Tell a story with your sentences

A story in six words.

In my last post, I explored the use of conflict to put energy into business writing.

I've just come across a fascinating idea: that individual sentences can introduce tension and tell little stories.

This comes from Constance Hale, an accomplished writer who wrote a series of instructional pieces for the New York Times on sentences. In the first piece, she writes:

For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). The subject is the person, place, thing or idea we want to express something about; the predicate expresses the action, condition or effect of that subject. Think of the predicate as a predicament — the situation the subject is in. 

I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. It features a protagonist (the subject) and some sort of drama (the predicate):The searchlight sweeps. Harvey keeps on keeping on. The drama makes us pay attention.

She draws from novels to illustrate her point:

• “They shoot the white girl first.” — Toni Morrison, Paradise
• “Elmer Gantry was drunk.” — Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry
• “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” — Ha Jin, Waiting

Let's look for examples in the business world:

• Foreign intelligence services from China, Russia, and other nations are exploiting cyber vulnerabilities to steal technology, money, and trade secrets from US corporations, threatening their reputations and undermining their competitive advantage. ~ Booz Allen Hamilton

• Does mobile commerce spell the end of traditional stores? ~ McKinsey

• As Europe continues to grapple with sovereign debt problems, austerity measures, and recession, the Eurozone is changing and will likely emerge from the ongoing crisis looking quite different from the one we know today. ~ Price Waterhouse Coopers

These are wordy, of course, but they suggest how individual sentences can introduce drama into otherwise staid writing.

Keep sentences short, stupid

Try this sentence on for size:

The paradigmatic change from the fully controllable, powerful point sources in the classical power grid to the distributed area sources of alternative energy sources – such as wind and solar – calls for new qualities in the system-wide aggregation and processing of basic data.

Yeah, me too. Now look at it edited:

Adding new sources of energy such as wind and solar to existing power grids will require better data processing to manage them. 

That example from Tim Parker of The Bloom Group illustrates one of the best ways to make your writing more powerful: keep you sentence length under control. Give the reader a chance to breathe.

"For readability," Parker says, "the optimum sentence length is somewhere in the range 15 to 25 words. But if you go to most professional firms’ sites, you’ll more likely find an average length of at least 30 words, with 50 to 75 word sentences not uncommon."

Long sentences create several problems for you, too.

• They require you as the writer to make a number of ideas work together.
• They require you to shuffle more words into some logical order.

So you're doing yourself a favor, as well as the reader, when you keep them short.

N. Watson Solomon, a readability expert, quotes a number of experts here. One notes that:

Based on several studies, press associations in the USA have laid down a readability table. Their survey shows readers find sentences of 8 words or less very easy to read; 11 words, easy; 14 words fairly easy; 17 words standard; 21 words fairly difficult; 25 words difficult and 29 words or more, very difficult.

Another:

Over the whole document, make the average sentence length 15-20 words. More people fear snakes than full stops, so they recoil when a long sentence comes hissing across the page.

Perhaps you should become the Sentence Length Cop in your office. Suddenly everything might become clear, the operation might run more efficiently, and you might be able to leave for home on time.

Addendum: I ran this post through a readability checker. Here's what it told me:

No. of sentences	19
No. of words	346
No. of complex words	31
Percent of complex words	8.96%
Average words per sentence	18.21
Average syllables per word	1.39

That translates into a grade level of about 9, meaning it should be easily understood by 14 to 15 year olds.

The power of a short sentence

Shorter is always better. But shorter is even better in the company of longer.

“If you ever have a preposterous statement to make … say it in five words or less, because we’re always used to five-word sentences as being the gospel truth.” ~ Thomas Wolfe

Roy Peter Clark, who teaches writing at the Poynter Institute, uses that statement as a springboard for discussion of short sentences. They are powerful indeed.

Using short sentences to their full effect is a centuries-old strategy, found in opinion writing, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and plays. It works in a formal speech or in a handwritten letter. Shakespeare had a messenger deliver the news to Macbeth in six words: “The Queen, my lord, is dead,” a message that could fit easily inside a 140-character tweet.
A familiar and effective place for the short sentence is at the end of a long paragraph. 

Clark shows this at work in a newspaper story. The writer described the life and influential tenure in a Tampa zoo of a chimpanzee named Herman.

“Altogether, he lived at Lowry Park Zoo for 35 years. He lasted there longer than any other creature and longer than any of the humans. Each of the 1,800 animals at the zoo is assigned a number. His was 00001.”

Placed in a short sentence at the end of a paragraph that telling detail assumes even more significance.

"What makes a short sentence short is determined by the sentences around it," Clark writes. "In the land of 40-word sentences, the 20-word sentence bears a special power."

Parallel construction does wonders for your writing

Here's a quick cleanup for your writing: parallel construction. Also known as parallelism, it refers to grouping similar ideas with similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure.

Parallelism improves readability by making sentences easier to process. The likeness of form enables the reader to recognize more readily the likeness of content and function. Parallelism also adds power and elegance to language. Think of the Beatitudes and the Gettysburg address. It's also a good way to reduce the number of words.

Let's look first at parallelism in a sentence.

Faulty Parallelism: Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method, while now the laboratory method is employed. 

Corrected Version: Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method; now it is taught by the laboratory method.

By this principle, an article or a preposition applying to all the members of a series must either be used only before the first term or else be repeated before each term.

Faulty Parallelism: The French, the Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese 

Corrected Version: The French, the Italians, the Spanish, and the Portuguese

Parallelism is also important in lists. If you're going to force a PowerPoint slide on people, at least make the bullet points parallel.

POOR: 

This article will discuss:

• How to deal with corporate politics.
• Coping with stressful situations.
• What the role of the manager should be in the community.

BETTER: 

This article will discuss:

• Ways to deal with corporate politics.
• Techniques of coping with stressful situations.
• The role of the manager in the community.

OR: 

This article will tell managers how to:

• Deal with corporate politics.
• Cope with stressful situations.
• Function in the community.

I actually get paid real money by smart people to fix their non-parallel sentences and lists.

A sentence designed for the reader

“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, 

that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges 

on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”

-- Mark Twain

The two previous posts explored the active voice and keeping the subject and verb close together. Let's combine those two rules to see what they do for clarity.

Try this sentence on for size.

The notion that our company’s critical infrastructures are highly interconnected and mutually dependent in complex ways, both physically and through a host of information and communication technologies (so-called “cyber-based systems”), is more than an abstract, theoretical concept.

The kind of stuff that makes you tired before the day is half over, right?

So let's look at a rewrite by Ed Barr, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Our company’s critical infrastructures depend on each other greatly. They are highly interconnected and mutually dependent in complex ways, through a host of information and communication technologies (so-called “cyber-based systems”) and through physical interconnectedness.

Still boring, but now you understand it. Barr's analysis:

How many words separate the Subject ("notion") from the Verb ("is") in the example sentence above? 28!! Yep, 28 words separate the Subject from the Verb. If the reader wants to know what is being affirmed (the Verb) about whom (the Subject), the reader (you) will have a helluva time figuring it out.

You may still not prefer my revised sentence for a variety of reasons; for example, you might say it uses too many multi-syllable words (and it does) and it uses some technical language. Nonetheless, you should be able to grasp its meaning more readily because in the new sentence the Subject “infrastructures” and the Verb “depend” sit next to each other. (I have also changed the sentence to active voice and split it into two sentences.) But, note: when you keep the Subject and Verb close together, readers will have essential information and an essential understanding of the sentence. Therefore, when you write, examine the first few words of all your sentences to look for the Subject and Verb.

I hope, of course, that you aren't reading this, thus depriving me of a potential revenue stream. 

Do your sentences make sense?

Maybe not, if you're focused on what you mean to say and not on what you actually put on the page.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of The New York Times Editorial Board, notes that often a writer speaks the language, knows the vocabulary, and tries to honor the rules of grammar and syntax. 

Yet he regularly produces sentences of whose literal meaning he’s completely unaware. In its own way, this is fantastic, like setting out to knit a cardigan, producing an armoire, and wondering why it’s so loose in the shoulders.

Here’s an example, written by a student several years ago: “I also had my father’s thick fingers, fingers that I often hid underneath thighs.” You see the problem of course. The author apparently hides his (or her) fingers under anyone’s thighs, not just his (or her) own. This is what the sentence actually says, though not what the writer is hoping it says.

Readers help a bad writer along, Klinkenborg says.

Readers also fail to catch such mistakes because they’re good at guessing what the writer really means. It’s not that they’re under-reading — skipping past the problem in a sentence. They’re nearly always over-reading, alive to the writer’s intention, as if the writer were somehow immanent in the sentence, looking over the reader’s shoulder, expecting the benefit of the doubt. We do this all the time in conversation. And so the sentence ceases to be a sentence — a verbal construct of a certain length, velocity and rhythm with, at bottom, an unambiguous literal meaning. It becomes a sign instead that telepathic communication is about to commence.

What to do? 

You’ll need to write, and revise, as if your intentions were invisible and your sentences will be doing all the talking, all on their own. This may be the hardest thing a writer has to learn. Looking at a sentence you’ve made is like looking at yourself in the shard of a mirror. A part of you has to be dreadfully literal-minded (and impervious to self-flattery) in order to do the work of making good, clear sentences. Seeing what your sentences actually say is never easy, but it gets easier with practice. There’s even a certain pleasure in discovering the booby traps you’ve laid for yourself in your prose.

"Inexperienced writers," Klinkenborg concludes, "tend to trust that sentences will generally turn out all right — or all right enough. Experienced writers know that every good sentence is retrieved by will from the forces of chaos."