STARK attachments do more to distinguish the professional from the common than any other edit. And all they take is a change in position and the cutting of two or three words.
LEADING PARTS
Most writers merrily run from one independent clause to the next, either joining them in one sentence or letting them stand apart as two. Doing this, they miss the opportunity to link two ideas more closely and build a more compelling structure—one with a touch of suspense. Most leading parts could appear after the subject—less suspenseful, less emphatic.
Esteemed in the West as the statesman who ended the cold war, Mr. Gorbachev is extremely unpopular in Russia, where he is blamed for allowing the Soviet Union to fall apart and for not having pushed reform of the command economy far enough.
Shortening what would otherwise have been an independent clause (Mr. Gorbachev is esteemed…) and abruptly attaching the phrase to the front of a sentence is a standard edit that too few writers avail themselves of.
Struck by an annual outbreak of filial sentiment, Americans make more long-distance calls on Mother’s Day than on any other day of the year.
Neither quite this nor altogether that, terrifically itself yet perpetually ambiguous, Turkey stands alone among the nations.
Like many amateur memoirs, this book may be best appreciated by the writer, not the reader.
A special class of the common embellishment, with a prepositional phrase, this one is attached to the subject that immediately follows. The example here could have been the common This book is like many amateur memoirs and may best….
INNER PARTS
Many writers habitually open their subordinate clauses with which is, that is, who is. Taking out the pronoun and verb is a standard edit (in the spirit of Strunk and White’s “which hunting”) and is one of the easiest you can make to begin building sentences that are less ordinary.
The PC Forum, an annual conference that attracts some of the biggest names in the computer industry, is a hard place to get noticed, especially if you are a relatively obscure economist.
The highlighted phrase could have been a dependent clause, which is an annual conference. Removing the which is shortens the sentence and picks up the cadence by adding the elaboration abruptly.
Last year General Electric, an American conglomerate, earned $6.6 billion in after-tax profits by selling everything from fridges to aircraft engines.
Most writers unnecessarily introduce examples with such as, for example, that is, and the shorthand i.e. and e.g. Dropping those openings and replacing the surrounding commas with a pair of dashes provide variety—and pick up the cadence of your sentences.
Then along comes some external force—a volcano, an asteroid, an ice age—that changes all the niches and launches a mad scramble for survival.
An ounce of example is worth a ton of abstraction.
Impressionism’s essential project—the capture of momentary effects of light—was too insubstantial to fully engage him.
TRAILING PARTS
As with leading and inner parts, what otherwise would be an independent clause can be starkly attached as a trailing part.
The deep intrusive past was never far away—echoed in a ruin, a habit, a village, a sight not meant to be a reminder but there all the same.
[My house] is unadorned and functional, inexpressive and solid: it has proved this during the last war, when it went through the bombings, escaping with some slight damage to the window frames and a few scratches which it still bears with the pride that a veteran bears the scars left by his wounds.
And as with some other inner parts, you can remove the who is or which is from a dependent clause and attach the remaining phrase at the end with a dash or comma.
Yet, staying at home can be the most brazen act of all. Or so we learned from Johannes Vermeer—art’s first great homebody.
This might have been much flatter as Johannes Vermeer—who was art’s first great homebody.
Hoping to jazz up vegetables’ boring image, the Vegetarian Society, a British group, recently released “Hot Dinner,” an erotic public-service cinema ad bursting with rapid-fire shots of sizzling chilies and oozing peaches.