WRITING CLEAR PROSE
George Perkins
Writing Clear Prose
Smashwords edition
Copyright © 2010 by George Perkins
Contents
Chapter One: The Paragraph
Chapter Two: The Writing as a Whole
Chapter Three: The Sentence
Chapter Four: Diction
Chapter Five: Style
CHAPTER ONE
The Paragraph
For prose writers, the paragraph serves as the primary unit of composition. It communicates with a completeness and clarity unmatched by the sentence or the word. If each paragraph is not clear and meaningful, the writing as a whole cannot be clear and meaningful. As writers, we begin by placing a word on a piece of paper. We turn that word into a sentence, connect that sentence with another, write a few more to complete a paragraph, then follow that first paragraph with another and another until the writing is complete. Each act of writing constitutes another lesson, self-taught, and we learn as we go along. When we direct our attention away from the process, however, and begin to consider why we write as we do and how we could make it better, we want to leave aside for the present the words and the sentences and the writing as a whole. We will come to those later. For now, we accept these propositions: that no study of words will teach us how to write sentences, that no study of sentences will tell us how to combine them in effective paragraphs, and that no study of the organization of an essay will move us very far toward writing one if we do not know how to write a paragraph.
A good paragraph centers on one thought, often expressed in a topic sentence, and is unified, complete, and coherent.
Topic Sentence
The topic sentence summarizes the thought of the sentence. Often it comes at the beginning, announcing the thought explored in the sentences that follow. In a paragraph from their Introduction to the History of Western Europe, for example, James Harvey Robinson and James T. Shotwell begin one of their paragraphs with this sentence:
The sublime prerogatives of the Church, together with its unrivaled organization and vast wealth, combined to make its officers, the clergy, the most powerful social class of the Middle Ages.
What follows fills out the thought, explaining briefly what the writers conceive as the constituent elements of the clergy’s power:
They held the keys of heaven and without their aid no one could hope to enter in. By excommunication they could not only cast an offender out of the Church, but also forbid his fellow-men to associate with him, since he was accursed and consigned to Satan. By means of the interdict they could suspend the consolations of religion in a whole city or country by closing the church doors and prohibiting all public services.
Sometimes the topic sentence comes at the end, drawing together the thought prompted by the earlier sentences, as in the following paragraph from Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art. He is discussing the artistic effects of black and white movies in contrast to the Technicolor movies films we have become so accustomed to:
Consider the face of a blond woman in a film shot: the color of hair and complexion approximate to each other as a curious pale white. Even the blue eyes appear whitish; the velvety black bow of the mouth and the sharp dark pencil lines of the eyebrows are in marked contrast. How strange such a face is, how much more intense, because unconventional, is the expression. How much more readily one observes whether the line with which a dense black braid of hair frames a white face is beautiful and suitable. Anyone who has noticed how unreal most film faces appear, how unearthly, how beautiful, how they often give the impression of being not so much a natural phenomenon as an artistic creation, toward which, of course, the art of make-up helps considerably, will get the same pleasure from a good film face as from a good lithograph or woodcut. Anyone who has the habit of going to film premieres knows haw painfully pink the faces of the film actors appear in real life when they come on stage and make their bows after the performance. The stylized, expressive giant masks on the screen do not fit beings of flesh and blood; they are visual material, the stuff of which art is made.
Arnheim lays out his observations one at a time, sharing perceptions with a reader who must remain uncertain of the point of the paragraph until he reaches the clarifications supplied in the last sentence. This procedure contrasts nicely with the straight-forward manner of Robinson and Shotwell, who state their idea up front and then support it.
Other positions for a topic sentence are possible. In the following paragraph, taken from Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams divides his central idea between two sentences, placing one at the beginning and one at the end.
At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres. Other churches have glass, quantities of it, and very fine, but we have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind the glory of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own. For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable; the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he is sure to lad wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre Mauclerc’s stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that Chartres was made what it is, not by the artist, but by the virgin.
Placing Adams’ thought in one sentence, we might write something like this: “The crowning glory of Chartres was made not by the artist but by the Virgin. Writing his paragraph as he does, holding “Virgin” until the last word, Adams captures the reader with a stunning idea that will need more support than he can give it in one paragraph. At the same time that he produces his climax, he deftly provides the turning point for a transition to a new paragraph.
. . . Chartres was made what it is, not by the artist, but by the virgin.
If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the glass with a light and color that actually blind the true servant of Mary.
There is more. If we seek out this paragraph in the book it comes from, we will find that it begins Chapter VIII. Coming very near the beginning of the book, the paragraph begins a chapter that is itself a turning point. Its opening words, “At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres,” are in themselves transitional, suggesting to a reader that the glories described in earlier chapters are less than the glory to come. The paragraph as a whole, in other words, leads from and leads to. Splitting his topic idea into two sentences, Adams accomplishes his ends with remarkable skill.
Good writers, then, find various ways to proceed, suiting their paragraphs to their goals. They may begin with a topic sentence, end with a topic sentence, or divide the topic idea into two sentences that embrace the rest of the words of the paragraph. Presumably we could find good paragraphs with the topic sentence placed somewhere between beginning and the end. Presumably we could find good paragraphs with a topic idea never stated, but so strongly implied that it needs no summary words. Students of writing, however, need not possibilities but guidelines. Two will help.
(1) Include a topic sentence in each paragraph. If you cannot construct a topic sentence for your paragraph, you cannot be certain your thought is clear. If you do not include the sentence among those you have written, you cannot be certain the reader will construe the idea in the way you intend.
(2) Place the topic sentence at the beginning of all paragraphs but the first and last. We will discuss the special needs of first and last paragraphs in the chapter on the essay as a whole. For now, we are concerned with constructing a solid paragraph, unified, complete, and coherent, the basic building block of prose writing.
To understand the force of these guidelines, it helps to remember that good writing is a communication between people. The writer has ideas and expectations, but so does the reader. Writing well, you consider what you have to say, but you know you communicate it best when you remember the reasonable expectations of the reader. Among the most important of these is the reader’s experience with the convention of the paragraph break.
The line you have been reading stops in its linear march across the page. You encounter a bit of white space, and then a new sentence. A pause, while the writer gathers momentum to begin again and provides you a convenient stopping place where you can put down the book and think about what has just been said? Yes, the paragraph break functions that way. An aesthetic device, relieving the eye of the pressure of an unbroken expanse of small ink impressions running margin to margin? Yes, the paragraph break functions that way, too. But in good writing it does more. As a reader, you have learned to recognize that the break in print generally signals a break in thought. Your readers have learned the same thing. You have broken off your writing; they expect a new thought, or a new turn to the old thought. Unless you have a better idea, it makes sense to tell them immediately what the new thought is, in a topic sentence that will focus their attention as you develop your idea in the rest of the paragraph.
Unity
A good paragraph is unified. After establishing the main thought, the writer should insert only those sentences that contribute to the development of the thought. Defining terms and explaining, expanding, or illustrating concepts, the writer should avoid the temptation to include material that comes to mind in the process of composition, but properly belongs elsewhere. Unskilled writers find it easy to imagine connections readers have trouble perceiving and should be especially wary of the tangential observation that slips into a paragraph and helps expand it to a respectable fullness while blurring its central focus. In the following paragraph the subject is fishing. The writer should have removed the next to last sentence.
The lake is noted for its fishing. Pickerel nest in the weeds to the north, while in the deeper portions n the middle and toward the south, bass abound. Trout occasionally make their up or downstream from the swift river that flows in and out of it. The landlocked salmon are famous and each of the older human residents in the few homes along the shore and in the nearby town knows of a sure fishing spot for the right time of day or season. Sunfish lurk in the shallows. There are bathing beaches, too, and lately there has been much recreational boating and water-skiing. Record catches are common.
Unity does not necessarily mean brevity. If the idea is simple, the paragraph will be short and direct, a sentence perhaps, or even a single word:
Yes.
A brief paragraph will do when that is all that is needed, or when the emphasis of isolation is wanted. It will also serve when a change of pace is needed, or the writer sees something to be gained by the contrasting rhythm of long and short. Generally speaking, a long paragraph signals a complex idea, one that when properly defined, explained, and illustrated requires the length given to it. In the following excerpt from Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen develops two paragraphs, one long and one short, but each unified and each complete for his purposes:
Lindbergh did not go back on his admirers. He undertook a series of exhibition flights and good-will flights, successfully and with quiet dignity. He married the daughter of the ambassador to Mexico, and in so doing delighted the country by turning the tables on ballyhoo itself, by slipping away with his bride on a motor-boat and remaining hidden for days despite the efforts of hundreds of newspaper men to spy upon his honeymoon. Wherever he went, crowds fought for a chance to be near him, medals were pinned upon him, tributes were showered upon him, his coming and going was news. He packed away a good-sized fortune earned chiefly as a consultant for aviation companies, but few people grudged him that. Incredibly, he kept his head and hi instinct for fine conduct.
And he remained a national idol.
Completeness
A good paragraph is complete. Striving for unity, ruling out irrelevant material, does not create excessively brief paragraphs, but only paragraphs no longer than they have to be. Writers still learning frequently assume that when a ting has been said once in a manner clear to the writer, it has been expressed clearly for all readers at all times. Nobody can fail to understand what the words say, such a writer believes, when they are written in plain English, right here on the page, and lying in good light right in front of the eyes.
Unfortunately, written communication is not that simple. Words seldom have one meaning alone and sentences generally need contexts and amplification. To write that a dog is fat communicate very little unless the reader has seen the dog: fat for a greyhound or fat for a bulldog. The picture, if it matters, is clear in the mind of the writer, much less so in the mind of the reader presented with no more than the words “dog” and “fat” to go by. Two sentences instead of one, or a few more words added to the first, begin to fill in the picture, begin to suggest also that it does matter, and get the writer thinking about why it matters and what more is needed to complete the thought. “The school was next to a highway,” writes a student. Yes, says the reader, and so? Did the desks rattle when the trucks went by? Was the voice of the teacher drowned out by shifting gears and cars without mufflers? Did the children choke on exhaust fumes sifting through the school windows? The dog and the school are simple matters, easily clarified by a few details, but the principle of expansion lies just as heavily upon concepts less easily defined and for these it is especially important that the writer resist the temptation to assume that everyone knows what is meant by words in broad and general use. “My father was conservative,” writes an essayist, inviting the reader’s response “Conservative in what way? In dress, in morals, in musical and artistic taste, in politics?” Another essayist spells it out a bit, writing “My father was conservative in his politics,” but stops there, failing to give any hint as to what that notoriously slippery term means in this almost wholly undefined instance.
Completeness in a paragraph is indispensable to clarity. A writer achieves it by close attention to the kind of detail that expands and explains. Perhaps it comes from an extended definition, or from saying the same thing in two or three different ways, each more sharply defined than the last:
The liberty I speak of is freedom, but it is not license. It is the liberty that gives people the use of the highways of their country, but does not allow them to drive on the sidewalks. It guarantees them the right to possess guns and use them in designated areas during the hunting season, but does not allow them to shoot their neighbors of take target practice in the town park. It allows each of us our private opinions but does not allow us to use the public press for slander.
Perhaps completeness follows from a writer’s illustrating a point with examples taken from personal experience or with information gathered from reading:
The narwhal has been much misunderstood. During the Middle Ages, it was unknown to science, and its horn, which turned up from time to time in the courts of Europe, was thought to be that of a unicorn. Later, though a mammal, it passed as a fish. Even its name has caused confusion, dictionaries translating from the Old Norse as “corpse whale,” Herman Melville giving it as “nostril whale.” As a child in New Bedford, I knew an old sailor who told tales of encounters with narwhals in polar seas, but I dismissed them as the fabrications of an old man. Only later, when I read carefully the inscription under the narwhal horn hanging on the wall of the Whaling Museum did come to understand that if the stories were fabulous, the creature was not.
Perhaps it comes from qualification of a topic sentence which otherwise might be interpreted too broadly:
Jonathan was one of the bravest men I have ever known. It was not that he was heroic in battle, in mine disasters, or situations of random violence; he had been too young for the Korean War and Vietnam and as far as I know he had never been near a mine or witnessed a school shooting or a bomb explosion. While I knew him he worked at various jobs and he had worked at others before, but none of them were especially dangerous. I don’t mean that he would not have been courageous as a soldier, a miner, or a policeman. He would have gone quietly about his business, whatever it was, and would have done what was necessary, and more. His was a life, however, that was not marked out for heroics. His courage was tested not in battle but in the innumerable minor frustrations of a lifetime of defeat, and he displayed it abundantly.
By whatever means it is achieved, completeness is necessary to the reader’s (not necessarily the writer’s) full comprehension of what is being said.
A paragraph may follow many paths and still be complete, but sometimes it helps to have a particular path in mind. The following outline represents one way of proceeding. It is a guide, not a blueprint, and is meant to be flexible.
Topic sentence. Explanation, in some detail, of what is meant by the topic sentence, perhaps only another way of expressing the idea. Two or more brief illustrations. A more complex illustration, developed at greater length.
Childhood is a time of joy. It is a time when desires are few and carefully provided for, when pain is transient and pleasure is lasting. It is a time of toy trains and hard candy, of sidewalk games and backyard circuses. It is a time when each hour brings a new and miraculous adventure, when the world of experience, new and beautiful in itself, is colored with the rainbow hues of he imagination. The kitten is a lion lurking in the grass. The basement is the repository of dark but exhilarating secrets; there is a pirate treasure in the corner. The bent arm of an oak tree is a seat, a tree house, the crow’s nest of a sailing ship, the tower of a medieval castle inhabited by the Black Knight, a magic carpet flying above the ramparts over the city and over a forbidding landscape of sun-drenched dunes toward an oasis of blue water and shading date palms—or it s merely the limb of an oak tree, as time and the mind demand.
Coherence
A good paragraph is coherent. Essentially, this means only that the sentences flow easily from one to another, that there is no awkward jarring between them, and that they belong together. Considered this way, coherence is the direct result of unity: paragraphs composed of disunified sentences are almost certainly incoherent. Considered in another way, coherence may be said to result from completeness: an apparently incoherent paragraph may often be improved by supplying thought links between point A and point B, links which the writer may have taken for granted but which may have been missed by the reader. But unity and completeness are not enough. A paragraph may possess both qualities and still jar the reader with its incoherence. An example follows.
It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers.
As many readers may observe, these sentences sound like Hemingway, and they will be right. Hemingway did indeed write them, and placed them at the beginning of his short story “In Another Country,” but in his story they appeared in a different order. In the printing above, the order has been scrambled. As printed above, the Hemingway order has been scrambled. The challenge of rearranging them to give them their original coherence, or something very close to it, is not difficult. Remember that this is a beginning paragraph. As such it will be governed by different dynamics than a later one. A check with the original (provided here among the exercises following this chapter) will reveal Hemingway’s order, and a little thought will suggest reasons for it.
Consider another jumble. Hemingway’s paragraph was fiction. The following, from a book by Rachel Carson was originally good expository prose, but is here disarranged.
When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history. The dramatic and the catastrophic in earth history have left their trace in the sediments, the outpourings of volcanoes, the advance and retreat of ice, the searing aridity of desert lands, the sweeping destruction of floods. The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. For all is written here. In the nature of the materials that compose them and in the arrangements of their successive layers the sediments reflect all that has happened in the waters above them and on the surrounding lands.
When Carson wrote these sentences in The Sea Around Us, she put them together in a much more coherent order than the one given above. Again, it is not difficult to rearrange them, and again a check with the original (provided among the exercises that follow) will provide insight into the arrangement chosen by an accomplished writer.
Order. A major element of coherence, then, is order. Each sentence should appear where it does in the paragraph for a good reason. Each should follow smoothly and logically from the sentence before and lead smoothly and logically to the one that follows. Too often in weak writing a sentence can be removed from a paragraph and placed at random at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end without any hurt to the sense. Sometimes such a movement results in considerable improvement. Occasionally, several sentences within a paragraph should be rearranged.
The basic principle of paragraph organization is simple: the writer should have a reason for positioning each sentence. Most of the time, the reason should be more compelling than intuition or an appeal to the random processes of the human mind. Thoughts come as they will. Writing puts them in an order that helps to lodge them effectively in the mind of a reader.
Time. Paragraphs concerned with time should never lose touch with the chronological order of our lives and of the world around us, first things coming first and last things last. That does not mean that the writer must never move away from the strict order of events, but only that a time order is most effective when written in remembrance of the reader’s desire to know what happened when and the corollary expectation that sequences will be clear. Disjunctions of time should serve a purpose. In the advantages of living close to a university, for example, it is a dead giveaway of slipshod composition to write “Because I live close to the university, I can save money by going home to lunch. I can also eat breakfast at home.” A student writing like that composes sentences as they come to mind, but should think once more and consider the jarring effect on readers whose experience in the world has taught them that breakfast comes before lunch. Revision is easy.
On the other hand, many events prompt a natural and effective movement backward in time, or backwards and forwards. “My grandmother died easily in her sleep,” one paragraph might begin, “but her last few months were far from easy,” and from that beginning the slide into the time just before her death will seem natural and useful. Time-ordered paragraphs need not move forward mechanically like a ticking clock or the turning pages of a calendar, but the writer of them needs to keep the reader’s sense of clocks and calendars in mind.
Space. Paragraphs concerned with space should proceed through logically organized segments: from side to side, from top to bottom, from back to front—or diagonally, in a circle, in leaps from here to there, or in any of the ways that thought can proceed in a three-dimensional world. As writers, we need to know where we stand and what we are looking at. Putting our spaces on paper for readers, we need to provide the pictures apparent to us and indicate how the segments of our vision come together as a whole. Often we will want to graft thought and feeling onto the elements of space, as e. e. cummings did in this excerpt from The Enormous Room:
In a flash the gate was locked behind me, and I was following along a wall at right angles to the first . . . A moment before I had been walking in the free world: now I was again a prisoner. The sky was still over me, the clammy morning caressed me: but walls of wire and stone told me that my instant of freedom had departed. I was in fact traversing a lane no wider than the gate: on my left, barbed-wire separated me from the famous cour in which les femmes se prominent, a rectangle about 50 feet deep and 200 long, with a stone wall at he farther end of it and otherwise surrounded by wire: on my right, grey samenesss of stone, the ennui of the regular and the perpendicular, the ponderous ferocity of silence. . .
General to Particular. It impossible wholly to escape time and space, but in instances where they become subordinate to thoughts or emotions, the writer may turn the dominant organizing principle into a movement from the general to the particular, from a broad summary statement to a catalog of supporting details:
It is a street of international charm. There are French restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Indian restaurants. There is a shop that specializes in Florentine leather and Venetian glass. Another sells Chinese silks, porcelains, and jades. A tailor will take your measurements and have a suit made in Honk Kong. An African shop deals exclusively in tribal masks, statures, and wall hangings. The Mexican one next door displays mostly pottery and straw and leather goods. People of all nationalities crowd the sidewalks.
Particular to General. Order depends upon purpose. Does the writer wish to lead to or from? In some situations the broad statement seems most effective if it comes first, but in others a beginning in specifics leads effectively to a concluding generalization. The paragraph immediately above can easily be written in precisely the same way, but with the first sentence moved to the end. The writer’s preference will depend on the flow out of and into the preceding and following paragraphs.
Definition. Paragraphs organized around a definition generally move from the genus (the large class that contains the term being defined) to the differentiae (the characteristics that differentiate items described by that term from others in the same large class).
The game of go is a board game like chess or checkers. Like chess or checkers, it is played by moving counters on a board marked into squares. Unlike chess or checkers, the counters are not limited to a few pieces and do not march across the playing surface. Instead, the payers take turns placing a new piece anywhere on the board . . .
Cause and Effect. A paragraph emphasizing cause-and-effect relationships may move in either direction (cause to effect, or effect to cause), but it must move in such a way that the relationship is clear:
When Frank returned to the house that his mother had left him in her will, he found that he had been away so long that few people in the town remembered him, and those few were from a generation. That he scarcely cared about. He found the town as he had found it in his youth, dull and uninteresting, but he could muster neither the energy nor the will to leave. With no place to go, no one to talk to, he became almost a recluse. In time, for lack of anything more compel to fill his days, he began to place his thoughts on paper. The result was a curious diary . . .
Comparison and Contrast. For a paragraph structured on a comparison (or a contrast, or a comparison and contrast together) the writer generally dissects the subjects of the comparison into their components and displays the results point by point:
In many ways, the two women were comparable. Each was born into a poor family with many children. Each was raised in a strongly fundamental religion by evangelistic parents. Each lived on a farm in childhood and moved to a city in early youth. Each left school early to go to work . . .
Mixed Orders. More often than not, good paragraphs are built round several considerations. Events in time take place also in space. General truths are discovered in particular insights that sometimes lead to definitions. Causes are sometimes understood better when compared to other causes, as effects when compared to other effects. Such observations, however, do not relieve writers of the necessity of paying attention to the order of sentences within paragraphs. They serve best as reminders tat principles of order exist even when details are complicated. Writers who ignore the order of their sentences risk falling into incoherence.
Transitions. Frequently a writer can improve the coherence in a paragraph by supplying words or phrases that clarify the relationships between sentences. Taken together, the sentences “Cecil Fielder played professional baseball in Japan. Later, he became a heavy hitter for the Detroit Tigers” beg for clarification. Transitional words and phrases, therefore, as a result, because, in addition, on the other hand, similarly, nevertheless, and other such links, help a writer move gracefully from one sentence to another, but they are only helpers, shortcuts to a linkage that needs further examination.
Weak: Kurt Mason was in an automobile accident as a child. He was blind from his ninth year
.
Improved: Kurt Mason was in an automobile accident as a child. As a result he was blind from his ninth year.
Weak: Some historians believe that the event was totally fictitious. Jennifer Martinez has written at length about the subject.
Improved: Some historians believe that the event was totally fictitious. On the other hand, Jennifer Martin has written convincingly about its fundamental truth.
Transitional devices are basically mechanical, showing the way to connection not otherwise apparent. Much more satisfactory than too much dependence on them is a logical sequence that amplifies and explains connections when necessary and leaves them implied when they cannot be misunderstood. Too many for examples annoy readers who pick up the patterns of good writing and see the examples coming without formal announcements. Presented with the statement that as a result of an automobile accident a boy became blind, a reader might well wish for more details, and, on reflection, a writer might think it appropriate to supply them. A statement that a historian on the other hand has written on a controversial subject invites speculation about the details that justify the different approaches.
Point of View. A writer should avoid unprofitable shifts in grammatical point of view within the paragraph and in the essay as a whole. A beginning in the third person singular (he, she, one, the student, the writer, and other similar constructions referring to a person neither I nor you) carries with it the obligation to stay generally within that perspective, writing impersonally of someone else. Establishing the normal boundaries of communication (I sit here composing words to be read by you about a student) an accomplished writer will seldom shift the point of view except for good reason: for example, to illustrate a general point with a personal experience. Then a writer becomes I. Similarly, a beginning in the first person singular, I, remains most effective when that point of view is maintained, avoiding shifts to constructions such as this writer believes.
These two points of view, impersonal third person and first person singular I, are the dominant choices for good prose writing. Only rarely does it profit a writer to make a shift that addresses readers directly (you see) or includes them, perhaps unwillingly, in the writer’s conclusion (we conclude).
Maintaining the Same Subject. Considerations of grammatical point of view direct attention to the governing perspective, the grammatical person that holds the paragraph or essay together. Considerations of grammatical subject direct attention to the nouns that govern the verbs within the main clause of each sentence. Sometimes grammatical point of view (I or the student) serves also as the grammatical point of view of the sentence (I think or The student writes). More often, although the point of view continues in command, the grammatical subject of the sentences focuses attention on the thing seen rather than the eye that sees it, the thought held rather than the mind that holds it. Encountering sentences that begin My mother or My job of My beliefs, a reader understands the overarching point of view of the I that provides the linking perspective. Just as surely, even when the my is dropped and the grammatical subject becomes cooking, assembly line, or the power of prayer, the reader understands, if the writing is effective, that the sentences lie under the control of an enveloping point of view. Still, the grammatical subjects may cause trouble.
Keeping n mind that the grammatical subject is the word that most immediately fixes the attention of the reader, the writer should strive to maintain the same subject throughout a sentence. Shifting subjects from one clause to the next results in mental adjustments of focus that are seldom necessary:
Weak: Physics is fun for me, and my brother likes physics, too.
Improved: My brother and I both like physics.
Weak: The salesman either makes the sale, or you turn him down.
Improved: The salesman either makes the sale or he doesn’t.
Similar considerations dictate an attempt to maintain the same subject in successive sentences throughout the paragraph, with variety gained not from shifting subjects but from changing sentence patterns. The writer may make the sentences simple or complex, may begin them sometimes with the subject and sometimes with a modifying phrase or subordinate clause, may use synonyms or pronouns to vary the word that denotes the subject, but should keep the same active agent (the same general subject) clearly in view. Although an occasional shifting of subjects may serve a valid purpose, in general the writer will compose most effectively when shifts of subject from sentence within a paragraph are few. Sure signs that control is slipping away are the snowball sentences that result when each succeeding sentence receives its inspiration from the last prominent noun of the one before it, gathering momentum as predicates become subjects one after another, rolling onward toward a dreary, unfocused eternity:
Hillary Rodham Clinton caught the world’s attention as a leader of health care reform. Reform is necessary because too many Americans are without basic coverage in the event of illness. Their illnesses may be major or minor, but often they cannot afford either hospital or doctor. Not all doctors, however, agree on the same prescriptions for better care. Care can be a very personal thing. Personally, I think the most important element in the equation is quality. Quality health care can be very costly. The cost of any plan can be the most important consideration for individuals and proprietors of small businesses. Small businesses seldom make big profits. The profit motive . . .
An accomplished writer sees such fuzziness developing and stops and begins again, attempting to answer the question “What is my point?” before construction a topic sentence.
Taking care in the composition of the topic sentence, the writer will find that it is not difficult to maintain the same subject in succeeding sentences. Wording the topic sentence carelessly, the same writer will find that later sentences come only with difficulty, that it is hard to keep a clear focus on the point, and that the paragraph turns out to be awkward and incoherent. Any writer stumped at the beginning of a paragraph can find help by proceeding in two stages:
(1) Decide what noun or phrase is most important to the concept being developed.
(2) Make that noun or phrase the grammatical subject of the first sentence.
The rest should follow with relative ease.
Weak: The fiction of Henry James is noteworthy for its realism. He selected his characters and events mainly for their believability. Because of his interest in realism, he particularly admired the Russian author Ivan Turgenev. Realism dictated his own experiments with the dramatic method . . .
Improved: An interest in realism stands as one of the most noteworthy characteristics of the fiction of Henry James. It dictated the choice of characters and events in his fiction. It helps explain his particular admiration for the Russian author Ivan Turgenev and for that author’s earlier experiments with the dramatic method.
Observe that in the paragraphs above the element of concern is not the broad topic of Henry James’s fiction, but instead the much narrower topic of his interest in realism. Recognizing that fact, the writer of the second paragraph has composed a first sentence that leads easily and naturally into the ones that follow.
Avoiding Verb Shifts. Generally, a writer should choose a tense and stay with it, shifting only when necessary. “Past events happened in the past, present events happen in the present, and future events will happen when time comes around to them”: Such a sentence shifts tenses because the times considered, past, present, and future, change. Most of the time, however, a writer has no need for shifts of such rapidity and stays in one time and one tense until the subject matter dictates a change.
The voice of the verbs is also important. Good writing proceeds generally in the active voice, where the grammatical subject performs the action described by the verb, and seldom shifts to the passive voice, where the subject receives the action of the verb:
Weak: The senator won the respect of his colleagues but was defeated in the election.
Improved: The senator won the respect of his collegues but lost the election.
Parallelism. Writers who have learned the effective uses of parallelism work from a principle easily stated: Thoughts possessing similar logical weight gain force when expressed in similar grammatical form. Those who have learned the advantages of maintaining the same subject and avoiding verb shifts have already made progress along the road to effective parallelism, but there is further still to travel. Parallelism results not simply from attention to nouns and verbs, but also from attention to repetitions and rhythms created within and between sentences by choices of words and manipulations of phrases and clauses. A reader who sees a pattern being repeated, who looks beyond the repetition and observes that the connection between thoughts is more than casual, who examines the structure of the phrases and notes how the effect was achieved: such a reader approaches an understanding of the value of parallelism as an aid to communication.
In the following passage from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner combines parallelism with rhythmic variety to provide memorable expression to his thoughts. Observe especially how the parallel structures italicized in this printing combine to bring the passage to a ringing conclusion. The “he” of the paragraph is “the young man or woman writing today,” the things that must be learned again are “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed: love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Fiction
To this point, we have spoken mostly of non-fiction, with a few examples taken from writers of fiction. We end this section by observing that guidelines for writing clear prose carry the same force for short stories and novels as they do for any of the many forms of nonfiction, with two important modifications.
First: Consider the narrator. The words, sentences, and paragraphs of a child should sound like a child’s writing or speaking. A semi-literate narrator should sound semi-literate. A fool should sound like a fool. A pompous person should sound pompous And so it goes through all the permutations of a narrator who speaks in his or her voice. The narrator of a work of fiction is not the writer, but a voice chosen to tell the story. That voice may be close to the voice of the writer (a choice that for a beginning writer may seem the easiest choice), or the voice may be far away from that of the writer, a wholly invented voice like the few suggested above.
As in any composition, the writer will need to choose between first-person narration and third-person narration, first person for the I who tells the story and is a part of it, or third-person for the narrator who stands outside the story and speaks of the he, she, or they who stand within it.
Second: Consider the narrative perspective. Briefly, the narrative perspective refers to the place in time and space where the narrator stands in relation to the story told. The story may be set in time in the recent or distant past. It may be set in a space not far from the space of the narrator, the same town or city or state. Alternatively, it may be set in a far distant country, or (in fantasy fiction) in a world wholly alien from our own.
Always, however, the writer of fiction must remember the reader. Garbled or incoherent writing will lose a reader of a short story or novel just as quickly as it loses a reader of an essay or a book of nonfiction. A good writer of fiction may shuffle or disguise the cards in the deck of good expository prose, but can seldom afford to lose or forget them.
EXERCISES
Topic Sentence. Construct a topic sentence for each of the following sets of information. Then, beginning with that topic sentence, construct a paragraph that includes the information provided. Alter the wording if the sentences do not fit easily into your paragraph.
A
1. The Society for Psychical Research met recently to examine the possibility of direct contact with the dead through the agency of mediums.
2. Rhonda Richards reported on her collection of false hands and tables with automatic tipping mechanisms.
3. Jason Ling read a paper concerning hallucinations induced in a laboratory.
4. Mary Almonds presented a detailed account of her unsuccessful visit to seven mediums in search of her late husband’s hidden money hoard.
5. A practicing medium, Madame Rachel Racine, showed blurred slides of her recent spirit encounter in Santa Monica.
B
1. Written records on popular ballads extend back to the manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
2. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ballads were printed and distributed on single sheets called broadsides.
3. In later times, they began to appear in popular and scholarly anthologies.
4. The “folk,” however, have mostly learned their ballads orally, from one another.
5. Elderly men and women singing ballads to scholars in the first half of the twentieth century almost always insisted they did not learn their songs from books, records, or the radio.
6. As songs pass by word of mouth down through the centuries, changes creep in.
7. According to scholars, the most significant mark of the popular ballad is the alteration it has received through oral transmission.
Unity. The sentences below contain items of factual information and opinion, some not clearly related to most of the others. Eliminate those sentences you believe lest related to the others. Begin with the topic sentence. Revise the sentences if necessary.
1. A woman’s education should be the same as a man’s.
2. Women have smaller bones than men.
3. In the nineteenth century most college did not accept women.
4. In the 1850s, Mrs. Bloomer led a drive for dress reform for women.
5. Women have always been prominent in the temperance movement, but they gave it special impetus after the Civil War.
6. Women writers such as Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Katherine Anne Porter achieved fame without graduating from college.
7. Woman’s place is in the home.
8. The trouble with giving women the vote is that now they want to run for office.
9. Women today are much more welcome in the professions than their mothers were.
10. Career opportunities for both men and women now tend to require college educations.
In the above example the task is easier than it might have been because the choices have been limited. On the other hand, a writer striving to make a sensible paragraph from the sentences given may well wish there were others to choose from. In the situations from which most paragraphs are written, choices are limited only by the knowledge and imaginative resources of the writer. Then the task is two-fold: to eliminate irrelevancies and discover telling points.
Completeness. A simple outline for providing completeness in a paragraph might be expressed as follows:
A. Topic sentence.
B. Explanation, in some detail, of what is meant by the topic sentence, perhaps only another way of expressing the idea.
C. Two or more brief illustrations.
D. A more complex illustration, developed at greater length.
Using that outline, select one of the following topic sentences for development into a complete and unified paragraph of at least one hundred and fifty words. Remember that the outline is meant to be flexible.
1. Honesty is the best policy.
2. Honesty is not always the best policy.
3. Few places are more stirring than a city at night.
4. Reading enlarges the mind.
The following paragraph, delivering only a brief summary of its subject, seems unsatisfactory because it lacks the kind of detail tat expands and clarifies, Use your imagination to elaborate it to at least two or three times its present length.
Martha discovered that keeping house was not entirely the joy she had previously imagined it to be. The daily tasks were dull. Her baby began to crawl around and became fun to play with, buts crawling created other problems. Her neighbors were friendly, but boring, and would drop in unexpectedly to talk for hours.
Coherence. In the earlier discussion of coherence, paragraphs were given from the writings of Ernest Hemingway and Rachel Carson, with their sentence order jumbled. Here they are given as their authors wrote them, Hemingway first, then Carson.
In the fall, the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.
The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can red in them all of past history. For all is written here. In the nature of the materials that compose them and in the arrangement of their successive layers the sediments reflect all that has happened in the waters above them and on the surrounding lands. The dramatic and the catastrophic in earth history have left their trace in the sediments, the outpourings of volcanoes, the advance and retreat of the ice, the searing aridity of desert lands, the sweeping destruction of floods.
Examine these paragraphs as written, trying to see the reasons for the order of the sentences. What considerations come into play? Time? Space? Movement of general ideas to particular ones, or the reverse? Definition? Cause and effect? Comparison and contrast? Granting that there are mixtures of order in these paragraphs, does the progression in each seem to follow a logical and satisfying path? Try writing an analysis of either one, showing how the principles of order come into play and explaining peculiar feature. Why, for example, does Hemingway mention the war, placing his reference in the first sentence and then dropping it?
Transitions. A reader can imagine more than one relationship between the thoughts in each of the following pairs of sentences. Rewrite each pair, adding words, phrases, or sentences to suggest a particular relationship for each.
1.
The Train was due to arrive at seven o’clock.
She brushed nervously at her hair.
2.
At that time, eggs were selling for ten cents a dozen.
His face was pinched, his cheeks hollow.
3.
“God made the country, man made the town.”
Beer cans and broken bottles littered the road.
4.
He was ten years old, but had never seen an elephant.
He was determined not to cry.
5.
The judge was noted for leniency.
The fine was seventy-five dollars.
Maintaining the Same Subject. Rewrite each of the following sentences so that the grammatical subject remains the same in each clause. It is not always necessary to repeat the noun, and sometimes a synonym or pronoun will serve to keep the subject in view.
1. He was often too sick to attend classes, but a ball game was something he never missed.
2. Waiting is so frustrating for some people that they always arrive late in order to avoid the frustration.
3. Although she had carefully checked the bus schedule, it was three months out of date.
4. Playing tennis was her favorite pastime, but her work never suffered as a result.
5. Running a stitching machine in a factory kept him continuously on edge, for in the evening he could not get the sound of wheels out of his head and at night it tormented him with visions of flashing needles.
Consider the following sentences as material for a paragraph. What word or phrase will serve best as the grammatical subject of the topic sentence? Write the paragraph, maintaining the same grammatical subject throughout. Again, it is not always necessary to repeat the noun or phrase and sometimes a synonym or pronoun will serve to keep the subject in mind.
1. By the 1870s many farms were deserted in northern New England.
2. People had flocked to Boston and to the mill towns of Lowell, Lawrence, and Fall River.
3. Readers became interested in realistic stories of farm and village life.
4. Many farm families moved to better land in the Midwest.
5. Industialization drew people to the cities.
6. People worked in factories, but dreamed of retiring to the country.
7. Sixty year later, intellectuals began to speculate that New England lost its glory when it lost its rural way of life.
Avoiding Verb Shifts. Note the shifts in tense and voice in the verbs in the following passage. Do they serve any valid purpose? Which tense (present or past) and which voice (active or passive) would be best for the entire passage? Give some consideration to the fact that stories in books, though they may be set in the past, seem often to be happening in the present in the reader’s imagination as the story is read, and newly happening in each reading. Rewrite the passage.
In Eudora Welty’s short story “A Memory,” she told of a girl’s first awakening to the ugliness of the world. She makes the girl extremely sensitive in order that the confrontation may be sharper. In order to heighten the contrast, the girl is described by her as a dreamer. Welty isolated her on a beach, then causes her solitude to be interrupted by a loud and boisterous family.
The plot was simple. A girl falls in love with a boy in her class, even though she hardly knows him. Once she touched his hand on a stair, as if by accident. Later, when he has a bloody nose, she faints. Then came the interlude on the beach. Years later, the events are still thought to be important by the girl.
Parallelism. Underline the parallel structures in the following passage from The Federalist. Then describe how they provide an outline of the ideas of the author, Alexander Hamilton, was trying to express. Typing the parallel phrases in outline form might help.
The causes of hostility among nations are innumerable. There are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion, the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety. There are others which have a more circumscribed though an equally operative influence within their spheres. Such are the rivalships and competitions of commerce between commercial nations. And there are others, not less numerous than either of the former, which take their origin entirely in private passions: in the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears of leading individuals in the communities of which they are members. Men of this class, whether the favorites of a king or of a people, have in too many instances abused the confidence they possessed: and assuming the pretext of some public motive, have not scruples to sacrifice the national tranquility to personal advantage or personal gratification.
Fiction
Consider the exercises presented a few paragraphs above under the heading Maintaining the Same Subject and beginning “He was often too sick to attend classes” and “By the 1870s many farms were deserted.” Select one or both to change into fiction. For either there are many possibilities. Select a narrator, place that person in the story or standing outside it, writing at the time or at a later date, seeing it from nearby or from another place or country or even from an alien perspective in another world than our own.
A Common Sense Approach to Writing Paragraphs.
Write a paragraph that adheres strictly to the following guidelines:
1. Begin with the topic sentence.
2. Make the subject of the paragraph the grammatical subject of the first sentence.
3. Keep the same grammatical subject (the same word, phrase, synonym, or pronoun reference) throughout.
4. Write with active verbs.
5. Make the paragraph unified and complete.
CHAPTER TWO
The Writing as a Whole
A writer who has mastered the paragraph has proceeded far toward mastery of an essay, since most of the principles of unity, completeness, and coherence apply here, too, though on a different scale. Additional topics that deserve consideration are choosing a subject, constructing a thesis, outlining, and beginning and ending the essay.