Every sentence names something and says something about it. This is the secret life of the sentence—the short story it tells. If that story is clearly told, the sentence will work; if not, it will not.
Naming things and telling us a short story about them is what a reader, whether they realise it or not, expects every sentence to do. Naming and telling is how we talk with each other. It’s how we think and make sense of things. It’s the way we experience reality: plants and elements and people and organisations doing things, often to others. The wallaby grazes the button grass; the cheque bounces; the
Dragons beat the Sharks.
The first sentence in this section, for instance, named ‘every sentence’.That’s its subject.What it said about it was that a sentence ‘names something and says something about it’. That’s its predicate. So, the part of the sentence that names is called the subject; the part that tells is called the predicate.
Sometimes the thing we name is, indeed, a thing: ‘orange’, ‘book’, ‘antelope’, ‘stone’, ‘tooth’, ‘gun’, ‘pen’, ‘watch’, ‘chair’. Sometimes the something is a someone: ‘I just wrote a sentence’, ‘You just read a sentence’, ‘Mark writes poems’, ‘The prime minister resigned last night’. (We give the noun a capital when it is someone’s name or a title, but not when it’s a common noun like ‘prime minister’.) Sometimes the thing named is an inanimate entity: ‘the government’, ‘the school’, ‘the company’, ‘the department’, ‘the team’, ‘the nation’, in which we all know real live people are breathing and speaking. These are collective nouns. Sometimes the thing we name is a concept (an abstract noun): ‘death’, ‘grief’, ‘writing’, ‘syntax’, ‘ecosystem’, ‘inflation’, ‘love’, ‘risk minimisation’. Sometimes, again, the thing we name is a place:‘Southeast Asia’,‘Australia’,‘Wyoming’,‘the Simpson Desert’,‘the Kimberley’.
As a part of speech, the subject will be a noun or a pronoun, such as ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘the man’ or ‘the government’ or ‘Peter’ or ‘the managing director’ or ‘the river’; or it may be a whole mob of words, like ‘the tendency for economies to atrophy over time’ or a
shorter phrase like ‘economic reform’ or ‘the purpose of all writing’ or ‘all of us’. Predicates, too, come in all shapes and sizes—but they always include a verb.
What a sentence says is:
• what that person or thing does (active voice) • what they are (linking or defining sentence) or • what happens to them (passive voice).
Some sentences name things and ask questions about them. These sentences are called questions!
Sentences (or, strictly speaking, their verbs) have moods. Some grammarians say that moods are old technology. But mood is a feature of many languages. It is a way of understanding what sentences set out to achieve. So let’s say it exists. You’ll find a sentence in one of three moods:
1 Indicative (‘Mark writes books’.)
2 Imperative (‘Write that book, Mark’; ‘Look at me!’; ‘Romans, go home’; ‘Lodge your forms here’; ‘Come, my beloved, let us go forth to the field’.)
3 Subjunctive (‘If I were you, Mark, I wouldn’t write that book’;‘She lies down in the field beside me as though she were my beloved’.)
These eight sentences show you the variety you can achieve using only simple sentences.
1 The rain falls; The man rises. (Who does—intransitive verb, which has no object; the rain just falls, the man just rises)
2 Daniel leaves home; The river floods the town; Greene writes novels. (Who does what—verb is transitive this time; the action described in the verb carries on to a second part, the object) 3 Graham Greene was a fine writer; This is the place; You are the one.
(Who is who; what is what)
4 They sent me her; He gives her lunch;We present this book to the people
5 The sky is grey; She is gorgeous; I am sorry. (Who is what—where
what, this time, is a describing word, or adjective)
6 The book was read by millions; The ball was returned; The plane was
recovered.(What is done—passive voice)
7 Why is Graham Greene a fine writer? Why did he never win a Nobel Prize? When did the rain stop falling? Whom does this book belong to? Which of these animals belongs to Lyle? How long has Jim lived in the valley? (Question)
8 See the child; Call me Ishmael; Ask not what your country can do for
you; Vote early and vote often. (Imperative mood)
Every sentence, no matter how long or short, how simple or convo- luted, must do the basics soundly. No matter what else it may attempt, a sentence must tell us plainly and elegantly who does what (and the variations on that theme this list of examples illustrates), so that no one is in the dark. If it does that well, we have a conversa- tion on our hands—we have a walk in the woods. If it trips up, if it makes heavy weather of this short simple story, it’s over. Forget the woods; forget the walk. It will have nothing much to say; we will have nothing much to learn.
The essence of good style is sound syntax.The most brilliant sentences, no matter how long or convoluted, are strung with sturdy syntax.
So concentrate, before you do anything else in a sentence, on these three elements: the agent of the action; the action; the recip- ient, if any, of the action. Get them straight; leave no confusion about what word or phrase in your sentence plays each of those roles. And be brief about it.
Where you can, choose for those key parts of every sentence words short and clear and vivid. Wherever it’s possible, make the who—the agent of action—somebody, rather than some kind of abstraction or process, some great cluster of words.That is, as often as you can, make your subject (and your object too) human or animate entities (such as ‘I’,‘we’,‘she and I’,‘the writer’,‘President
Lincoln’, ‘General de Gaulle’). And make your verbs recognisable actions like ‘change’, ‘leave’, ‘regulate’, ‘make’, ‘diminish’, rather than the verb ‘to be’ or something effete like ‘seems’, ‘facilitates’, ‘tends’, ‘suggests’, ‘indicates’, ‘implements’ and so on.
Why? Because every reader wants a (short) story—he wants something named and something said about it—and this is how stories go best.What we understand fastest is a sentence that describes some people doing things.What a good sentence needs is some action, some human beings, and some particular things being affected or performed or whatever. Put in some beat and colour and texture and poetry, by all means, if they belong; qualify what you’re saying. Beat around those kinds of bush. But if, instead of people, the sentence depicts abstrac- tions and processes, then it will also, very likely, have nothing much by way of a verb about it, and nothing will be happening and no one will be doing anything at all, and the poor reader will be left to conjure an image of what the hell is really going on out there beneath the sentence’s cloudy abstractions, all on her own.
Let me show you what I mean.
1 Recent changes in the insurance industry, whereby insurers are refusing to cover schools for injuries to students on excursions beyond the school grounds or on school grounds outside normal hours, except where specific insurance has been taken out to that effect, make it incumbent upon us to curtail such activities until a review of our insurances is completed.
Here, all the words from the start to ‘effect’ constitute the subject—the who. ‘Make’ is your verb—the does. And ‘it’, believe it or not, is your object—what.
How much clearer is this?
The school has cancelled all excursions and events such as sports practice, carnivals and concerts until it has determined whether its insurance covers staff, students and visitors for any harm that may come to them on such occasions. Recent cases give us cause for concern about this, and we’re not prepared to take any risks.
If this is any better, it’s because it puts ‘school’ in the role of subject and makes the verb ‘has cancelled’, and makes the phrase ‘all excursions and events such as …’ its object. Making the sentence this way, and putting other matters into other sentences similarly made, makes meaning faster and more clearly. Notice, too, how it is more like speech.
2 Not so good:
It is a requirement of the relevant legislation that BAS documentation be lodged by all companies by 30 June each year.
Better:
Every business must lodge its BAS by 30 June each year’ or ‘The law requires every business to lodge its BAS by 30 June each year.