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Branching Out Can Leave Verbs Out on a Limb

By Roy Peter Clark

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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:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, whose rise to political power as a fierce enforcer of ethics in public life was undone by revelations of his own involvement with prostitutes, resigned on Wednesday, becoming the first New York governor to leave office amid scandal in nearly a century.

And then this accompanying story:

Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, a state legislator for 22 years and the heir to a Harlem political dynasty, will be sworn in as New York's 55th governor, making him the state's first black chief executive.

If you are counting, the writers put 24 words between subject and verb in the first sentence and 14 words in the second. A simple diagram for both sentences might look something like this:

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.

The second sentence in that paragraph ("Having risen") would look like this:

-----------------------------------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:

A bill that would exclude tax income from the assessed value of new homes from the state educations funding formula could mean a loss of revenue for Clark County schools.

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:

Clark County schools will get less money from the state if the legislature passes a bill designed to lower property taxes.

It ain't no beauty, but it replaces a big mess of 30 words with a little mess of 21 words. Any time I can derive greater meaning from fewer words, I do.

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.

As in: "Hurricane Elene, rotating ominously in the Gulf of Mexico for two days, suddenly and unexpectedly, and to the delight of Floridians, turned left."

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:

The world can be made beautiful again by viewing it as a battlefield. When we have defined and isolated the evil things, the colours come back into everything else. When evil things have become evil, good things, in a blazing apocalypse, become good. There are some men who are dreary because they do not believe in God; but there are many others who are dreary because they do not believe in the devil.

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:

The ghost, for all of its Christian credentials, imposes upon Hamlet a mission that is totally incompatible with the Christian moral system. And Hamlet, though he does entertain severe doubts about the nature of the ghost, wondering whether it is a "spirit of health or goblin damned," never once explicitly questions the mission of revenge, though revenge is abhorrent to Christian thought. Any suggestion that he is repelled by the task on moral grounds can only be inferred from his several vague remarks about conscience and scruples as causes of his delay.

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 tornado ripped through St. Petersburg Thursday, tearing roofs off houses, shattering windows in downtown skyscrapers, snapping power lines and tree limbs, and sending children and teachers scurrying for cover from an elementary school playground.

This sentence could go on and on effectively, all because the meaning comes early ("A tornado ripped") while all other elements branch to the right.

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.

When this happens, when that happens, when the other thing happens, then off we go to Canterbury.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on August 14, 2008 (boomark / email).