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  The boat show gets crowded on the weekends. So this year, for the second time, it will conclude over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. This spreads out the number of visitors and relieves crowding during the closing weekend, which is traditionally the busiest.

  or

  Saturdays and Sundays usually mean huge crowds at the boat show. The closing weekend gets especially jammed. But last year the producers had an idea: why not make the last weekend of the event the four-day Thanksgiving weekend? The strategy was so successful at reducing overcrowding that they're doing it again this year.

  I could go on. But you get the idea.

  As a writer, it's your job to organize information, to prioritize it with the Reader in mind, to chop and add as you see fit. But only by fully understanding the mechanics of the sentence can you do so in the best possible way.

  Say, here's a god-awful sentence:

  After walking into the office, retrieving the gun from his desk drawer, shooting his business partner in the face, and quickly beginning to understand that he needed to escape immediately, John realized he was tired.

  If you don't see right away what's so terrible about that sentence, read it again, but don't focus on the grammar or the adverbs or even the length. Focus on the meaning. What's the main point? A number of things are happening in this sentence: a man walks into an office, he gets a gun, he shoots his business partner in the face, and he gets that panicky get-me-out-of-here impulse. All great information. But what is the central point of the sentence? What is its main clause, the bit of information presumably so exciting, so pivotal that every other action in this sentence is mere accessory to it? It's John realized he was tired.

  We'll talk about clauses in chapter 3. Subsequent chapters will look at some of the other structural issues in this passage. But I wrote this deliberately bad sentence to illustrate an issue we should cover right away—one of the least known but perhaps most helpful concepts for writing good sentences: subordinating conjunctions.

  The job of a subordinating conjunction is (drum roll, please) to subordinate. It relegates a clause to a lower grammatical status in the sentence. Subordination is not a bad thing. On the contrary, subordination through the use of conjunctions like after is a crucial and interesting dynamic of the language. But when you don't fully understand the power of subordinating conjunctions, they can suck the life out of your writing faster than you can say "rejection letter." The problem they can create is sometimes called upside-down subordination. It's a simple concept. It means that a sentence inadvertently takes some less interesting piece of information like John was tired and treats it as though it were more notable than John shot his business partner in the face. Occasionally, that might be exactly what the writer intended. But often it's accidental and undermines the sentence.

  I first noticed this subordination problem when I started hanging out at writers' Internet message boards. On these sites, aspiring authors often post their query letters—the pitches that authors write to literary agents to try to persuade them to read their manuscripts. The query writers ask others to critique the letters. Many of the letters contain rambling sentences, incoherent sentences, sentences that don't jibe with previous sentences, danglers, comma splices—you name it. But the most troubling mistake occurs when a writer subordinates the interesting action. That is, she relegates the exciting stuff to a lower grammatical status.

  Query letters are prone to subordination problems. In a query, an author must synopsize and sell her own book. It is a task that can trip up even the most skilled writer. After all, if an author has just spent a year or two steeped in every minuscule detail of the characters she made up from scratch, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. She's spent countless hours laboring over the minutiae of her own story, so she can't bring herself to omit the details that just aren't important enough to go in a query. Instead, the writer's solution is to cram in as many exciting details as possible. All too often, the result is a sentence like the one at the beginning of this chapter.

  To understand what's wrong with such sentences and to learn to write better ones, you need to take a moment to learn about conjunctions.

  Conjunctions, as those of you of a certain age will remember from Schoolhouse Rock, are for "hooking up words and phrases and clauses." They're little words like and, if, but, so, and because. We use them every day with no problem. We seldom stop to think about them.

  Conjunctions come in different varieties. The best-known ones— the conjunctions highlighted by Schoolhouse Rock—are the coordinators, which are distinct from the subordinators. Coordinators are a small group that includes and, or, and but. Their job is to link units of equal grammatical status:

  I eat oranges and I eat apples.

  Here, the coordinator and is linking clauses that could stand on their own as sentences: I eat oranges. I eat apples. These units are equals. Neither is dependent on the other. They both have something to say, and their grammar makes clear that they're equally important. But and or can also be understood this way:

  I eat oranges but I don't eat apples.

  I eat oranges but I also eat apples.

  I eat oranges but I devour tangerines.

  I eat oranges or I eat apples.

  I eat oranges or I eat nothing at all.

  In each sentence, you have two clauses with the same grammatical weight, which shows the Reader that they carry the same importance. Obviously, coordinating conjunctions can link other things besides whole clauses: He met Sam and Mickey and Beulah. You can have pizza or spaghetti or ravioli. Still, our conjunctions are linking units of the same grammatical status. In these examples, they're all nouns.

  A lot of experts say that the best way to remember all the coordinating conjunctions is with the acronym FANBOYS, which represents for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Others say this is an oversimplification—that these words don't all work alike. But for our purposes, this acronym is useful because, by labeling these words as coordinating conjunctions, we can now set them all aside and begin talking about subordinating conjunctions.

  Subordinating conjunctions are a much larger set. They include after, although, as, because, before, if, since, than, though, unless, until, when, and while.

  A lot of common phrases serve as subordinating conjunctions as well. They include as long as, as though, even if, even though, in order that, and whether or not.

  These subordinators all have one thing in common: They subordinate. They relegate information to less critical status. They tell the Reader, "This is just minor info we have to get out of the way before we get to the really big news" or "We're tacking this on as an afterthought to really big news."

  Consider this sentence:

  Before robbing a bank, Mike was an accountant.

  Read it aloud. Notice how, instinctively, your voice wants to rush through all the stuff before the comma, then emphasize the stuff after the comma? That's because our subordinating conjunction, before, tells you that what follows is not the main point. The main point will come later, perhaps after a deep breath or a pause.

  There's nothing wrong with putting the main point last. A main clause can come at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence. But it's usually a bad idea to beat down that information by subordinating it.

  Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would agree that robbing a bank is more interesting than working as an accountant. There may be contexts in which this is not true, like in a study examining the long-term psychological effects of accounting work. But usually bank robbery is more notable to Readers than adding up columns of numbers.

  In Before robbing a bank, Mike was an accountant, we are snuffing the action out of our sentence. We've made the main point Mike was an accountant.

  But in After working for twenty-five years as an accountant, Mike robbed a bank, the main action is robbing. Chances are that's a better choice.

  By saying that subordinators relegate information to a lower status, I don't just mean by nua
nce or tone. It's not just because you read these phrases in a rushed voice. It's more concrete than that. Subordinating conjunctions relegate clauses to lower grammatical status. Which brings us to my favorite grammar magic trick. Look at this sentence:

  Bob likes mustard.

  It's a complete sentence—subject, verb, and all. So can you render this complete sentence an incomplete sentence not by taking any words away but by adding a word? Yep. If that word is a subordinating conjunction:

  Because Bob likes mustard . . .

  If Bob likes mustard . . .

  Although Bob likes mustard . . .

  As Bob likes mustard . . .

  When Bob likes mustard . . .

  Unless Bob likes mustard . . .

  Ta-da! Our once complete sentence is now less than complete through a process of addition. More is less. Pretty neat, huh? (Don't feel bad if you don't find that as thrilling as I do.) Subordinating conjunctions relegate clauses to a lower grammatical status.

  Subordination means that what was a whole sentence is whole no more. It's a mere subordinate clause. This is why subordinate clauses are often called dependent clauses: they depend on another clause to make the sentence complete.

  Your Reader instinctively knows that a subordinate clause is less important than the main clause that's sure to come up somewhere in your sentence:

  The company resumed regular operations after its president failed to acquire a competing firm.

  We have two actions in this sentence: a resuming of operations and a failed attempt to acquire a company. One is a big event. The other is a return to business as usual.

  Remember that little rant about thy Reader, thy god? That's your guiding light here: what does your Reader most want to know?

  There are times when the structure just presented is the best choice. For example, if you already mentioned in a previous sentence the failed acquisition, the example sentence would work fine. There's no need to pound the point home again. Similarly, if your Reader is a shareholder, it's possible that the resumption of regular operations is the most important thing to him. In that case you'd be wise to emphasize the business-as-usual stuff over the failed acquisition. On the other hand, if the failed acquisition is most notable to the reader, take that out of the subordinate clause:

  The company's president failed to acquire a competing firm. After the deal fell through, the company resumed regular operations.

  Again, this illustrates that subordination is not a bad thing. It's a tool. It only becomes a bad thing when you subordinate the stuff most interesting to your Reader while elevating less important information.

  Let's look at another example:

  Until Jane can slay the dragon, retrieve the jewel from its belly, and bribe the evil King Goombah, her mission of protecting her townsfolk will remain unfulfilled.

  Here, our subordinating conjunction is until. And just look at all the stuff it's subordinating: dragon slaying, open-worm surgery, bribing of regents. Pretty interesting stuff to a certain type of Reader. Now look at the main clause: her mission will remain. It has a vague subject and weak action.

  A sentence like this might be okay after you've already discussed the slaying, jewel-getting, and bribing business. But unless you've already fleshed out these details for your Reader, you're throwing a wet blanket on some interesting action.

  Once you're aware of the power of subordination, a whole world of options opens up to you:

  Jane must slay the dragon. Then she must cut the fabled jewel out of its belly and deliver it to the evil King Goombah. It's the only way she can stop the massacre of her townsfolk.

  Now that you're getting the hang of this, here's a more subtle example:

  If I'm going to give you ten million dollars, you must use it wisely.

  This is not a bad sentence. If clauses set up conditions, which can be crucial to your meaning. But because our if clause contains the most interesting stuff—a ten-million-dollar gift—it's worth considering whether we can play up that information:

  I'm going to give you ten million dollars if and only if you'll use it wisely.

  I'm going to give you ten million dollars on the condition that you use it wisely.

  I'm going to give you ten million dollars. Use it wisely.

  Here's ten million bucks. Blow it all at the roulette wheel and I'll smack you upside the head.

  Some of these alternatives might fit the bill for your Reader. Some might not. Some might remain true to the facts. Some might not. As you can see, every rewrite contains the danger that you'll lose or warp important information. For example, our third and fourth alternatives take out the if and thus remove all signs of conditional-icy. In the last example, which begins Here's ten million bucks, the speaker clearly doesn't want the listener to squander the money. But she's giving it to him either way. What's iffy now is not whether he'll get the money but whether he'll spend it in a way that gets him that smack upside the head.

  The Reader's needs should dictate which information you subordinate. If you subordinate the information about a ten-million-dollar gift, it should be a choice—a result of the power you wield over words.

  A skilled writer can use upside-down subordination as a device to make things astoundingly right-side-up. The best example I've seen is pointed out in Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. It is a passage from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried—a passage seemingly dedicated to the mundane possessions like canned peaches and pocketknives that some soldiers hauled on their backs through a jungle during wartime. In the middle of this listlike passage appears the sentence "Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Ke in mid-April." Then, after seven sentences of information like how much the soldiers' helmets weighed and the material that lined their ponchos, O'Brien tosses in, "In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then carry him across the paddy, then lift him into the chopper that took him away."

  Lavender's death is subordinated. Twice. On purpose and to great effect. The writer was grammatically downplaying a soldier's being shot dead in order to create a chilling commentary on the significance of one life in wartime and the speed with which it can end. It's a feat that wasn't lost on Prose herself. She notes O'Brien's skill at illustrating "the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause."

  Does that inspire you to master the concept of subordination and subordinating conjunctions? I hope so, because we have more work to do. Let's look at some more ways that poorly chosen subordinators can hurt your writing. For example, one subordinating conjunction that seems to sabotage a lot of fiction is as:

  A bewildered look came over Cyrus's face as the sword pierced his armor and he fell to the ground.

  There are two problems with the use of as here. First, it's subordinating the action. Someone just skewered Cyrus. Yet the writer did not see fit to make that the main clause. As with all subordination matters, there's room to debate whether this was a bad choice. I believe it was. But there's another problem with our as that's clearly worse.

  As suggests simultaneous action. You brush your teeth as you read the paper. This is one of several definitions of the word. So our sentence seems to say that Cyrus was getting stabbed, making a face, and falling all at the same moment. My knowledge of sword fights may be based on nothing more than a Brad Pitt movie, but I'm pretty sure those things would happen in sequence and not all at once.

  As you can see, upside-down subordination is not the only danger presented by subordinating conjunctions. Some carry added danger in their definitions. The quintessential example is while:

  While walking through the park is good exercise, jogging is better.

  Some people will tell you this is an out-and-out misuse of while. They say that while can refer only to a time span and can never be used to mean although. Webster's New Worl
d College Dictionary begs to differ. While can indeed be a synonym for although. But it's often a very, very bad one. If the spirit strikes you, vow to use while only by its main definition: "during or throughout the time that."

  While walking through the park seems to be setting up something that happened during that walk: While walking through the park,

  Susie saw a squirrel. But midway through our sentence it becomes clear that this is not the meaning of while that the writer intended. The writer could have saved the Reader this potential confusion simply by choosing the more accurate although:

  Although walking through the park is good exercise, jogging is better.

  Of course, not all uses of while for although are as confusing:

  While it is always a good idea to bring an umbrella, today will likely be sunny.

  If that sentence came across my desk for copyediting, I'd leave the while intact.

  Another subordinator that poses its own unique dangers is if:

  If you enjoy seafood, the restaurant offers many fresh fish selections.

  This is another example of a subordinating conjunction making mischief not through subordination but through logic. You see, the restaurant manager doesn't call you to ask if you enjoy seafood before he decides on the menu. His restaurant offers fresh fish whether you like it or not. But our sentence doesn't accurately reflect this. Our sentence says the menu offerings are contingent on your preferences. The writer meant

  For those who enjoy seafood, the restaurant offers many fresh fish selections.

  or

  If you enjoy seafood, note that the restaurant offers many fresh fish selections.

  or

  If you enjoy seafood, you'll be happy that the restaurant offers many fresh fish selections.

  In some cases, illogical uses of if are so common that they're pretty much acceptable: