Key principles in this chapter:
• Use it and this only when you can state exactly which noun each word refers to.
• As a general rule, avoid using that more than once in a single sentence or three times in a paragraph, except to achieve a specific stylistic effect.
• Beware of sweeping generalisations that begin with ‘There’.
The words it, this, that and there – collectively referred to in this chapter as ‘waste words’ – function in our language like ‘bad fat’ in our diet. Not only do they supply little verbal nutrition, but their mere presence in a sentence often signals the proximity of other heart-attack-inducing elements such as be-verbs, abstract nouns and long strings of prepositions. While waste words can add flavour and texture to any writing, in high doses they can clog up your prose as surely as cholesterol clogs your arteries or grease clogs your sink.
Let’s look at it first. Employed strategically, this diminutive word wields impressive linguistic power. The original ‘It Girl’, Elinor Glyn, imbued it with mystery and sex appeal. In phrases such as ‘I get it’ or ‘It’s in the bag’, it equals everything. Portia’s repetition of it in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice lends her speech an incantatory quality, emphasising the power and holiness of mercy, gentle as rain yet mightier than kings:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown …40
When used as a placeholder for a previously mentioned noun, it prevents unnecessary repetition:
Every time he threw the ball, she caught it.
Here, it clearly equals ball. However, suppose we were to write:
The girl threw the vase through the window and broke it.
What did the girl break: the vase or the window? Because it could logically refer either to the first noun after threw (vase) or to the noun closest to broke (window), we are left to guess the author’s meaning.
More serious problems occur when writers employ it as a semantic catch-all, a crutch word with no clear referent. Academic authors often display a touching faith in their readers’ ability to interpret this kind of nebulous it, as in the following excerpt from a book about work-place learning:
Full participation stands in contrast to only one aspect of the concept of peripherality as we see it: It places the emphasis on what partial participation is not, or not yet.41
Here, it occurs not just once but twice, separated only by a colon. If we take time to decipher the sentence, we can infer that the first it probably refers to ‘the concept of peripherality’ and the second it to ‘full participation’. But how can we be sure? And why should we have to work so hard? The confusing double it acts as the final nail in the coffin of a sentence already afflicted by a deadly combination of weak verbs (stands, places, is), abstract nouns (participation, contrast, aspect, concept, peripherality, emphasis) and static prepositions (in, to, of, on).
It tends to hang around with be-verbs and fellow waste words, especially that:
• It can be shown that …
• It is my position that …
• We regard it as self-evident that …
• It appears that …
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
It is a point well worth conceding that even the stodgiest it-phrase, in the hands of a writer as clever as Jane Austen, can score rhetorical points. Some writers even exploit its ambiguity, as Vietnam veteran Yusef Komunyakaa does with the title of his poem ‘Facing It’, which alludes both to the poet’s physical act of facing the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. – a wall of reflective granite carved with the names of all the American soldiers who died in the war – and to his metaphorical act of facing his own past. As a general rule, however, unless you can state exactly what noun this insipid little pronoun refers to, it may be best to avoid the temptation of sprinkling your prose with it.
This, like it, pulls its own weight in many grammatical situations. Together with its siblings these, those and that, this can direct a reader’s attention to a specific object or idea:
• I’m catching this bus today, but I caught that one yesterday.
• Do you like this dress?
• I want to buy this television.
As long as you can name the noun that this refers to, you stand on firm rhetorical ground. All too frequently, however, this becomes a cover-up for fuzzy thinking. Writers of academic prose excel at exploiting the ambiguous this:
MRCD [Multirecursive Constraint Demotion] can be applied to a set of full structural descriptions, and it will either determine that the set is inconsistent or return a grammar consistent with all of the descriptions. This means that we could try to deal with structural ambiguity by collecting a set of overt forms, and for each overt form generate all possible interpretations of the form.42
Here, this serves as shorthand for ‘the fact that MRCD can be applied to a set of full structural descriptions’, or perhaps for ‘the fact that MRCD will either determine that the set is inconsistent or return a grammar consistent with all of the descriptions’. No wonder the author – ironically, a linguist – has dumped this into the paragraph and fled, rather than taking the trouble to state his argument clearly and concisely.
Whenever you encounter this on its own, ask yourself, ‘This what?’ This concept, this principle, this statement?
Her watercolors were not simply beautiful pieces of art, but also didactic objects that bore the burden of teaching others about Spiritualism and sharing the spirits’ lessons about the nature of God. This was a lot to ask of works whose non-objective imagery could make them seem impenetrable.43
This what was a lot to ask?
The democratic troubles in Bolivia and the Andean region more broadly can partly be read as a reaction against the established political class in each country. This has good and bad implications.44
This what has good and bad implications? The fact that the democratic troubles in Bolivia and the Andean region can be read as a reaction against the established political class in each country? The fact that the democratic troubles in Bolivia and the Andean region are a reaction against the established political class in each country? Here, this functions like a cloak tossed over a puddle to disguise muddy thinking.
And yet, as always, there are some compelling exceptions to the rule: authors who use the ambiguous this to fine effect. In a passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for example, Fabian berates a jealous Sir Andrew Aguecheek:
She did show favour to the youth in your sight only to exasperate you, to awaken your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart, and brimstone in your liver. You should then have accosted her, and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have banged the youth into dumbness. This was looked for at your hand, and this was balked: the double gilt of this opportunity you let time wash off, and now you are sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard …45
Shakespeare’s double this (‘This was looked for at your hand, and this was balked’) encompasses all the actions on Fabian’s list: becoming exasperated and valorous and angry; declaring passion to the lady; telling jokes to shame and silence the rival; seizing a golden opportunity to act. This what was looked for? This response, this resolve, and more. In a passage crammed chock-full of concrete nouns, active verbs and vivid imagery, Shakespeare can afford to indulge in a moment of strategic ambiguity.
That, like this, seldom causes problems when accompanied by a noun. Indeed, when deployed as a determiner – a specifically slanted variant of the – that performs yeoman service: That Girl; That ’70s Show; That Darn Cat! When W. B. Yeats opens his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ with the phrase, ‘That is no country for old men’, he points to a land far far away, in the realm of the imagination: that country, not this one. Even ambiguous phrases such as That’s great! and What’s that? can make perfect sense in the appropriate context.
When used as a link between clauses, however, that risks becoming as unhealthy as a pat of butter on a frosted cupcake. The following passage aptly defines the linguistic phenomenon of logorrhoea as ‘prose that is highly abstract and contains little concrete language’:
Writers in academic fields that concern themselves mostly with the abstract, such as philosophy and especially postmodernism, often fail to include extensive concrete examples of their ideas . … The widespread expectation that scholarly works in these fields will look at first glance like nonsense is the source of humor that pokes fun at these fields by comparing actual nonsense with real academic writing.46
Note how each of the first two that-clauses drives a wedge between a sentence’s subject and its verb: seventeen words separate writers and fail, and thirteen words intervene between expectation and is. In this example, with its podgy prepositional phrases and abstract nouns, that serves as a symptom rather than a cause of flabby writing. Authors of lean prose employ that too, of course, but in moderation and with a clear sense of purpose.
Like that, the word there possesses both a light side and a dark side. Together with its siblings here and where, there positions us in the world: ‘Are we there yet?’ ‘Will you go there again tomorrow?’ Sometimes, however, there loses its sense of place and becomes a catch-all word meaning ‘the universe contains’ or ‘one can surmise the existence of ’. In a sentence such as ‘There used to be more friendly people in the world than there are now’, what does there actually mean?
The universal there usually dances cheek to cheek with be-verbs:
• There are many reasons why …
• There is a rule that …
• There could be no better way to …
• Are there any alternatives?
Gertrude Stein’s famous aphorism about Oakland, California – ‘There is no there there’ – plays with the potential double meaning of there. Even while commenting humorously on the relationship of grammar to geography, Stein offers us a warning: when you open a sentence with ‘There is’, there is sometimes no substance there.
Should you avoid the universal there entirely? Of course not. In the works of skilful writers such as Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, there-clauses lend emphasis and weight to the nouns they introduce:
• There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.47
• There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there.48
However, writers of academic prose await a flabby fate if they fail to hold there in check:
With most or even all vague predicates, it soon appears that the idea that there is a sharp division between the positive cases and the borderline ones, and between the borderline cases and the negative ones, can no more be sustained than can the idea that there is a sharp division between negative and positive ones.49
In this excerpt from a philosophical essay aptly titled ‘Is There Higher-Order Vagueness?’ there joins with several partners in crime – it, that and be-verbs – to produce a sentence of almost unfathomable, and by no means higher-order, obscurity. This leads us to the conclusion that there really is no excuse for it when an academic writes quite as confusingly as that.
In the following sentences composed by undergraduate writers, the words it, this, that and there (and occasionally what) all congregate together, pulling be-verbs, abstract nouns and prepositional phrases into their orbit:
• This essay will consist of information about nine composers and one piece of work that each of them is known for.
• There are a number of studies that show that if a cellular phone is being used near a cardiac pacemaker, it causes interference.
• It is interesting that so many people believe in aliens, given that there is no actual proof of their existence.
• What is most striking about this photograph is that it is not really an accurate depiction of real life.
But who can blame these students for padding their paragraphs with ‘waste words’? Many of their teachers – the best brains in the business – do exactly the same thing. The excerpts below come from academic publications in the fields of general science, sociology, philosophy and literary studies, respectively:
• [Science] What does it take to establish that such incompleteness will actually occur in a specific system? The basic way to do it is to show that the system is universal.50
• [Sociology] It is important to recognize that sex segregation is a multifaceted and complicated phenomenon that is difficult to aggregate into one single index of sex segregation.51
• [Philosophy] A major consequence of all this, then, is that when language does appear, semantics (that is, meaning) is already anchored in this bodily conceptuality. In short, there exists a universal core of signifiers that have a natural relationship to signifieds.52
• [Literary studies] Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness?53
If you consider such convoluted sentences to be unavoidable in academic writing, take a look at these four passages written by scholars from a similar range of disciplines:
• [Science] Today as never before, the sky is menacing . … Even in daytime, reflected light on a floating dandelion seed, or a spider riding a wisp of gossamer in the sun’s eye can bring excited questions from the novice unused to estimating the distance or nature of aerial objects.54
• [History] Farmers make their living by slightly altering nature to achieve human ends . … In short, the farmers’ metier has everything to do with flows of energy through ecosystems, fluxes of hydrology, and the invisible transference of nitrogen from air to soil and back again.55
• [Philosophy] We live in deceptive times . … Lies and other forms of deceptive behavior degrade our characters, unravel the fabric of civil society, and threaten our progress toward the good life.56
• [Literary studies] We tend today to think of Jane Eyre as moral gothic, ‘myth domesticated’, Pamela’s daughter and Rebecca’s aunt, the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can’t quite figure out the mansion’s floor plan).57
Rich in concrete nouns and active verbs, with not a ‘waste word’ in sight, these examples prove that academic writers can indeed communicate complex ideas in language we take pleasure in reading.
In a sample of your own writing or a piece of published academic prose, highlight every occurrence of the word it:
Example: Many writers find it all too tempting to use this little pronoun as liberally as if it were a more interesting vocabulary item than it really is.
What is it doing in the above sentence? The first it (‘Many writers find it all too tempting’) is catchy but defies definition; we cannot clearly say what it stands for. The second it refers unambiguously to the most recent noun, pronoun; but why, we might wonder, does it occur twice in a row with two different meanings? The third it, like the second, refers to pronoun; however, a new noun, item, has shown up to sow additional confusion. An alert editor would probably opt to retain just one it (the first or second) and scuttle the other two.
Now try the same exercise with this.
Example: When we use this word too frequently, we grow lazy and complacent. This causes us to lose sight of our own meaning. How can we prevent this from happening?
Here, only the first this accompanies a noun (‘this word’); the second and third thises have no clear referent. If you cannot easily answer the ‘this what?’ question, consider rephrasing your sentence to omit the ambiguous this.
Whenever you find yourself using that more than once in a single sentence or more than three or four times in a paragraph, ask yourself a simple question: Do all those that-phrases direct the flow of your sentences, or do they muddy the waters?
Examples:
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
• A sentence that makes clear that the author has not thought carefully about its structure will ensure that readers lose their way.
In the first example, from the opening lines of the United States Declaration of Independence, parallel that-phrases guide us neatly through a series of parallel ideas. In the second example, by contrast, the repeated thats confuse rather than clarify, signalling a lack of authorial attention and care.
Do not be tempted, by the way, to reduce your that-quota simply by replacing that with which. Grammar mavens note a crucial distinction between the two words:
• The dog that bit the child had very sharp teeth.
• The cat, which disliked children, purred loudly.
A that-phrase that directly follows a noun (‘the dog that bit the child’) provides us with essential information about the noun, whereas a which-phrase, which is normally set off by commas, remains grammatically expendable and can be deleted without ill effect.
There is no reason why you should not use the word there from time to time. Indeed, if there were a law passed tomorrow banning all use of the word there except as a marker of place, there would undoubtedly be protests by professional writers.
The paragraph above contains three there-phrases (not counting ‘the word there’):
There is no reason why you should not use the word there at least occasionally. Indeed, if there were a law passed tomorrow banning all use of the word there except as a marker of place, there would undoubtedly be protests by professional writers.
Let’s leave the opening there alone but eliminate the other two:
There is no reason why you should not use the word there at least occasionally. Indeed, if a law were passed tomorrow banning all use of the word there except as a marker of place, professional writers would undoubtedly protest.
With no significant loss of meaning, we have trimmed the second sentence from 44 words down to 40 (a lard factor of 10%).
Try writing a few sentences crammed with ‘waste words’: e.g. ‘There is a belief that difficult assignments are unfair’. Easy, right? Now rephrase your sentences to eliminate, say, half the ‘waste words’ and forms of be: for example ‘Many people resent difficult assignments’. Like a hard work-out at the gym, this exercise requires considerable effort. You might even have to repeat your exertion every time you write something new. Persevere! Your prose will become leaner and sharper, and your readers will thank you.
Full participation, however, stands in contrast to only one aspect of the concept of peripherality as we see it: It places the emphasis on what partial participation is not, or not yet. In our usage, peripherality is also a positive term, whose most salient conceptual antonyms are unrelatedness or irrelevance to ongoing activity. The partial participation of newcomers is by no means ‘disconnected’ from the practice of interest. Furthermore, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involvement. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must then be connected to issues of legitimacy, of the social organization of and control over resources, if it is to gain its full analytical potential.
|
WritersDiet fitness ratings: |
|
|---|---|
|
verbs |
Heart attack |
|
nouns |
Heart attack |
|
prepositions |
Flabby |
|
adjectives/adverbs |
Needs toning |
|
it, this, that, there |
Flabby |
|
Overall |
Heart attack |
Comments: This relentlessly abstract passage contains virtually no concrete language. Uninspiring verbs – stands, places, suggests – contribute little energy to sentences already weighed down by prepositional phrases, multiple be-verbs, ambiguous its and all those zombie nouns.58