Over millennia of language use and study, one powerful message survives: The creation of meaning –- expression of a complete thought — requires a subject and a verb, the king and queen of comprehensibility. And the king and queen are most powerful when they sit on thrones beside each other rather than in separate castles far away.
Consider the lead to this New York Times story about the downfall of an important political figure:
And then this accompanying story:
Subject——————————Verb——————–>.
These stories are so important, and the sentences so carefully constructed, that the curious reader will find a way through. But to clear the path, I’ll follow an axiom of comprehensibility that requires stickum between subject and verb, a revision that would look more like this:
Subject Verb————————————————>.
To achieve the new pattern, I’d rewrite the first lead this way:
Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned on Wednesday, becoming the first New York governor in nearly a century to leave office amid scandal. Having risen to power as a fierce enforcer of ethics in public life, Spitzer was undone by revelations of his own involvement with prostitutes.
———————————–Subject Verb—————->.
Whenever an author separates subject and verb, he or she can lead the reader astray, as one writer does in this clumsy rendering:
Many obstacles to comprehensibility hide in that sentence, but the separation of subject (“a bill”) and verb (“could mean”) is a big one. Without a stronger backbone, the sentence seems to wander in all directions, piling one bit of government jargon upon another. I’ve tried to rewrite it, and the best I could do is this:
It seems as if the subject and verb of a main clause can appear in almost any location and without much regard to the distance between the two. So a sentence could look like this:
Subject———————————————————Verb.
Attention to the position of subject and verb does not require the writer to create simple or childish prose. Here, for example, is a paragraph from one of my favorite authors, G.K Chesterton, who often wrote about religious themes:
This passage rings clear as a bell, due in no small part to the connubial nesting in all clauses of subjects and verbs. The single separation is brief and dramatic, the place where “in a blazing apocalypse” sits between “good things” and “becomes good.”
For lack of a better term, let’s call these “happy interruptions,” moments in which modifying words and phrases enrich our sense of the subject, thus preparing us for the verb. It’s a device that captures the bright scholarly style of my first college English teacher, the late Rene Fortin. Here he writes about the ghost of Hamlet’s father:
Study, for a moment, the position of subjects and verbs (each dot represents an intervening word):
The ghost …… imposes
Hamlet …………………… questions
Any suggestion ……… can only be inferred
It was my old friend Dennis Jackson, scholar, writer and teacher, who introduced me to a term from language studies: the right-branching sentence. To understand this useful concept, I had to begin to imagine sentences in a different way, not as part of a column of text, but as a single line moving from left to right. To determine the direction of the branches, you first identify the subject and verb of the main clause. So a sentence can branch to the right:
Subject Verb——————————————————————–>.
Or to the left:
<——————————————————————–Subject Verb.
Or from the middle:
<—————————–Subject Verb—————————–>.
None of these –- and many other variations -– is right or wrong. But each one offers a different effect.
The right branching sentence, for example, helps the writer make meaning early and then attach modifying elements to infinity:
A left branching sentence works, by definition, in the opposite direction. Subordinate elements pile up on the front end, with the main meaning arriving –- at times in dramatic form –- near the end, as in this prose summary of the first 18 lines of Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”:
When April comes with its sweet showers and pierces the parched days of March, and soaks every root with such sweet liqueur that flowers spring up; when the sweet west wind has breathed, in every wood and field, the tender shoots, and the young sun has run its course halfway across the Ram’s sky, and small birds sing and sleep all night with eyes wide open –- as Nature pricks their little hearts –- that’s when English folks bust out to go on pilgrimages.
