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  This sentence rocks. It's concise. It's powerful. It knows what it wants to say, and it says it in clear, bold terms.

  But upon quickly or slowly reading a sentence such as this, in which the writer quite clearly is wanting to make a point regarding various issues pertaining to general written communication, it suddenly becomes more than clear that this is a sentence whose aspirations of rocking have been handily eclipsed in favor of the act of sucking.

  We all know bad writing when we see it. Yet recognizing it and understanding it are two very different things. It seems we never take the time to sit down and ask ourselves what exactly makes a sentence like the one in the previous paragraph so terrible. Yes, it's too long. Yes, it's stuffy. But those issues alone don't capture the breadth and depth of its lameness. The problems with this sentence run much deeper. Understanding the issues that plague it—that plague all our writing—requires thought, time, a grounding in grammar, and the energy to stop and look at the writer's guiding question: what am I really trying to say?

  On the rare occasions when we endeavor to understand the difference between good and bad sentences, we can find ourselves lost. Surely good sentences have something to do with all that grammar stuff we were supposed to learn in school—the stuff that somehow escaped us and, as a result, has caused us great shame ever since. We remember a teacher saying something about dangling participles. We have vague memories of someone lecturing about active versus passive voice. We know all this business has something to do with subjects and modifiers. But we don't remember the details. So instead of helping us, these terms taunt us. They linger in the back of our minds, making us feel as if good writing is completely beyond our grasp. So we go on writing badly.

  We write bad memos, bad term papers, bad novels, bad cover letters, bad query letters, bad advertising copy, bad e-mails, bad book proposals, bad blog entries, bad grant proposals, and bad technical manuals. We crumble under the weight of our own information, at a loss to convey it to the reader in a way that makes sense. We have so much to say. On many levels, we know we're good writers. Maybe even really good. Yet we just can't form our good information into readable, engaging, comprehensible sentences.

  Ironically, most of us are perfectly adept at putting our thoughts and experiences into words—as long as those words ate coming out of our mouths and not through our keyboards or pens. No one ever shows up at the office on Monday morning and says of Saturday night's Green Day concert, "Before considering whether to madly rush the stage, charging in the direction of an area rapidly transforming itself and its denizens into what could only be described as a rollicking mosh pit, I purchased and thirstily consumed a cola beverage."

  No, it's the act of putting it on paper—forming ideas into sentences—that trips us up. That's true partly because some of us are conditioned to fear writing. Unlike when we speak, we usually spend time thinking about what we want to say before we write, so we have more time to worry about it and thus overcomplicate it. What's more, when we write we often have in our heads more information than we can use, and we don't know what to leave out.

  But perhaps the biggest reason that our sentences go bad is that, when we sit down to write, someone is missing. Unlike those bull sessions around the watercooler in which we so adeptly tell stories of concerts and cola consumption, when we write we're all alone. The rapt co-workers looking us in the eye and hanging on every word are nowhere to be found. In their place is a shadow of a someone we may have never met and we'd just as soon not think about—someone called the Reader.

  Thy Reader, Thy God

  If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth—something a lot of writers would rather deny: The Reader is king. You are his servant. You serve the Reader information. You serve the Reader entertainment. You serve the Reader details of your company's recent merger or details of your experiences in drug rehab. In each case, as a writer you're working for the man (or the woman). Only by knowing your place can you do your job well. You have a boss—a fickle, exacting, surprisingly slick one—and you can't ignore him just because he isn't physically reading over your shoulder. Good writing hangs in the balance.

  Here's another way to think of this: Your writing is not about you. It's about the Reader. Even when it's quite literally about you—in memoirs, personal essays, first-person accounts—it's not really about you.

  Ever read a memoir that sounded too self-pitying? Ever read an op-ed that sounded too preachy or self-important? Ever read a memo that sounded smothered in jargon or unnecessary details? Ever read a blog entry that talked about people you've never met as if you'd known them all your life? Those things happened because the writer forgot her place. She forgot that she was working for you and not the other way around. She was unwittingly attempting to get you to work for her. She was trying to get your pity or evoke your shock for her own purposes. She was trying to tell you what to think instead of giving you information from which you could draw your own conclusions. She was focused on the details of her own situation without asking herself which details were relevant to yours.

  Readers don't read memoirs because Frank McCourt needs pity or because Jeannette Walls needs you to know that her parents were unstable or because Mary Karr wants to get some stuff off her chest. In each of these memoirists' amazing stories, the Reader finds not just entertainment but themes that touch on his own life—themes of hope, perseverance, suffering, and the power to overcome.

  When you forget the Reader, you get what I call writer-serving writing. It exists at every level of writing expertise. I've gagged on it when reading personal essays and caught whiffs of it in award-winning books and articles. I've been horrified to notice it in my own writing. Writer-serving writing is perfectly appropriate in diaries and journals—but any writing that's meant to be seen by a Reader must serve the Reader. If you like, we can make an exception for diary-like blogs in which the Reader is like a voyeur. But that's the exception. This is the rule: whether you're Christian, Jew, Muslim, or a disciple of the church of Penn Jillette, when you sit down to write, the Reader is thy god.

  True, you can't know everything the Reader wants. You can't serve all the Readers all the time. And you shouldn't try. But there is one thing all Readers want: clear, concise, comprehensible sentences that mean something to them.

  Oh, Yes, There Will Be Grammar

  This is where grammar comes in. This is where word choice comes in. This is where questions about clarity come in. This is where I come in.

  In this book, I hope to share some information I believe can be very helpful to you, my Reader, about the art of sentence writing. I arrived at this information not as a teacher of writing or a critic of great literature. I arrived at it as a student of grammar.

  For years I've been writing a column about grammar and style, which in turn spawned two books on the subject and more of the professional copyediting work I had already been doing for years. And in this journey, I stumbled across a truth that no one had told me before. Grammar isn't just a list of pedantic prohibitions. Nor is it just an academic pursuit of labeling parts of speech and analyzing how they work together. Grammar is actually useful. It really can help your writing, as you will see in this book.

  Sentenced to Life

  Grammar isn't the only key to good sentence writing, of course. Word choice, common sense, passion, information—all these elements and more are essential.

  Yet all great writing has one thing in common. It starts with a sentence. The sentence is a microcosm of any written work, and understanding it means understanding writing itself—how to structure ideas, how to emphasize what's important, how to make practical use of gra
mmar, how to cut the bull, and, above all, how to serve the almighty Reader.

  If I live up to my goal of serving you well, that's what you'll learn here.

  Tor years I made my living schlepping city council stories for a small community newspaper. Perhaps a third of the articles I wrote could have begun with an identical opener: "On Tuesday, the city council voted to . . ." But they didn't. The reason: the almighty Reader.

  In any type of writing, be it journalism, fiction, or advertising copy, the almighty Reader is the boss. But there's no better field for understanding this than community news. When I worked in that field, the Reader was always in my face. He wasn't like the silent, invisible, fickle master consuming literary fiction, corporate earnings reports, or sales brochures. The community news Reader wrote to me. He called me. And, because I was working in a much smaller arena than that of big-city reporters, he knew me. The Reader considered me part of the community, even though I lived fifty miles away, and he expected me to serve the town's best interests while answering to him directly.

  Yes, this got annoying at times. Especially when he failed to realize that he didn't get to assign me stories: "I want you to do an expose on how the president of my condo association refuses to put up 'Keep Off the Grass' signs." In community news, the Reader will not be ignored.

  Now that I no longer wake up in the middle of the night screaming, "I will not write a front-page article about your dog!" I realize this experience is a good thing. It helped me understand how to form sentences that serve the Reader.

  Consider this story lead:

  The city council on Tuesday voted on a budget that contains no funds for fixing Main Street potholes.

  Informative, relevant, clear, true. But could the writer do a better job of remembering her boss, the Reader? Absolutely. A sentence like the one just stated is written from a writer's perspective. The writer's job consisted of going to a meeting, documenting a vote, and perhaps listening to some discussion of one important element of that vote—pothole repair. So that's what got emphasized in the sentence.

  But this approach downplays the facts that are most pertinent to the Reader. Look at the main subject and action of the sentence: The city council voted. The Reader already knows that the council voted. The council is always voting. It votes on thirty, forty, fifty things a month—most of which are total yawners. The Reader doesn't really care that the council voted. He cares about what it all means to him.

  These are the questions that a skilled newswriter asks: "How will this affect the Reader? Why should he care?" Such questions lead to an opener like this:

  The bumpy ride on Main Street isn't going to get smoother anytime soon.

  Although this example works well, we've all seen this go too far. Used dishonorably, this approach can come off as pandering or even downright sleazy. Nonprint media come to mind: "Something in your kitchen wants to kill your children! Details at eleven."

  But if you stop and think about such sleazy tactics, you see that this lead really has the same problem as the snoozer lead: It's writer-serving writing as opposed to Reader-serving or Viewer-serving writing. It's deliberate manipulation, and Viewers can smell it a mile away. It works—but the best writing doesn't stoop to this level.

  To strike a balance between snoozer "the city council voted" sentences and sleazy "there's a killer in your kitchen" sentences, all you have to do is remember the Reader. Ask, "What's important to my Reader?" not just, "What will get his attention?"

  The answer—be it about the bumpy ride on Main Street or the bottom line on a tax bill—then becomes the main point of your sentence, and your sentence can become a thing of real value.

  Of course, it's not always that simple. Wanting to accommodate your Reader and actually pulling it off are two different things. Ironically, sometimes the very act of trying to explain things to the Reader creates problems. Consider this sentence, written by a professional writer, which was in a piece I copyedited. I've disguised it slightly to save the writer embarrassment:

  While the boat show is predictably crowded over the weekends, holding the event over Thanksgiving for the second

  consecutive year positively impacts the flow of attendees over the closing weekend, which is traditionally the busiest.

  Any copy editor who works with novice writers sees stuff like this all the time. This sentence, while not the worst ever, contains a number of problems that are all rooted in the writer's misguided attempts to explain stuff to the Reader. Let's look at it piece by piece:

  While the boat show

  While is a subordinating conjunction, which we'll talk about in chapter 2. There's nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a subordinating conjunction in general or with while in particular. But such an opening can, in unskilled hands, pave the way for a problematic sentence. At the very least, it tells the Reader, "Stay put. It could be a while before I get to the point."

  is predictably crowded

  Really? It's predictably crowded? We can see what the writer meant: the show is so consistently crowded on the weekends that you could predict it. But does predictably crowded really capture this? The adverb predictably comes right before the adjective crowded, as if it's modifying crowded, as if it means that predictably is a way—a manner—of being crowded. As you'll see in chapter 7, adverbs are flexible. They're so flexible, in fact, that they can modify whole sentences. You could argue, then, that this part of our sentence is okay. But is it good? No.

  over the weekends

  Nothing wrong with that—yet. But two more over phrases are about to appear in this sentence, so over the weekends sets up an annoying redundancy. We'll look at this type of problem more in chapter 9 when we discuss prepositional phrases.

  holding the event over Thanksgiving for the second consecutive year positively impacts the flow of attendees

  Most of the choices reflected in this clause might be fine in certain cases. But the overall effect stinks. For starters, this is the main clause of our sentence. That means it contains our main subject and our main verb. (We'll look at clause structure in chapter 3.) But both are downright anemic. Holding—the subject of our lengthy, winding sentence—is a form of a word that usually connotes action: I hold, you hold, he holds. But here it's made into something called a gerund, which is basically a noun. We'll talk more about actions made into nouns in chapter 13. The usage is grammatical, but is it wise to make this the main subject? Do you really want the single most important actor in your whole sentence to be the abstract concept of holding?

  Here's a more troubling part of that excerpt:

  for the second consecutive year

  The way this phrase modifies holding makes the sentence illogical. Let me pare down the sentence to show you what I mean: Holding the event for the second consecutive year positively impacts the flow. See how for the second consecutive year attaches itself to holding. We're no longer talking about just holding. We're talking specifically about the second time you do it. So our sentence says that the benefits of holding the boat show over Thanksgiving weekend apply only the second year. In years three, four, and five, holding it over Thanksgiving weekend has no effect. Only holding it for the second consecutive year impacts the flow. That's just wrong.

  positively impacts the flow of attendees

  Positively impacts sounds like something in a corporate earnings report, and flow of attendees sounds like something in a fire safety manual. Each of these phrases squanders an opportunity to connect with the Reader in a more meaningful and tangible way. The Reader knows all about long ticket lines, bottlenecked foot traffic, and crowds in stadiums. He has visual and emotional associations with the concept of crowd control. There are so many ways to make the concept more meaningful than positively impacts the flow of attendees.

  Impacts, all by itself, is a problem. It couldn't be vaguer. Here it's used to mean that something improves or reduces or ameliorates crowding. But impacts contains less information than any of these alternatives. Also, w
hy use a word that could mean something negative or positive when you're clearly talking about something positive? (We'll discuss choosing specific words in chapter 6.) Making matters worse, some people argue that impact isn't really a verb. They're wrong. But since you'll never get a chance to sit down and explain that to them, you have to decide whether it's worth irking them. Oh, and don't miss that second over phrase,

  over Thanksgiving

  because here comes our third over phrase:

  over the closing weekend

  So we now have in one sentence over the weekends, over Thanksgiving, and over the closing weekend. Personally, I'm amazed that the writer did such a good job of associating each time element with a specific action. Usually when you see this many time elements in a sentence you end up with a nonsensical statement like He took a three-year hiatus in 1992 or over the weekend he got lost over the course of three hours. The three over phrases in one sentence tell us that the writer was simply cramming in too much information. Then, as if that weren't enough, one last thought gets tacked on:

  which is traditionally the busiest.

  This is called a relative clause (which we'll discuss in chapter 8). Relative clauses can be great for squeezing in more information— when the information fits. But the usage here is like squeezing Louie Anderson into Ryan Seacrest's jogging shorts. Not pretty.

  Just look at all the distinct pieces of information we have in this sentence:

  The boat show is crowded on the weekends.

  This crowding is predictable.

  The event is being held [or can be held] over Thanksgiving.

  The event was held over Thanksgiving last year.

  Holding it over Thanksgiving means crowds are better spread

  out over the duration of the show.

  This improves crowding on the closing weekend.

  The closing weekend is traditionally the busiest.

  We can understand why the writer didn't want to spend too much time on each of those points. But his attempt to slip them in gracefully failed because he was overambitious. He crammed in too much. The best thing you can do in a situation like this is to first consider whether any information can go (I, for one, can do without that predictably business) and to then break up what's left into smaller sentences. The possibilities are endless: