Sentences

Tenses

Prepositions

Syntax Strategies

Finding the Right Word

Word Agreement

Paragraphs

Contradictions

The Particular and the General

There is noteworthy stigma linked to written sentence fragments and the inappropriate use of verb tenses. "They wasn't," or "She am," used unwittingly, is a signal to the powerful of an outsider's voice. While some forms of English might not disapprove, it remains that a multi-lingual approach recognizes the importance of awareness of the terrain.

Most writing manuals here turn to an extensive lesson on parts of speech and follow that up with charts of sentence diagrams.

Let us instead try some exercises.

Is: "Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!," (Thoreau) a sentence?

No. "Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!," is a series of sentence fragments--by a fellow who could get away with it.

How about: "I think, therefore I am,"? (Descartes)

Yes. Descartes used a subject and a verb, twice actually.

Complete sentences have subjects ("I") and verbs ("think").

You probably knew that. But your speech doesn't reflect it. A lot of speech is composed of sentence fragments.

"Eat yet?"

"Yup. Ate pizza. Only thing to eat in State College."

When you were told to listen for potential errors in your writing, you may have been led to believe that spoken and written symbols are equivalent. Clearly, they are not--and many errors stem from expecting to hear something that is silently written.

Run-on sentences and sentence fragments, common in speech, are outlawed in formal writing. Research demonstrates that these two errors are both common and highly penalized. (Noguchi)

A run-on sentence is made up of two or more sentences held together without punctuation.
 

Although General Custer thought he had a good match of data and equipment when he arrived at the Little Big Horn he found that he was sadly mistaken and the mismatch of theory and practice cost him dearly.

Although General Custer though he had a good match of data and equipment when he arrived at the Little Big Horn, he found he was sadly mistaken. The mismatch of theory and practice cost him dearly.

The easiest way to treat a fragment is to attach it to the idea that generated it. For most people, the problem is not how to carry out that operation; it is how to recognize the amputated fragment.

Try to apply a slightly different visual approach to decoding; perhaps somewhat like watching body language as you listen. That means a visual check for punctuation, the completion of a sentence, tense, voice, and number agreement--a check that goes beyond spell-checking.

So, you need a noun and a verb; unless you are Thoreauvian.

The subject and verb must exist in the same time frame.
 

There are four tenses truly worth recommending:
 

1) Present tense. In simple form, present tense expresses current action: I correct papers. They rebel.

To show continuing current action: I am grovelling.

2) Past tense: I corrected papers. They rebelled.

3) Future tense: I shall give exams. They should attack soon.

4) Perfect tenses: Here things become somewhat imperfect. There are present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect tenses.

Present perfect: something was done before now.
 

I have given the rebels "A's."
Past perfect: something was completed before a time certain.
 
I had given the "A's" before their deadline.
Future perfect: a future act in relation to a time certain.
 
The "A's" I will have given them should evaporate at midnight.

Prepositions show a relationship between a noun or a pronoun and some other word in a sentence. Prepositions are often short, single words: at, by, in, up, down, out, around, above, through, behind, in front of. Never end a sentence with a preposition. Fortunately, the language police have limited enforcement powers. But a middle-class native speaker's ears will frequently grate at the sight or sound of sentences concluding with prepositions.

Again, the issue here is sound and sight. Consider:
 

Examples like this are hard to think up.

Where is it at?

That is the sister I am so fond of.

Once you understand the basics of writing and know what you want to say, you have to figure out how to put it all together. A good rule of thumb is to vary your sentence structures. A paper full of long complex sentences is difficult to get through. Works that repeat the same simples structures over and over get repetitious and lose the reader's attention.

To keep your reader interested, make your writing active. Try to avoid the passive voice: The pie was eaten by mother. Instead change to: Mother ate the pie. The latter sentence is much more direct.
 

Facts are stubborn things, simultaneously unconditional (the water is 38 degrees) and changing (temperature is always relative and transforming). Choosing signs to represent ideas which in turn represent things external to us is a difficult process. One challenge that is often encountered is that we seek to be concrete and flexible at the same time.

The key suggestion is: Find a way to write things, not words. You can plumb for words on the computer with the thesaurus and the dictionary, but spell-checks and the limited thesaurus on Word-Perfect and Micro-soft Word often do not have the depth you need.

Use the dictionary. The Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary is the accepted standard cited in the APA Style Manual. It is helpful in spelling and may give you clues for a further search. The Doubleday Rogets Thesaurus in Dictionary Form is a useful aid. The Oxford English Dictionary is a vital source in determining word derivations.

Clarity, if that is your goal, is found in simplicity and conciseness. Your reader should not have to puzzle over your sentences like a crossword. But the slash and burn technique advised in many manuals, an approach urging the elimination of all but the most sparse word necessities, misses the possibilities of ambiguity in life.

Both the renowned educator, Henry Giroux (Border Crossings), and the author of popular fiction, Toni Morrison (Jazz), create scenes thick with ambivalence, a marvelous symmetry of tentativeness and certainty. Besides, "Four-score and seven years ago," is hardly a minimalist approach.

Still, if complaints from professors are a reliable indicator, it is true that wordiness persists as a major problem in student writing. If you feel ambivalence, the advice here is to express it vividly and cut pitilessly.
 

If finding just the right word is a substantive problem, the agreement of several words is a formal problem. This applies especially to pronouns meeting verbs, and subjects balancing with verbs. Specifically:
 

Verbs agree with subjects.
 
The students were marching against date rape.
Compound subjects take plural verbs.
 
The students and teachers were requesting smaller classes.
When subjects are linked by neither-nor, either-or, not- only-but-also, the verb agrees with the nearest subject.
 
Neither the teachers nor the student is here.
If the subject is a title, a book name, a quote, or a group of words focused on a single idea, the verb is singular.
 
The Souls of Black Folk is one of the key books of this century.
A pronoun must agree with the words to which it refers in number, person and gender.
 
Bill Haywood fought for his rights--and yours.

Ten students reported their assignments were eaten by a dog.

Sojourner Truth could always find her way with the stars.

Paragraphs are determined by transitions in thought and the visual impact of print. On the one hand, extremely long paragraphs are dizzying; on the other hand, short paragraphs look choppy. Moreover, a paragraph often signals a new step in the development of meaning.

Most paragraphs are helped by a topic sentence which organizes the structure of the idea beneath the print. This assists the reader--and you.

To write a good paragraph is to come to understand the basics of writing a good paper. You must sift your ideas, pick a central thought that drives your work, ascertain the contradictions underlying the position, work them through, and carry on in reasonably logical order.

Note the way David Bradley develops his point in this paragraph from The Chaneysville Incident:
 
 

The key to the understanding of any society lies in the observation and analysis of the insignificant and the mundane. For one of the primary functions of societal institutions is to conceal the basic nature of the society, so that the individuals that make up the power structure can pursue the business of consolidating and increasing their power untroubled by the minor carpings of a dissatisfied peasantry. Societal institutions act as fig leaves for each other's nakedness--the Church justifies the actions of the State, the State the teachings of the School, the School the principles of the Economy, the Economy the pronouncements of the Church. Truly efficient societies conceal the true nature of the operations, motivations, and goals of all but the most minor institutions, some even managing to control the appearances of the local parish, courthouse, board of education, and chamber of commerce. But even the most efficient society loses control at some point; no society, for example, is so efficient that it can disguise the nature of its sanitary facilities. And so, when seeking to understand the culture or the history of a people, do not look at the precepts of the religion, the form of the government, the curricula of the schools, or the operations of businesses; flush the johns.

All things are composed of contradictions; a struggle and unity of opposites.

In mathematics: plus and minus, multiply and divide
In electronics: positive and negative
In anatomy: the thumb and forefinger
In education: nature and nurture
In mechanics: for every action there is a reaction
In music: sound/silence, major/minor keys
In art: darkness and light
In geography: north/south, east/west

All unity is temporary; struggle is permanent. This is the primary aspect of any contradiction. Imbalance outweighs symmetry. Contradictions are represented by polarities woven together like the yin and yang symbol in martial arts studios.

If struggle is permanent, our world is thus composed of motion: the contradiction of being there and moving along; nearly simultaneously. You cannot stand in the same stream twice.

Good writing recognizes opposition and carefully studies the particularities of the spaces between the poles. It is in the interceding details that we often find the greatest meaning. Write things, not words. Good writing requires and creates reasoned thought. It is the exploration of the gray areas.

In coming to understand a thing, our perception moves from its appearance to its essence--usually from the general to the specific and back again. Our theories rise, first, out of our practice. Our comprehension develops from the general to the specific, passing quickly from one to the other. If you wish to know an apple, you must seek to change it, perhaps by biting into it and tasting it. Repetition of this process is often key to learning--as many teachers know. Again, write things, not words.

Here are four examples from literature that combine these thoughts.
 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything going before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (Dickens, 1).

From a less formally literary, but no less vivid, angle:
 

Old Spencer started nodding again. He also started picking his nose. He made out like he was only pinching it, but he really was getting the old thumb right in there. I guess he thought it was all right to do because it was only me that was in the room. I didn't care, except that it's pretty disgusting to watch somebody pick their nose.

Then he said, "I had the privilege of meeting your mother and dad when they had a little chat with Dr. Thurmer some weeks ago. They're grand people."

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's phony. I could puke every time I hear it. (Salinger, 12).

Now watch Richard Wright work contradictory tensions and the interstices of choices through his character Bigger Thomas in Native Son.
 

He was sick of his life at home. Day in and day out there was nothing but shouts and bickering. But what could he do? Each time he asked himself that question his mind hit a blank wall and he stopped thinking. Across the street directly in front of him, he saw a truck pull to a stop at the curb and two white men got out with pails and brushes. Yes, he could take the job at Dalton's and be miserable, or he could refuse it and starve. It maddened him that he did not have a wider choice of action. Well, he could not stand there all day like this. What was he to do with himself? He tried to decide if he wanted to buy a ten-cent magazine, or go to a movie, or to go to the poolroom and talk with the gang, or just loaf around. With his hands deep in his pockets, another cigarette slanting across his chin, he brooded and watched the men at work across the street. They were posting a huge colored poster to a sign-board. The poster showed a white face. ( Wright, 16)

The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing state of affairs but so as to make a better future for humanity. But there is the greatest difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purposes. (Dewey, 95)

Human perception moves from the exterior of a thing to the interior. Profound thinking grasps that the essence of a thing is internal, but that the exterior can be important. Consider the folk saying, "Beauty is but skin deep."

In addition, our understanding moves from a general grasp of a thing to its particularities, and we then correct our initial generalization and recreate it. Most students go to a new class with general expectations, find their expectations met with certain new realities, and reform their opinions.

Listen to Truman Capote describe the specific details of a young Marlon Brando in one of his first roles:
 

...I found the auditorium deserted and a brawny young man stretched out atop a table on the stage under the gloomy glare of work lights, solidly asleep. Because he was wearing a white T-shirt and denim trousers, because of his squat gymnasium physique--the weight lifter's, the Charles Atlas chest (though an opened "Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud was resting on it)--I took him for a stage hand. Or I did until I looked closely at his face. It was if a stranger's head had been attached to the brawny body, as in certain counterfeit photographs. For this face was so very untough, super-imposing, as it did, an almost angelic refinement and gentleness upon hard-jawed good looks, taut skin, a broad, high forehead, wide-apart eyes, an aquiline nose, full lips with a relaxed sensual expression. Not the least suggestion of William's unpoetic Kowalski. (Capote p. 67)

 
 
To Chapter 4
 

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