THE SECTIONS THAT FOLLOW are intended to introduce the basic workings of English prose, from the different parts of speech (or sorts of word) to the grammar and punctuation that organises them into sense-making sentences. It covers a lot of what you will already know – or, at least, a lot of what you will already do. But, just as having a rough sense of how a car engine works might help you when you break down on the side of a motorway, having a basic technical vocabulary to talk about sentences will help you fix them.
This does not pretend to be exhaustive.* Rather, I follow William Strunk’s view that it’s better to give ‘three rules for the use of the comma instead of a score or more’, because those three will generally cover ‘nineteen sentences out of twenty’.
But in talking about sentences, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with nouns.
Nouns, we’re usefully told at primary school, are words that stand in for things: commonly objects in the world (‘cat’), people (‘Donald’); concepts (‘antidisestablishmentarianism’), feelings (‘sadness’) and situations (‘disaster’).
They are a tiny bit more slippery than that, though. What really makes a noun is how it works in a sentence. A noun – as it has memorably but unhelpfully been expressed by Steven Pinker – is ‘simply a word that does nouny things’, and he goes on to offer a couple of examples of nouny things – among them being able to come after an article* (‘a cat’; ‘the Donald’), being the subject of a sentence (‘the cat sat on the mat’; ‘the Donald won the election’), and so on.
Does the role of a noun in its sentence come before or after its quality as a repository of meaning about things? That may be one for the philosophers. But in terms of knowing how to decode a sentence, it’s the structural aspect, oddly, that comes first. You’ll know whether ‘face’ is a noun or a verb from its role in the sentence, not the combination of letters in the word on the page.
There are two main types of noun.
These are nouns that, in context, denote one specific thing and one thing only – such as ‘Julio’, ‘Sellotape’, ‘Madonna’ or ‘The Taj Mahal’.† Brand names, people’s names, individual buildings, planets, makes of car and so on all fall into the category of proper nouns. They’re easy to spot because they take a capital letter.
Note my slightly weaselly use of the words ‘in context’. Many proper nouns do denote more than one thing. There are lots of people called ‘Julio’; ‘Sellotape’ is a company or brand as well as what you’ve got stuck to your finger; ‘Madonna’ is a pop singer as well as the mother of God; ‘The Taj Mahal’ is a monument in Agra and any number of Indian restaurants. The thing is that in any given context they will only denote one of them.
These are nouns that denote, out of context, a whole category of things – such as ‘cat’, ‘intelligence’, ‘pop singer’ or ‘sadness’. They indicate something general.
Note, though, my slightly weaselly use of the words ‘out of context’. Many common nouns do denote one specific thing. ‘This cat ate my budgie’; ‘his intelligence won him a scholarship’; ‘that pop singer duetted with Frank Zappa’; ‘sadness was the reason he called the Samaritans’. Common nouns are often modified by determiners – such as ‘this’, ‘the’ or ‘my’ – which make them, in context, more specific. Adjectives, also, narrow things down. In fact, when positioned in a sentence a common noun can be every bit as exact as a proper noun.
The borderline between common nouns and proper nouns, then, is not something absolute that inheres in them as words. ‘Silence’, ‘nothing’ and ‘mathematics’ are common nouns – even though they mean one specific thing that is, at least in theory, the same everywhere. ‘Marxism’ is a proper noun, even though it denotes a whole category of systems of political thought, and we pluralise it – as ‘Marxisms’ – quite cheerfully and correctly.
So, to adapt Pinker, a common noun is a word that does common-nouny things (such as cosying up to attributive adjectives or indefinite articles, and being allowed to be plural), and a proper noun is a word that does proper-nouny things (such as taking a capital letter or signing up to a golf club).
You will often hear people say that the most important thing in vocabulary choice is precision. They’ll lament someone using ‘uninterested’ to mean ‘disinterested’, or using ‘shall’ and ‘will’ in free variation, since there is a useful difference of meaning between the one and the other. And, in many cases, there is.
But when you consider how many of our most useful nouns are, in isolation, as ambiguous as hell, it becomes clear that actually their imprecision is arguably more important. A world of absolute precision would be a world where all we had were proper nouns. It would render communication all but impossible; the language would be like a map of the world on the scale 1:1.
Talking about words in isolation is like talking about Lego bricks in isolation: meaning doesn’t inhere in the words themselves. It is constructed by a combination of all their possible connotations and denotations, and their role in a sentence, and the context in which that sentence is placed. And that’s the work the reader’s brain is doing, all-but-unconsciously, in fractions of a second.
When it comes to grammar, English nouns are as easy as pie. They account for at least half of the language’s total vocabulary and – hurrah! – they don’t inflect.* For most of them, you add an ‘s’ or an ‘es’ (if they already end in ‘s’ or ‘z’) to form the plural,* and a ‘ ’s’ to form the possessive. And that’s it. But there are – aren’t there always? – exceptions.
As M C Hammer would put it, you can’t touch this. Abstract nouns denote things unavailable to the senses such as ‘peace’, ‘anger’, ‘freedom’ and – ironically enough – ‘materialism’. Many of them don’t pluralise or take an article – ‘the angers in the room were palpable’; ‘looking shifty, he took a handful of materialisms out of the boot of his car’.
But then again, we talk about ‘freedoms’ or ‘a lasting peace’. How to account for this? These are abstract nouns being used in a concrete sense, you could argue – just as you could make a distinction between Toyota (proper noun, referring to the company) and ‘a Toyota’ (common noun, referring to a car made by the company).
I raise this neither to sow confusion nor to imply that anything goes. Rather, I do so to indicate that once again it’s a relationship between the lexical meaning of the word and its syntactic behaviour that determines its meaning in context. That means – at least to a certain extent – you can stop worrying. Your wonderful brain does an awful lot of this on autopilot.
Some nouns are always found in the plural form. You would find it about as easy to put one pant on as you would to incorporate it into a sensible sentence; likewise to cut with a scissor, to do well in a mathematic and to turn the telly on at nine o’clock to watch an evening new. Some of these nouns take a plural verb (‘your pants are on fire’) and some of them take a singular verb (‘no news is good news’). The language doesn’t half get up to a shenanigan when you’ll let it.
Invariant nouns are nouns that have the same form in the singular as in the plural. Sheep would be a good example. So as you count them in the hopes of going to sleep, you’ll say: ‘One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, four sheep, five sheep …’* and so on. They behave quite normally with verbs and modifiers: one sheep jumps over the fence; five sheep jump over the fence.
These are nouns that denote not one thing, but a whole bunch of things. ‘A murder’, used of crows, is a collective noun.* Likewise team, government, family, assembly, audience, choir, lynch-mob and so forth. There’s some lively debate about whether collective nouns take a singular or a plural verb. ‘The lynch-mob are advancing on the castle’? or ‘The lynch-mob is advancing on the castle’?
Here, a decent guideline is emphasis. If you’re considering the group in question as a collection of individuals, you’ll sometimes use a plural verb: ‘My family are all murderers and scoundrels.’ If you’re considering it as a whole unit, the verb’s going to be singular: ‘My family is the only thing that keeps me sane.’ The singular verb is usually the more formal option – you seldom go wrong with ‘the government is …’ – and, in general, the safest bet.
But it’s not incorrect to use a plural verb. Here is an instance of what gets called ‘notional agreement’ rather than ‘formal agreement’:† the pedant-confounding tendency of language to shape its grammar according to the meaning, rather than to treat the meaning as something to be inserted into a rigid and invariable grammatical structure. A plural verb can agree with the singular ‘family’, as above, because the verb is responding to the meaning of its antecedent, not to its grammatical number.
Mass nouns, or ‘non-count’ nouns, are nouns denoting something that’s an indivisible bulk: flour, wine, butter, plankton and so on. These might be divided by quantity – ‘a pound of flour’ – but not by number (‘two flours’, ‘half a wine’‡). They contrast with ‘count nouns’, which can be numbered rather than weighed, scooped or poured: you can have 25 balls in your bucket, but that does not add up to a bucket of ball.
Just as some proper nouns also have a usage as common nouns, many words are used both as count and as mass nouns. ‘He spends all day dreaming of beer. In the evening he goes out and has 16 beers in a row. Beers give him a hangover. Beer is his undoing.’
If the debate about agreement with collective nouns is, as I characterised it, lively, the debate about count nouns is positively murderous. Are they one thing or lots of things? Here is that ancient inflamer of self-styled grammarians everywhere: the ‘ten items or less’ lane in the supermarket. The reasoning is that ‘less’ (as an expression of quantity) goes with mass nouns and that ‘fewer’ (as an expression of number) goes with count nouns.
This is, in standard English, usually a sound distinction to make. But it’s a question of touch, rather than an absolute. The count noun/mass noun distinction is subject to the same fuzziness as the verb agreement for collective nouns. So: ‘He woke up less than four hours later’ is perfectly idiomatic – because you’re talking about (countable) hours as a measure of (mass) time. You’d sound eccentric, at the very least, if you said ‘He woke up fewer than four hours later’.
There’s an analogy with collective nouns: are you thinking primarily of the amount, or of the individual units that go to make it up? ‘Less than 1,000 people turned up to the demonstration’ is fine. ‘Fewer than 1,000 people turned up to the demonstration’ is also fine. In the latter case you’re emphasising the individual people; in the former, the size of the demonstration.
This is testament to the plasticity of the language. Consider how words such as agenda, data and media – which originate in Latin plurals, agendum, datum and medium being in each instance the singular – have by and large come to take singular verbs. ‘Agenda’, etymologically, means ‘the things that need to be done’, but the Latin singular no longer has a common English meaning. Grammatically, ‘agenda’ behaves in English as a singular count noun. ‘The meeting’s agenda was ratified by the board.’ ‘Data’ and ‘media’ are slightly different cases. In both cases the singular still has a meaning in English: ‘datum’ has a slightly more technical usage in science; ‘medium’ (when used to mean television or radio rather than some muttering old mountebank in a gypsy caravan) has a pretty widespread common application.
But we use the plurals, most often, as mass nouns. When you talk about ‘the media’ you mean to speak about the press and radio and TV as a whole, and when you talk about ‘big data’ you mean a big collection of things rather than a collection of big things. Both behave most idiomatically when teamed up with singular verbs. Don’t get me started on referenda.
These are the words that stand in for nouns. We use them a lot – because they avoid repetition and increase the economy of the language. Once you’ve introduced a concept, however complicated it may be, you can use a pronoun of as little as two letters to stand in for it.
Take that last short paragraph. It uses eight pronouns in three sentences. Without pronouns it would read something like:
Pronouns are the words that stand in for nouns. People use pronouns a lot – because pronouns avoid repetition and increase the economy of the language. Once a writer has introduced a concept, however complicated the concept may be, the writer can use a two-letter pronoun to stand in for the concept.
Pronouns come in different flavours.
Personal pronouns are so called because they apply to people: I, you, he, she, we, they. They stand straightforwardly in for a noun or a noun-phrase. The pronoun ‘it’ doesn’t usually apply to humans but behaves in the same way.
Possessive pronouns: Mine, yours, his, hers, theirs.
Reflexive pronouns: Myself, yourself and so on. These are used when the subject and object of the verb are the same (‘I’m going to kill myself’) or for emphasis (‘I myself killed the Jabberwock’).
Demonstrative pronouns: This, that, these, those. These, you could say, single their antecedents out for special attention.
Relative pronouns: What, which, whose, whom, that, etc. These introduce relative clauses that bring us news about their antecedents: ‘The little engine that could.’
Interrogative pronouns: What, which, whose, whom, where. These introduce questions.
As you’ll be able to see, these form family groups. The possessive and reflexive pronouns are variations on the basic personal pronouns. The interrogatives and relatives are closely related, too. You could say that one asks a question and the other frames the answer: ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ ‘The sparrow, who killed Cock Robin, confessed immediately.’ Likewise, the demonstratives shadow the same words when used as determiners. ‘He didn’t wash his hands before baking that cake. I’m not going to eat that.’
Other words and phrases sometimes behave as pronouns. ‘One another’ and ‘each other’ behave as pronouns in phrases such as ‘We love each other’. ‘Much’ and ‘enough’ get used as pronouns in phrases such as ‘there wasn’t much left in the bottle’ or ‘you’ve had enough, sunshine’. This is testament to the elasticity of the language. The good news is that you don’t, as a native English speaker, need to be able to write out an exhaustive list of every pronoun in the language. You do this stuff (most of the time) naturally.
For all their usefulness, though, pronouns do cause problems. The main one is to do with agreement. Pronouns are one of the last surviving users of the system of inflecting by case in English. Most nouns don’t vary in form with their role in the sentence. ‘Dog bites man’; ‘Man bites dog’. ‘Dog’ and ‘man’ remain the same in form, as I mentioned above, whether the dog is biting the man or the man is biting the dog. With pronouns it’s different. ‘I bite him’ and ‘He bites me’.
So a pronoun needs to be in the right case for the sentence, which means agreeing with its antecedent (the word or phrase it is standing in for). A singular antecedent takes a singular pronoun. A plural antecedent requires a plural pronoun.
So:
Willy Wonka ascended in his Great Glass Elevator.
Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka ascended in their Great Glass Elevator.
It gets trickier when you introduce certain qualifiers. ‘Each’ and ‘every’ are singular, so they muscle a plural antecedent into taking a singular pronoun. Likewise ‘neither … nor’ and ‘either … or’
The fathers and sons went trick-or-treating in their zombie costumes.
Each father and son went trick-or-treating in his zombie costume.
Every father and son went trick-or-treating in his zombie costume.
Neither father nor son got the sweets he was hoping for.
The agreement of personal and relative pronouns is pedant heaven, so it’s discussed at more length in ‘Perils and Pitfalls’. All that remains to mention is that there’s a long-running controversy about epicene, or gender-neutral, pronouns. What do you say when you don’t want to specify a person’s sex? For a long time, ‘he’ was used as the universal pronoun without objection. A university administrator, meaning to indicate students of both sexes, might write:
Every student should bring his textbook to class.
Feminists, in recent years, have taken the reasonable view that using the masculine pronoun as the default universal inscribes patriarchy at the level of language itself.
Various solutions are proposed. One, which I adopt as much as possible in this book, is:
Every student should bring his or her textbook to class.
This has the advantage of neutrality (you might insist on using ‘her or his’ half the time for added PC points, though that sounds to me unbearably clunky), but can make for tangled and unwieldy sentences. When writing over greater length, some simply alternate male and female pronouns with each chapter. In Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, for instance, his notional reader is female one chapter, and male the next.
Another common solution is to use the plural form of the pronoun:
Every student should bring their textbook to class.
If the missed agreement between singular ‘student’ and the plural pronoun sounds grating because they are so close to each other, you could try a compound sentence:
If a student turns up to class without a textbook, they will be sent home.
Or you can rewrite the sentence to pluralise it:
All students should bring their textbooks to class.
Or (in the sort of context we’re dealing with) you might be able to shift into the second person:
If you’re a student you should bring your textbook to class.
The bottom line, I’m afraid, is that it remains a problem. And like lots of problems in writing, it doesn’t have a single ideal solution. Fiddle, fudge, test the results on your ear, consider your audience, and see what works best.
To return to our primary school classrooms once again, these are the ‘describing words’. As I wrote above, nouns – and especially the most common ones – tend to start out being rather vague. In isolation ‘cat’ could denote anything from a lion to a two-keeled boat. These ‘describing’ words help the process of narrowing things down. Adjectives modify – aka describe – nouns and noun-phrases; adverbs do the same for verbs, verb-phrases, adjectives and sometimes other adverbs.
So, the adjective ‘crazy’ gives us a crazy cat and a crazy time in my life.
The adverb ‘crazily’ gives us shouting crazily, crazily reckless driving and someone shouting crazily loudly across the pedestrian crossing.
The terms describe grammatical roles rather than something intrinsic to a specific group of words. ‘Yellow’ appears in the dictionary as an adjective. But in certain circumstances nouns such as ‘Barrett’ (as in ‘Barrett Homes’) or ‘shower’ (as in ‘shower curtain’) serve in an adjectival role – where they’re known as ‘noun adjuncts’. Similarly, when something ‘hits home’, ‘home’ is here an adverb rather than (its usual role) a noun or (as it is for pigeons) a verb.
Adjectives come in two main flavours depending on where they sit in a sentence. When they sit next to whatever they modify they are said to be attributive: ‘The yellow curtain.’ ‘The greedy banker.’* When they sit behind the noun, linked by a version of the verb ‘to be’ or another verb involved with a state or change of state, they’re predicative: ‘I was sad.’ ‘He got wet.’ ‘She became intolerable.’
Most adjectives can sit in either position, but a handful can only be used predicatively. Most of these seem to begin with a. So, for instance, you can say ‘my mother is awake’, but you can’t say ‘my awake mother’.† You can say, too, ‘my mother is asleep’, but not ‘my asleep mother’.‡ There’s an even smaller handful of attributive-only adjectives. You can say, ‘a mere trifle’ but not ‘this trifle is mere’; ‘my elder brother’ but not ‘my brother, who is elder’. In all of these cases, though, your own ear will be the best guide. To any native English speaker using one of these words in the wrong position will sound clangingly wrong.
But wherever they sit, they sit tight: they don’t inflect to agree with case or number.
The only way in which they vary is when they are comparative or superlative. These form either with the addition of ‘more’ or ‘most’, or by a simple and universal inflection: he was a smart boy; he was smarter than his friends; he was the smartest boy in his class. That’s also straightforward, with the exception of a handful of irregulars. All of these will be familiar, though.
Good, Better, Best
Bad/Ill, Worse, Worst
Little, Less, Least
Old, Elder/Older, Eldest/Oldest
Much/Many, More, Most
Far, Farther/Further, Furthest
Inasmuch as you do ever find yourself in trouble with adjectives, it’s likely to be when it comes to comparatives. Some words refuse to form comparatives with ‘-er’ or ‘-est’, particularly but not invariably ones of three or more syllables. One Jewish person can’t be ‘orthodoxer’ than another.* The dialogue for the film version of The Da Vinci Code couldn’t be ‘banaller’ than the dialogue in the book.† Again, try these out on your ear. You’ll hit the right answer. Just use ‘more’ or ‘most’ instead.
Then there’s the prohibition on what is seen as a sort of tautology – i.e. combining inflectional comparatives with a ‘more’ or ‘most’ form: ‘I’ve got a more bigger tractor in the shed.’ There’s plenty of precedent for idiomatic, jocular and dialect usage – Spike Lee made a fine film called Mo’ Better Blues – but it has no place in standard written English.
Can you use a superlative when you’re only comparing two things? Sticklers say no. But we do talk about ‘the best of both worlds’. In non-idiomatic usage, however, you’re safer using a comparative. ‘Of my two languages, Russian and English, I speak English better.’ Something to keep an eye on.
And finally, there’s the old complaint – a cousin of the row about using ‘less’ with count nouns – that you can’t compare an adjective that is itself an absolute. Simon Heffer, for instance, makes the reasonable point in his Simply English that ‘When two people are dead, one cannot be “more dead” than the other, and if three are dead one cannot be “the deadest”.’
Likewise, at least logically, someone can be ‘pregnant’ but they can’t be ‘more pregnant’: you either are pregnant or you aren’t. But ‘she’s very pregnant’ is a perfectly idiomatic response to a colleague who waddles into the office looking as if she has a bus strapped to her tummy. The comparative form, when used with so-called ‘absolute adjectives’ (‘perfect’, ‘infinite’, ‘complete’ and so on) works along those lines: not as a strict comparative but as a general-purpose intensifier. ‘A more perfect union’, in the preamble to the US Constitution, is not a grammatical howler – it’s a nicely cadenced idiom.
A curiosity of the English language is that there is in fact a sort-of rule about the order in which adjectives come. Like most of the actual rules of grammar, it’s one that pedants seldom concern themselves with because native speakers never get it wrong. If you have more than one adjective applied to a given noun, they are ordered according to their meaning.
That list goes, though it isn’t invariable: general opinion, specific opinion, age, size, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose, as in:
Indiana Jones broke into the underground space and found a bizarre, slightly arousing, millennium-old forty-foot circular yellow Aztec marble pornographic diorama.
I say it isn’t invariable. Age, size and shape, in particular, sometimes swap around in order depending on idiom and emphasis – ‘a large young man’; ‘a big old catfish’; ‘an ancient rectangular stone’. As a native speaker, you should be able to trust your ear as a guide. Certainly, you’ll never hear a crowd of primary school children singing about a ‘red big combine harvester’ or, for that matter, a ‘combine big red harvester’.
Most writing advice says you should use adjectives sparingly. If you pick them wisely, and pick your noun wisely, you’ll do so anyway. There’s a freight of meaning you’re trying to get across in your noun-phrase. The right noun should carry most of it, and the odd modifier will help with precision. But if it’s taking four or five words to get that meaning you’re increasing the reader’s cognitive load and clotting the rhythm of the sentence. There’s probably a more direct way.
To take a parodic example, you could call something a ‘furry, bouncy, yellow-green, fist-sized sphere’ but unless you’re describing the scene from the point of view of a Martian, ‘tennis ball’ will do. Because adjectives are essentially stative – they say what something is – they take some of the action out of a sentence.
The late newspaper columnist Lynda Lee-Potter liked to roll out great long sequences of adjectives. It was a hallmark of her style. In an old column of hers I just picked at random I found her complaining that British troops ‘faced death not only from enemy attack but also because of shoddy equipment, parsimony and disastrous Government planning which we now realise was furtive, chaotic, rushed and dishonest’. I’d say five adjectives to qualify ‘planning’ is too many. ‘Furtive’ and ‘dishonest’ overlap enough to make each semi-redundant; ‘rushed’ and ‘chaotic’ likewise. ‘Disastrous’ – good and forceful when we first meet it – has by the time we reach the end of the sentence been qualified out of any sort of necessity. And (though I suppose that’s at some level the intention) the noun that holds this altogether, ‘planning’, has come to mean its opposite. There’s no difficulty understanding what Lynda’s getting at, but she does take the reader round the houses.
Above all, beware of adjectives that glom onto nouns automatically: are you meaningfully qualifying your noun, or are you bolting together a set phrase? In journalism, for instance, rows are always ‘furious’, U-turns ‘humiliating’, revelations ‘explosive’, lessons ‘salutary’ and civil wars ‘bloody’. You might as well think of these not as nouns modified by adjectives, but as woolly compound nouns.
The usual way in which adverbs are formed is by adding -ly to the end of an adjective.* That’s not the only way, however. So-called ‘flat adverbs’ – where the adjective and adverb have the same form – are common in all sorts of dialects and informal usages. When Bob Dylan was heckled ‘Judas’ while playing an electric set in Manchester in 1966, he told his band: ‘Play really fucking loud.’ The boy done good.
Standard English also includes a large number of adverbs which don’t end -ly, among them ‘very’ (when qualifying an adjective), ‘far’, ‘fast’, ‘straight’, ‘first’ and so on. Adverbs can be tricky beasts. Many of them actually change their meaning depending on whether they’re ‘flat’ or not, and where they come in the syntax of the sentence. There’s a well-worn jocular distinction between ‘working hard’ and ‘hardly working’. Mr Bojangles, in the old song, ‘jumps so high’. Clearly he’s a highly accomplished dancer; the singer thinks of him highly.
Most adverbs form their comparatives and superlatives with ‘more’ and ‘most’ – as in ‘she spoke to me more coldly after I said I had brought Donald to the pool party as my plus one’. But a few one- or two-syllable adverbs use ‘-er’ or ‘-est’ in the same way that adjectives do: ‘She escaped from Donald because she swam fastest.’
One particularly Cromwellian school of writing advice has it that you should dispense with adverbs altogether. Stephen King is on record at thinking that ‘the road to hell is paved with adverbs’. Elmore Leonard regards it as a ‘mortal sin’ to use an adverb to modify the word ‘said’; indeed, he throws into a parenthesis that he thinks it’s a mortal sin to use adverbs ‘in almost any way’.
The thinking here is that adverbs clutter a sentence, and that they drain the energy from verbs. Just as with adjectives, there’s truth in that. Thriller writers such as Elmore Leonard or Stephen King feel it particularly keenly: verbs are where the action is in any given sentence, and thriller writers are all about action. If your verbs always have to come with apologetic qualifiers, you may not be choosing your verbs right in the first place.
But, on the other hand, the good Lord would not have given us adverbs had he not meant us to use them now and again. They survive as a resource in the language because they have a use.
Auden’s wonderful poem ‘The Fall of Rome’ ends with the stanza:
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeers move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
You get nowhere by red-pencilling the last line of that. And, for that matter, if you stripped out the other qualifiers too you’d have: ‘Elsewhere, herds of reindeers move across miles and miles of moss.’ That would do for David Attenborough, at a pinch, but not for W. H. Auden.
Just as you should be cautious with adjectives that attach to nouns too easily, try not to produce conga-lines of empty adverbial intensifiers. If you’re routinely presaging the arrival of an adjective with ‘really’, ‘very’,* ‘absolutely’, ‘quite’, ‘extremely’ and the like, you will be subject to the law of diminishing returns. Use the same caution with bethedging adverbs: ‘arguably’, ‘possibly’, ‘quite’ (in its other sense), ‘somewhat’ and so on.
Verbs, in the primary school account of them, are ‘action words’. If you want something to be running, jumping, shouting, hitting or exploding it’s the verb department you need to consult. Verbs also cover such less exciting states of being as existing, enduring, reflecting, shutting up and sitting absolutely still.
It’s not only people or animate objects that can be the subjects of verbs: a car runs, a joint jumps, a headline shouts, an arrow hits, a grenade explodes, a subordinate clause exists, a rock endures, a mirror reflects, a door shuts up and a chair sits absolutely still. My old Action Man toy was much better, now I come to think of it, at existing, enduring, reflecting, shutting up and sitting absolutely still than he was at any of the runny-jumpy-explodey stuff.
So there are verbs without action – they can denote a state of being* or an occurrence – but there’s no action without verbs. The verb brings a clause or a sentence together. It helps to fix its parts in time and settle the relations of the nouns to each other. So verbs – even if they aren’t action words – are where the action is.
Does every sentence need a main verb? No. Do most of them? Yes.
Voice is the term linguists use to describe how a verb relates to its subject and/or object. In other words, is the subject of the verb doing, or being done-to?
Active:
Everyone loves The Great British Bake-Off.
Passive:
The Great British Bake-Off is loved.
There’s a neat trick – first suggested, as far as I can discover, by the American academic Rebecca Johnson – for identifying a passive construction in case of doubt. Try adding ‘by zombies’ after the verb. If you can do so, you’re looking at the passive voice.
‘Everyone loves by zombies America’s Got Talent’ is recognisably not English. ‘America’s Got Talent is loved by zombies’ is not only a grammatical sentence, but probably true.
One of the oldest and most persistent writer’s tips is that you should prefer the active to the passive voice; or, in its extreme form, that you should always avoid the passive.
That is just nonsense. If the passive voice had no value, it would not have survived in the language. In the first place, it is useful when the agent of an action is unknown, or when the emphasis needs to be firmly on the subject. No decent newspaper reporter would write ‘Someone stabbed a man outside a nightclub in Vauxhall yesterday’ in preference to ‘A man was stabbed outside a nightclub in Vauxhall yesterday’. Making the construction active actually increases the empty verbiage because you need to supply a subject and, not having one, are forced to put ‘someone’ in.
One of the reasons that passive constructions can seem unwieldy, though, is that they add an extra layer of abstraction between subject and verb, particularly if an agent is involved. You always get an auxiliary verb and – where the agent is identified – the particle ‘by’ (as in ‘by zombies’) entering the construction.
‘John F. Kennedy was shot’: fine.
‘Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy’: fine.
‘John F. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald’: clunky. It conveys exactly the same information as the second example offers, but it adds two extra syllables and it articulates the event, as it were, backwards.
So the principles of brevity and clarity – rather than a reflex disdain for the passive – should guide you. If an active construction is going to be clunkier, use the passive. Most often, though, it’s the passive that will make the sentence knottier. Or, I could say, the sentence will be made knottier by the use of the passive.
Another problem with the passive is that because it makes it possible to dispense with an agent, it’s a favourite of the mealy-mouthed. ‘Mistakes have been made,’ politicians will say, without wishing to dwell on who exactly might have made them. This goes along, as often as not, with a certain shuffling around with personal pronouns.
‘I deeply regret the deficit in the BHS pension fund’; ‘We deeply regret the deficit in the BHS pension fund’; ‘The company deeply regrets the deficit in the BHS pension fund’; ‘The deficit in the BHS pension fund is deeply regrettable’. The perpetrator, in each version, inches a tiny bit further away from the scene of the crime.
Similarly, corporations and public bodies often use passive constructions to give an appearance of impersonal authority. ‘Patrons are kindly requested to return their glasses to the bar.’ ‘It is forbidden to walk on the grass.’
Don’t be afraid to say ‘I’ or ‘we’ and ‘you’. A lot – probably most – of your communications will be personal. A lot of officialese – because we think that somehow if we take ourselves out of the scene it looks more professional – ends up in the third person or in abstract or passive terms.
The implementation of Camden Council’s green space renewal project is expected to commence in three weeks.
Here your subject is an abstract noun (‘implementation’) and your main verb is passive (‘is expected’). Plus, the expectation is not what’s important here: it’s the commencing. And it’s not the project but the green space. What it’s trying to say is, roughly: ‘We will start building the new park in three weeks.’
Questions such as these are addressed by what linguists call ‘tense’, ‘aspect’ and ‘mood’. These are the ways in which a verb changes to indicate:
1. when what it describes took place relative to the speaker (tense)
2. the nature of the action – whether habitual or occasional, completed or still going on (aspect)
3. what you might call the attitude – is it a command, a wish, an obligation, a regret and so on (mood).
English is a minimally inflected language. Most verbs have a simple present form (blow), a simple past form (blew) and a continuous form (blowing) – and some irregular verbs, such as my example, also differ in the past participle (blown). The infinitive is formed by prefacing the simple present with the word ‘to’. Most of the work, then, is done by auxiliary verbs: to have or to be for the past, will or shall for the future.
To start with, let’s look at the various tense and aspect combinations: forms of the verb that tell us when something happened or will happen, and whether it happened once, several times or is still going on. Let’s use the example of a verb that works well in many tense-aspect combinations – and that might help you cope with them.
This can indicate a single action, or a habitual action. Are you writing one of those terrible present-tense novels? ‘I walk into the cafe. Black waves of despair roll over me. I drink a shot of Um-Bongo.’ Or are you making a confession to your GP? ‘Yes. I drink. So would you if you were writing a chapter about English verbs.’
This is used to indicate an action that has started and is still going on, or that is happening right now: ‘I am drinking methylated spirits. Care to join me?’ It is also, idiomatically, used to denote something that’s happening in the future. ‘I’m drinking Pernod under the hen-house later. Let’s make a night of it.’
Here’s an action that either happened one time in the past, or that happened habitually for a period of time but has stopped. ‘I drank a glass of water.’ ‘I drank through my teens and early twenties until I let Jesus Christ into my life.’
This denotes an action that started at some point in the past and went on for a period of time but has since stopped. It’s often used in a scene-setting way, as if to tee up the action that interrupted it. ‘I was drinking gin and lemon when the vicar arrived.’
This seems to English speakers a very intuitive tense, but as Harry Ritchie warns in his excellent English for the Natives, it ‘bewilders EFL* students. Each and every one of them.’ It is tricky because it does several different things. It can denote actions that started in the past and continue into the present: ‘I have drunk Cointreau non-stop since I started going out with that French girl.’ Or it can describe a completed action located in a time-scheme that is still going on – be that ‘today’, ‘this week’ or a lifetime: ‘For he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.’* Or it can be a completed action that stopped recently, and whose results or implications are still present. To adapt William Carlos Williams: ‘I have drunk/ the Special Brew/ that was in/ the icebox// and which/ you were probably/ saving// for breakfast// Forgive me/ it was delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold’.
There’s a certain amount of overlap with the present perfect but there’s more emphasis on the continuing – ‘I have been drinking Buckfast since 7am’ – or just-completed nature of the action: ‘Why are you making that noise? I have been drinking tequila.’
Here’s a further wrinkle in the timeline. The past perfect signals that an action took place before something that is itself in the past. ‘I had drunk most of a bottle of claret before I started in on my host’s Scotch.’ Three points on the timeline: claret, then Scotch, then the present tense in which the speaker is suffering the unspeakable consequences. That’s a horrible example of an extremely useful and expressive construction. If we had no past perfect we’d tie ourselves in knots trying to distinguish between more than one time-frame in the past.
The same triple-situation as the past perfect, but here – as with the present perfect continuous – the aspect indicates that the action is an ongoing or recently completed one. ‘I had been drinking for three hours by the time Curly joined me.’ ‘I had been drinking, but I nevertheless attempted to ride my moped home.’
As we step into the future tense, we are nearly out of the woods. No more triple time-frames. However, a completely baffling distinction has traditionally been made between will and shall, which bears at least mentioning. It has to do with intentionality.
The theory is that if you’re simply observing that the action is going to happen you use ‘shall’ in the first person and ‘will’ in the second and third person; but if you’re indicating determination you use ‘will’ in the first person and ‘shall’ in the second and third.
In practice, the distinction has all but collapsed. You can hear it only vestigially. ‘I will go to the pub’ and ‘I shall go to the pub’, with no special emphasis, convey an identical meaning – except for a certain whiff of fussiness in the latter. If you emphasise the auxiliaries the old distinction is, just, there – ‘I will go to the pub’ (even though you’ve told me not to) sounds right, where ‘I shall go to the pub’ does not. Second and third person examples bear this out: ‘You shall go to the ball, Cinderella!’ or (in the words of Monty Python’s ill-fated Black Knight) ‘None shall pass.’ Both of those convey a determination that ‘will’ doesn’t quite carry: ‘none will pass’ sounds like an observation, not a statement of intent.
But these examples are outliers. It’s worth knowing the rule, although in ordinary usage ‘will’ covers the waterfront admirably. Those who use ‘shall’ in writing, as in speech, risk sounding a little affected. The exception is in first-person questions involving intentionality: ‘Shall we drink some tea?’
There’s a light neutrality to this tense and aspect combination: it indicates, as a gentle inevitability, that a state of something happening will obtain at a specific time. ‘I will be drinking in the Bald Faced Stag this evening.’ Or, in the formulation favoured by The Fast Show’s oversharing yokel Jesse: ‘This season, I will mostly be drinking … scrumpy.’
This involves a sort of mental time-travel. It describes – future tense, perfective aspect – a completed action as if viewed from the future. ‘By closing time, I will have drunk about a gallon of Strongbow and will very much need a wee.’
This effects the same frame-shift as the future perfect, but with a continuous or progressive aspect. At the time from which you’re viewing the action, the action is still going on, or is only just coming to an end: ‘I will have been drinking Strongbow for a good few hours, and the landlord will want me to go home.’
That’s tense and aspect. Now let’s add in mood. Mood describes, as I said above, something of the flavour of the verb. Is it expressing something that has definitely happened, that has definitely not happened, will not happen under certain circumstances, might be happening, or ought to happen?
When you hear people talking about the conditional, the subjunctive, the imperative, the interrogative or the indicative, these are all grammatical moods. The indicative is the straightforward one: as per its name, it indicates something real. The imperative issues a command. Conditionals indicate something that might or might not happen according to a particular circumstance. The subjunctive (all but vanished in English) refers to imaginary situations or events, and expresses wishes or requests.
The two main sorts of modality are epistemic and deontic. The first deals with the state of knowledge of the speaker. The second deals with possibility, permission, advice, desire or obligation.
This is most easily demonstrated by example:
Epistemic modality: do we know whether Joe Strummer fought the law or is planning to?
He fights the law (indicative).
He may fight the law.
He might fight the law.
He would fight the law if it came to it (conditional).
He must have fought the law (i.e. from the sweat on his forehead and those rocks he is breaking).
Deontic modality: can he or should he fight the law? Here’s our attempt to persuade him.
If only he were to fight the law! (subjunctive).
He can fight the law.
He may fight the law.
He could fight the law.
He ought to fight the law.
He must fight the law.
Fight the law! (imperative).
And we know how that goes. Most of this stuff, happily, native English speakers do naturally. You thread your way expertly through the thickets of epistemic and deontic modality, quite unaware you’re doing so. But it’s worth taking special care with epistemic modality. In the wider sense, for instance, certain verbs come with a mood baked in. So ‘knew’ has a different epistemic force than ‘thought’ or ‘suspected’. Some verbs of knowing, saying or thinking commit you to a particular position. Anyone with a care to the laws of libel, or just good manners, will be careful with them. This is at the heart of the rebut/deny distinction I discuss in the chapter ‘Perils and Pitfalls’.
When you’re choosing which verbs to use, a common piece of advice is to keep them concrete, to keep them active in voice and to keep them indicative in mood. This is all right as far as it goes. And, indeed, you’ll struggle to produce a long run of verbs in any voice other than the indicative. A marine drill-instructor might manage a long run of imperatives, but an essayist or the writer of a winning memo to head office will not.
You should watch out for verb inflation, though. That’s when you don’t head something, you head it up. You don’t start something, you roll it out. You don’t evaluate something, you conduct an evaluation. Less confident writers are often tempted to substitute orotund phrasal verbs for simpler alternatives, or to nominalise their verbs* (i.e. put the action into a verbal noun; ‘take delivery of’ for ‘receive’). They add, you might think, a certain grandeur and sophistication to the prose. Their cadence might be appealing. But they also cause problems of clarity.
Particularly for foreign language speakers, phrasal verbs can be very difficult to parse. This applies to the supposedly simple Anglo-Saxon constructions we’re meant to prefer, as much as if not more than complicated Latinate ones. That’s because these simpler words have acquired a whole range of idiomatic phrasal uses. For instance: put up, put in, put out, put down, put off, put back, put forward and put on all have very different meanings, and there’s seldom an intuitive relation between those meanings. You might put in for a job and put out in the back seat of a car. To put forward and to put forth are not quite the same thing – a plant might put forth foliage, and a person might put forward a proposal. Many phrasal verbs themselves change their meanings according to context: I might put up shelves badly; my wife, too mean to hire a professional to correct my work, might resolve to put up with them.
The problem with nominalisations is that, effectively, simple main verbs are replaced by clusters of nouns and prepositions glued together with weak secondary or auxiliary verbs. After all, every verb you turn into a noun leaves you needing a fresh verb – and that ‘fresh’ verb is likely to be far from fresh. If all the action in your sentence – the verb’s change of meaning – has leached into the surrounding nouns, you can find yourself with long, bristling sentences anchored with a version of ‘to be’ or ‘to have’.
To take a caricatural business-speak example, ‘I have had sight of your letter of the 20th’ turns the verb ‘to see’ into a noun, and makes the main verb ‘to have’. ‘I saw’: two words. ‘I have had sight of’: five words. It’s not hard to understand, sure, but it’s windier, and it sounds pompous.
My thinking is that a consultation should be undertaken with the clients.
Can be more directly put as
I think we should consult the clients.
And so on.
None of this is to say that there’s anything wrong with the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’. ‘He is an idiot’ is an invaluably forceful and simple construction. Likewise: ‘He has a gun!’ is the quickest way to clear the hotel lobby. But using them as jacks-of-all-work to give nouns a verbal force is a habit to avoid.
Having taken a tour through the main parts of speech, let’s look at how these things come together to make meaningful units of prose.
The basic unit of writing, most of us think instinctively, is the sentence. But how you define a sentence isn’t always that easy. A simple way of doing it in the written language is to say that a sentence is something that begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop or a related punctuation mark – question marks, exclamation marks, and ellipses (dot-dot-dot) being, as it were, cousins of the full stop. The problem with that is, as I’ll discuss in more detail later, spelling and punctuation are conventions for marshalling the grammar of the spoken language on the page.
A more satisfactory definition is that a sentence is a self-contained unit of meaning consisting of one or more clauses. A clause is the basic unit of meaning: it’s a sentence-chunk with a subject and a predicate in it.
The subject is a noun (‘a cat’), or a noun-phrase (‘the big ginger cat with ragged ears’), or something that stands in for one (a pronoun such as ‘it’ or ‘she’) and behaves like one. The predicate is, simply put, the bit of the clause that isn’t the subject: it’s the bit of the clause that gives us some news about the subject. It consists of a verb and, if appropriate, some other material that goes with the verb.
If a clause can stand alone and hold its meaning entire – if it could be a sentence on its own, in other words – it’s called an independent or main clause; if it can’t, it’s called a dependent or subordinate clause. A phrase, by contrast, is a sentence-chunk that may have a subject in it and may have a verb in it but that doesn’t have both: if it did, it would be a clause.
At the risk of boring veteran grammarians, let me roll through some examples in ascending order of complexity. In each case I’m putting the predicate in bold.
• ‘The cat slept.’
The cat is the subject: it’s the one doing the sleeping. The verb tells us what it’s doing. This is a single-clause simple sentence.
• ‘The cat ate the mouse.’
Still a single-clause simple sentence. The cat is again the subject. It’s the one doing the eating. The wrinkle is that we’re using a transitive verb (a verb that not only has a doer but a done-to). The mouse is the object: it’s the thing being eaten.
• ‘The mouse gave the cat a tummy-ache.’
The mouse is now the subject. In the predicate ‘gave the cat a tummy-ache’ the tummy-ache is the grammatical object (it’s the thing being given) and the cat is the indirect object (it’s the thing to which the tummy-ache is being given). Again, it’s a simple sentence – one subject, one predicate containing one main verb – but we’ve introduced the wrinkle of an indirect object.
• ‘The cat ate the mouse, and the mouse tasted horrid.’
Yikes! Two subjects, two predicates and two main verbs. This is what’s known as a compound sentence: a construction in which two or more independent clauses share sentence space. These can be linked by punctuation – ‘The cat ate the mouse: the mouse tasted horrid’ – or by a class of words called coordinating conjunctions. The mnemonic for these conjunctions, of which there are seven main ones in English, is FANBOYS: ‘for’, ‘and’, ‘nor’, ‘but’, ‘or’, ‘yet’ and ‘so’.
Compound sentences can usually be split very easily into two (or more) separate sentences – though whether or how you do so is a stylistic decision. For reasons of rhythm, for instance, you might like to have a longer sentence. You might also want to emphasise the connection between the two independent clauses. Consider the shades of effect. ‘The cat ate the mouse and the mouse tasted horrid.’ This is pretty neutral: a fait accompli; an unfortunate fact of life, delivered as a package. ‘The cat ate the mouse. The mouse tasted horrid.’ There’s more of a sense, here, of an unpleasant discovery made in short order after a rash decision; the news delivered in a tone of pained neutrality. ‘The cat ate the mouse. And the mouse tasted horrid.’ To my ear there’s a certain theatrical relish here: that full stop gives you a pause; the conjunction launches you into the second clause as a consequence of the first. Here’s the whipping away, in a small way, of the magician’s hanky from the cat’s discovery.
• ‘The stricken cat, which was now suffering grievously, crawled onto the sofa, hoping it would feel better after another nap.’
Here, we are in the territory of the complex sentence. The subject is modified by a subordinate clause. You can tell ‘which was now suffering grievously’ is a subordinate clause because it can’t stand alone. ‘Which was now suffering grievously’ isn’t a sentence in anyone’s book. Complex sentences involve joining a main clause to a subordinate clause with a coordinator or a piece of punctuation that explains the relationship between the two things.
• ‘The cat, which had imagined its troubles were over for the day, dozed off on the sofa, but was rudely woken up when its owner sat down to watch Match of the Day without looking.’
This is a complex-compound sentence. It has two main verbs – ‘dozed’ (an active verb: the cat is doing the dozing) and ‘was woken up’ (a passive verb: the cat is being woken up). The subject of both of these is the cat. So here’s a compound sentence. Stripped down, it says: ‘the cat dozed off but [the cat] was woken up’.
The sentence also has a number of nested subordinate clauses. First, ‘which had imagined its troubles were over for the day’. The cat is the subject of the first verb ‘had imagined’, but that verb’s object (‘its troubles’) is itself modified by ‘were over for the day’. Then we have ‘when its owner sat down to watch Match of the Day without looking’: ‘when’ introduces another subordinate clause, modifying the waking up, whose subject is the owner and whose verb is ‘sat down’. And within that subordinate clause we have yet another: ‘without looking’ is a participle clause, behaving a bit like an adverb, and modifying the owner’s sitting down. And so, merrily, you can go on.
The coordinators and the punctuation of that sentence help you through the thicket. The first subordinate clause is sandwiched between two commas and introduced by ‘which’. The second half of the compound sentence is marked off with another comma and introduced with the conjunction ‘but’. Further subclauses are flagged by ‘when’ and ‘without’.
I run through this stuff not because this book is intended as a guide to syntax – rather, because if you get a handle on the basics of how sentences work, you’ll be better able to disentangle your own. And also, because you can see how quickly those basics can be slotted together and nested inside each other to make quite complicated constructions.
There are two encouraging things to remember.
The first is that, even if your head spins when trying to sort your coordinating conjunctions from your subordinate clauses, this is something you do very naturally in speech. You understand all of these sentences – which means that you understand their grammar even if you can’t immediately label it. You both make and decipher complex-compound sentences without even thinking about it. You know more than you know you know. The grammarians aren’t telling you how you do it: they’re trying, with incomplete success, to describe systematically what you are doing.
The second encouraging thing is that the basic idea is the most important one. Beneath the curlicues of subject-predicate grammar are two very familiar things: nouns and verbs. All these complicated sentences are built on very simple ones. There’s always, always a main clause in there somewhere, and it has a subject and a verb. Shunt two of them together and you get a compound sentence. Festoon one with subordinate clauses and you get a complex sentence. Do both and you get a complex-compound sentence.
But right at the bottom, under all the ornamentation, is the spine of your sentence: subject and verb. The successful sentence-surgeon identifies it, reaches in, grabs it and doesn’t let the little rascal go. In the chapter ‘Sentence Surgery’, later, I’ll give some examples of how you can apply this understanding.
* * *
What makes a sentence easy to read, and what makes it go wrong? The most obvious thing to say is that, by and large, the longer the sentence the harder it is for the reader. So you’re looking to make sentences short. That doesn’t mean they can’t convey grown-up ideas.
As Hemingway said: all writing is rewriting. So reread each sentence. How many words long is it? The average sentence should be between 15 and 20 words. Sometimes they will be longer. But if you’re regularly hitting 40, your writing is going to be much, much harder going. You don’t have to confine one thought to one sentence. But the fewer thoughts-per-sentence you go for on average, the better. (Zero is too few.)
But, as I’ve said, keeping sentences short is only one part of it. You also need to consider their structure. A very good way to do this is to keep your eyes firmly on the main clause. What’s the subject of the sentence? What’s the main verb? Can the reader easily see the connection between the two? These are the spine of your sentence: lose sight of them, and you’re lost.
At root, a tricky sentence is one that demands a lot of cognitive work from the reader – and we know, roughly, what this consists of. It has to do with the concept of ‘working memory’. This is to your brain as the ‘clipboard’ on your computer is to its hard drive: it acts as a sort of mental holding pen. As a sentence unfolds on the page or in the ear, you hold its elements in working memory as you wait for the clues that tell you how to interpret it. And the roadmap to a sentence is that subject-verb connection: the longer it takes to become clear, the harder the brain is working.
The problem is that working memory has limited space. Remember how Microsoft Word sometimes bleats: ‘You placed a large amount of text on the clipboard’? So does the brain. An influential 1956 essay by the psychologist George Miller made a stab at the limits of working memory. That essay was called ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’, and it argued that the average person is capable of storing only between five and nine pieces of information in working memory.
What linguists call ‘right-branching sentences’ – that is, sentences which give you the subject and verb up front, are therefore easier on the brain. Once you have subject and verb established, you know where you’re going with the sentence. Sentences where you have to wait a very long time between subject and verb, or where you’re having to fight through a thicket of modifying clauses before you even reach the subject, tax the working memory.
English has advantages in this department. Unlike German, where you often have to put the verb at the end of the sentence, you can put subject and verb close to each other. Keep them there, if possible. And if you can manage subject-verb-object order – the default position in English – so much the better.
Crime writing is a good place to look for examples of right-branching sentences: its first job, after all, is to make it easy for readers to keep turning the pages. The thriller writer Harlan Coben, for instance, is no sort of literary stylist. But he’s almost infallible in his kindness to the reader’s working memory. Here’s a paragraph more or less at random from his novel The Woods.
She parked near her father’s old car, a rusted-out yellow VW Beetle. The Beetle was always in the exact same spot. She doubted that it had moved from there in the past year. Her father had freedom here. He could leave anytime. He could check himself in and check out. But the sad fact was, he almost never left his room. The leftist bumper stickers that had adorned the vehicle had all faded away. Lucy had a copy of the VW key and every once in a while she started it up, just to keep the battery in operating order. Doing that, just sitting in the car, brought flashbacks. She saw Ira driving it, the full beard, the windows open, the smile, the wave and honk to everyone he passed. She never had the heart to take it out for a spin
I’ve put the subjects in italics and the verbs in bold. Notice anything? Of those 12 sentences fully three quarters go directly from subject to verb. All are indicative in mood. All are in the active voice. The odd sentence is more complicated – an absolutely rigid commitment to slamming subject-verb into the first three or four words of a sentence would become monotonous – but not much more complicated. There’s the sentence whose subject is a gerundial* phrase – ‘doing that’ – where another gerund phrase in apposition,* ‘just sitting in the car’, intervenes between subject and verb. And there’s another sentence where an eight-syllable modifying clause, ‘that had adorned the vehicle’, gets between the bumper stickers and their fading. None of these are much of a challenge to the reader’s brain.
Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, is a thriller writer who does have some claim on being a stylist. Most of his sentences are brisk, businesslike and right-branching, as per the Coben model. Here’s a representative extract from Worth Dying For (my italics and bold as above):
Sixty miles north Dorothy Coe took a pork chop from her refrigerator. The chop was part of a pig a friend had slaughtered a mile away, part of a loose cooperative designed to get people through tough times. Dorothy trimmed the fat, and put a little pepper on the meat, and a little mustard, and a little brown sugar. She put the chop in an open dish and put the dish in the oven. She set her table, one place, a knife, a fork, and a plate. She took a glass and filled it with water and put it next to the plate. She folded a square of paper towel for a napkin. Dinner, for one. Reacher was hungry. He had eaten no lunch. He called the desk and asked for room service and the guy who had booked him in told him there was no room service. He apologized for the lack.
This is tough-guy prose. Child is idiomatic and informal – as witness that curt verbless sentence ‘Dinner, for one’. A grammatical stickler might insist that the last three sentences read: ‘He had eaten no lunch. He had called the desk and had asked for room service and the guy who had booked him in had told him there was no room service. He had apologized for the lack.’ In context, though, the pluperfect would have been horribly unwieldy. There’s a methodical and unfussy feel about it, too, artfully produced. There are structural parallelisms – ‘She put … she set … she took … she folded’; ‘He had … he called … he apologized.’* There are repeated words and simple connectors: ‘and a little … and a little … and a little’.
One of Child’s stylistic quirks, though, is that he goes completely to town when his hero thumps somebody. Here’s the equivalent of slo-mo, or ‘bullet-time’, and it can produce quite absurdly long sentences:
Then Reacher’s blow landed.
Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, a huge fist, a huge impact, the zipper of the guy’s coat driving backward into his breastbone, his breastbone driving backward into his chest cavity, the natural elasticity of his ribcage letting it yield whole inches, the resulting violent compression driving the air from his lungs, the hydrostatic shock driving blood back into his heart, his head snapping forward like a crash test dummy, his shoulders driving backward, his weight coming up off the ground, his head whipping backward again and hitting a plate glass window behind him with a dull boom like a kettle drum, his arms and legs and torso all going down like a rag doll, his body falling, sprawling, the hard polycarbonate click and clatter of something black skittering away on the ground, Reacher tracking it all the way in the corner of his eye, not a wallet, not a phone, not a knife, but a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol, all dark and boxy and wicked.
That second sentence is 168 words long, contains no main verb, and is as easy to parse as any sentence you’re likely to come across. Technically, it isn’t a sentence at all – it’s a set of modifiers for the four words ‘Then Reacher’s blow landed.’ Full stop or no (you could as easily recast it with a colon), here’s an extreme right-branching construction. It’s easy to follow because the logic of what it describes moves from clause to clause: this happened, then this happened, then this happened. The first couple of phrases are appositive (the moving mass, the fist, the impact) and then we have a trail of consequential effects (moving, with loosely parallel constructions, from zipper, to breastbone, to chest cavity, to lungs, to heart, to head, to shoulders and so on). The kneebone’s connected to the anklebone. Each gobbet of information is entire; the working memory isn’t working all that hard.
Favouring right-branching sentences is not the whole story, though. Your choice of nouns and verbs will also have an effect on how easy your sentences are to digest. And for reasons of cadence or emphasis, you may well want to throw in some left-branchers here and there. Nobody, not even the simplest of thriller writers, writes exclusively in that sort of sentence. Nor should they. Variation in sentence structure (and length) are what prevents your prose sounding robotic and repetitive or even babyish.
As ever, I want to make the point that you don’t write well by following an absolute set of rules. You write well by developing an ear that will tell you when something isn’t working – and you can use the analytical tools I’m offering here as a series of possible strategies for understanding how to put it right. Some more practical work on this appears below in ‘Sentence Surgery’.
Words build into phrases and clauses; phrases and clauses build into sentences; sentences build into paragraphs; paragraphs build into sections and chapters. The hardest work is done at the level of a sentence, but organising a longer document also requires application. It needs to be navigable. Paragraphs and chapters – along with other design features apt to the genre you’re writing in (pie charts, block pagination or whatever) – help make that possible.
If you’re writing something very technical and exact – be it a company report, a legal document or a scientific paper – paragraphs are a vital part of the logical structure of the piece. They may begin with so-called ‘topic sentences’, and end with a sort of recap – a very narrow and precise form.
Not all forms of writing are that tight. The paragraph, as most of us think of it, is a unit of thought. It’s also a unit of prose rhythm. It’s also a design feature. Compare the staccato style of tabloid reportage with the more digressive movement of a literary essay. As Keith Waterhouse notes in his book Daily Mirror Style: ‘Fowler wrote that the purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. Had he been more of a student of the popular Press he might have added that it is not the purpose of paragraphing to give the reader a jolt. That, however, is often the result.’ Nor, pace Waterhouse, are those jolts always a bad thing.
It’s impossible to make absolute rules for paragraphing. One-word paragraphs look odd in serious continuous prose. One sentence paragraphs are a tabloid mainstay, and present in some technical writing, but don’t usually look good in an essay. But you need to gauge the context and develop a feel for what works.
In doing so just keep those two very nebulous ideas – giving the reader a break, and the paragraph as unit of thought – front and centre. A paragraph is a prose mouthful. The breaks between paragraphs – lovely white space – give the reader a chance to swallow what has gone before. But what’s in a paragraph needs to be in some sense homogeneous. You don’t want to be presenting the reader with a forkful of roast beef and gooseberry crumble.
I’m afraid that here we are once again in the territory of know-it-when-you-see-it. Or, if you like, know-it-when-you-taste-it. A paragraph might well have more than one thing in it: those who dement themselves by obsessing on the one-thought-per-paragraph idea will produce some stiff and eccentric paragraphs. But the things in any given paragraph need to belong together. Roast beef, carrot, roast potato, Yorkshire pud and a dab of mustard might make a delicious if challenging mouthful. Roast beef, gravy, gooseberry crumble and custard will like as not be ejected onto the tablecloth.
This is meant to be encouraging. Remember: you don’t need special training to spit out the custard-and-gravy mouthful. You’ve already had the training through a lifetime of Sunday lunches. You’ve read a lot of paragraphs in your life. You’ve had a lot of thoughts. Your sense of what belongs in a paragraph may be better than you think.
Sections and chapters are paragraphs writ large. They are units of thought and design and intellectual rhythm. They, too, are subject to the gooseberry crumble test.
In the later section, ‘Out into the World’, I discuss the ways you might structure a longer document in terms of style and argument.
* The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, edited by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (Cambridge University Press, 2002), is a professional shot at doing that. It runs to 1,842 closely printed pages, will considerably tax the brain of non-linguists, and for all its magnificence is a threat to the structural integrity of my bedside table.
* Words like ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’.
† You may object, here, that ‘The Taj Mahal’ is two words (plus an article), or that – to simplify with an article-free example – ‘Julio Iglesias’ is two words. Does that prevent them being nouns and make them, instead, noun combinations or even noun phrases? Here, you’re more or less splitting hairs. You can make a distinction, if you want to, between proper nouns (one word) and proper names (two or more words) – but the grammatical role (the nouniness) remains the same.
* That is, the form of the word doesn’t change to reflect its grammatical role. A dog is a dog whether it’s biting or being bit. That work is done, in English, by word order and/or the use of prepositions: ‘The dog bit the man.’ ‘The man bit the dog.’ It doesn’t work like that in Latin, Russian, German or Proto-Indo-European. This has advantages (no case system! yay!) and disadvantages (the work is done by word order and/or the use of prepositions, but the work has to be done by word order and/or the use of prepositions).
* I’m indebted to Harry Ritchie’s English for the Natives for the delightful discovery that plural isn’t a simple concept in itself: ‘English defines a plural as any number more than one – e.g. 1.00001 litres – whereas French, for example, takes plural to mean a minimum of two (1.00001 litre, deux litres). Both English and French have opted for the binary model of singular + plural, but there are others, most popularly the three-way singular + dual + plural.’ But let’s leave it there for the minute.
* If you’re counting juveniles, though, you’ll count ‘one lamb, two lambs, three lambs, four lambs, five lambs …’ You may as well be hanged for a sheep. And if you’re eating them – hey presto! – both the invariant word ‘sheep’ and the regular-plural-forming ‘lamb’ become (see below) mass nouns: either ‘mutton’ or ‘lamb’. Grammatically at least, they dress the same.
* Unless you’re murdering crows, and you probably aren’t because the verb ‘murder’ takes a human object, unless you’re a hard-core animal rights enthusiast using it for rhetorical effect, or Morrissey.
† Also, if you want to be fancy about it, ‘synesis’.
‡ You can have ‘two flours’ when you’re using ‘flour’ to stand in for a type of flour – plain, wholemeal, Canadian stoneground or what have you – but here it’s being used in a different sense. Context, again, is the key.
* You could think of words like ‘the’ or ‘this’, acting as determiners, as stapling these simple adjectives to their nouns.
† Idiomatically, in US English, the adjective ‘woke’ has come to mean ‘politically conscious’, and can be used attributively, as in ‘my woke friends in the Black Lives Matter movement’.
‡ Again, a quirk – you can say: ‘my half-asleep mother’.
* Adjective, comparative, superlative: observant, orthodox, frum.
† Not even if it tried.
* Not that -ly is the infallible sign of an adverb. Some adjectives have that ending: a silly goose; a comely maiden.
* We can forgive Auden ‘very fast’, I think, because a) it does seem to have a particular force and b) it scans.
* ‘Linking verbs’, for instance, are verbs such as ‘be’, ‘seem’ or ‘become’ that, rather than indicating an action, yoke a subject to a ‘subject complement’ (either a noun or an adjective) that describes it. ‘The water was still’; ‘She’s a private detective’; ‘He seems grouchy’; ‘That tastes foul.’
* English as a Foreign Language, i.e. students learning English who grew up speaking a different language.
* To make this clearer, consider a counter-example. If the time-span in which the action happened is itself complete you need the past simple. You could say ‘He has drunk 14 pints today’, but not ‘He has drunk 14 pints yesterday.’ The same applies to the completion of a lifetime. You could say ‘I have drunk opium’, but not ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge has drunk opium.’ Dead men don’t wear plaid, tell tales or act as the subject in a clause whose verb is in the present perfect.
* See also: Perils and Pitfalls, under ‘Nouning Verbs; Verbing Nouns’.
* A gerund is the word given to a noun made out of a verb. It usually takes the same form as a present participle, i.e. it ends in ‘-ing’. A place-setting at a table, a good showing in the football game, or a good kicking in a fight: all are nouns that come from verbs. Those are gerunds. In the case above the phrases containing the -ing words are working as noun-phrases: you could expand them to say (awkwardly) ‘the doing of that’ or ‘her doing that’, and they serve as the subjects governing ‘brought flashbacks’.
* ‘In apposition’ means that two phrases are placed side-by-side as if in parallel: the second phrase is explaining the first: ‘Harlan Coben, the writer, is a favourite of mine.’
* Different ‘he’; same structure.