the assembled force of the aggregation. And that force increases gradually as the subjects of the four sentences become more complex: the first two subjects (danger and issue) are entirely simple, the third adds an adjective (perilous), and the forth expands into two subjects (decision and action). (We should note too that the fourth sentence is also to be classed as simple, even though its subject is compound. Sentence types are determined by the properties of their predicates, not their subjects.)

Those first four sentences each beat down, drumlike, on one idea, and their simple grammatical make-up makes it easy for us to hear and absorb the meanings. If we imagine each a vertical downstroke, the fifth sentence works horizontally, first sweeping across the landscape of circumstances with two prepositional phrases (despite the danger, in the face of the urgency), then rising to say what it has to say (I believe that the perilous fight can be won), and then swooping down in finishing with temporal and spatial adverbs (now, today and tomorrow, at several levels). Because the main idea is positioned between the subordinate elements, this design is called a centered sentence. Although there is much to be said for the arithmetical balance of twenty-five words plus twenty-five words, could the fifth sentence have gained more energy by deleting the last, vague prepositional phrase (at several levels)? I think so.

Such close analysis, though, can be too close sometimes, here because this last prepositional phrase might very well stand as a transition to the paragraph following, in which Nearing details the many ways individuals may fight, as he calls it, the perilous fight. But as a study of composition, we must isolate a passage and say what we can about it as it stands, the better that way to learn how to write such fine work ourselves. We can feel Nearing’s conviction in the way he assembles his thoughts, and that inweaving of form and content remains ever the goal to achieve.

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Good writers take good risks from time to time, and when they prevail, they can enrich a sentence with ambiguity without impairing the truth. In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education,” Jennifer Frey writes this interesting sentence: Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. A close reading of this example will remind us of a few important points, both grammatical and rhetorical.

Let’s focus on focused. That’s where the writer took a risk and her composition took an interesting grammatical turn. First let’s establish the fact that the sentence, for all its thirty-three words, is structurally simple; there is only one clause and it is grammatically independent: I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. The two structural groups which precede it (beginning over the past and focused on studying) are both phrases, and therefore are both subordinate elements (though not clauses) intended to build anticipation of some complete thought as the sentence concludes. The layout designs a standard cumulative sentence (main clause followed by subordinate detail) in reverse.

The word focused, once again, marks the beginning of the second structural phrase. It is grammatically the past participle of the transitive verb to focus, and as a participle (and here we are about to reach the heart of the issue) it functions as an adjective. Participles are adjectives built from verbs, and so like all adjectives they incline to modify some noun (or anything acting as a noun) close by. They may modify a noun by describing it more fully or by defining it more exactly, but whichever they do, they must do it logically. If I say, for example, that flying at night the lights of the city sparkle on the horizon, the participle flying grammatically modifies the noun lights. Logically, of course, that makes no sense, because what is flying is not the lights of the city, but the subject in the airplane, whose pronoun has been illicitly suppressed: when I fly at night, the lights of the city seem to sparkle in the distance. That’s better.

That is a mistake the author of our example, however, does not make. And not making it, she enlivens the sentence with a dash of ambiguity—not equivocity, but ambiguity. Something that is equivocal is misleading, and often purposefully so. Something that is ambiguous can be that, but it can also be something that allows for more than one interpretation, legitimately and logically so. When the writer here begins the second prepositional phrase with the participle focused, our instinct is to apply that participial adjective to the noun standing closest to it, the proper noun Honor’s College; and that makes logical sense as well, because such a college program may indeed (and it is true, in fact, in this case) have the studying of Western classics as its primary concern. But it could be that focused refers to the noun dean earlier in the sentence, again both grammatically and logically defensible and, in fact, all the likelier when we come to the main subject I (in the contraction I’ve) as we continue reading. Though inanimate colleges of people may be said figuratively to be focused, an animate pronoun magnetizes the participle all the more obviously, strengthening the assertion by associating it with a person’s mental determination.

The good ambiguity here lies, then, in the fact that the participle focused may modify either the nearby noun College or the faraway noun dean. Those two possibilities, equally justifiable, intensify the sentence by attributing a preeminent concern to two entities involved in the assertion—without causing confusion or raising any logical contradiction. And when that’s the case, composing such careful ambiguity does not impoverish but enriches the way language can carry meaning successfully from one mind to another.

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Appreciate for a moment the extravagant detail, or what we could call the involvement, of this description of a character in Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas.” This is Braggioni, who waits every evening for Laura, to sing for her with his guitar:

Braggioni catches her glance solidly as if he had been waiting for it, leans forward, balancing his paunch between his spread knees, and sings with tremendous emphasis, weighing his words…. His mouth opens round and yearns sideways, his balloon cheeks grow oily with the labor of song. He bulges marvelously in his expensive garments. Over his lavender collar, crushed upon a purple necktie, held by a diamond hoop: over his ammunition belt of tooled leather worked in silver, buckled cruelly around his gasping middle: over the tops of his glossy yellow shoes Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness, his mauve silk hose stretched taut, his ankles bound with the stout leather thongs of his shoes.

Quite someone this Braggioni, whom Porter has drawn so fully for us here. Remember the obvious: that piece of paper Porter had on her desk or in the typewriter before her was blank when she began to write; Braggioni was alive in her mind, but it was up to Porter the writer to involve her character in a world—a world made up of things—which we, her readers, could recognize. She had to bring this conjured wooer to life on the page before us, and that she does by commanding this piece of detail and that to enflesh what she finds in her imagination for us to live with as well. Is Braggioni’s physique large or small? She doesn’t say outright, but she shows: a paunch so large it must be balanced, cheeks so bulbous they balloon, a grandiosity so great that this crooner doesn’t just swoon, but bulges. As the writer John Gardner says in his The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Vintage, 1991), “Vivid detail is the life blood of fiction…. The reader is regularly presented with proofs—in the form of closely observed details—that what is said to be happening is really happening.” This detailing proof, he says, is the cause of the verisimilitude that makes fiction work.

It is Porter’s last sentence of this passage, however, that catches and impresses our close attention, because that lengthy assertion combines even more ancillary detail about Braggioni in a sophisticated sentence structure which gives that detail an energetic presence. A first reading of those sixty words will highlight the outlines of the grammatical foundations: the preposition over occurs three times, establishing a parallel repetition of structure called anaphora, a design meant to secure and enforce the emotional overtones of what is being depicted. Unusual here, though, is the fact that these three prepositional phrases are separated not by two commas as one would expect, but by two colons (after hoop and after middle). Colons are generally used either to explain or to enumerate what they abut, but here, the two colons act as what engineers call a linear motor, which produces not the twisting energy of torque but an advancing, linear force. The result is that the energy of the ideas in the prepositional phrases gathers on itself and pushes one unobstructed up to the one main clause of the sentence, Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness. From that height, the sentence swoops down like a roller coaster through the remaining detail of his appearance and dress.

Where that one main clause is placed—midway through the sentence with subordinate elements before and after it—is the reason such a configuration is called a centered sentence. Not common, centered sentences both build up to and release a lot of energy in the form of detail, but in doing so they look for a requisite amount of attention and concentration from the reader to be successful. This, then, points to a general rule about composition which John Gardner also explains in his Art of Fiction. What we write, he says, must be

vivid and continuous—vivid because if we’re not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.

This passage of Katherine Anne Porter’s is a wonderful illustration of just how much attention to craft the serious writer gives to the work of composition and how much work that same serious writer expects from the serious reader. And work it is. We forget that sometimes—to our own unnecessary frustration when ideas don’t quickly flip from mind to page or page to mind. No first draft is a final draft, and sometimes we have to read again, as the writer certainly has to write again. The traditional adage has it that writing is rewriting. Perhaps reading is rereading, too.

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