Dazzling Sentence Openers
Americans’ speech, or to be more precise, speech habits that most use from cradle to grave, follow a strong pattern that often impedes them from writing well crafted sentences.
“Kay shaved her hair.”
Subject (Kay), verb (shaved), and Object (her hair): S-V-O
When people write, they bring their speech habits into writing. That is why so much of the English newspaper articles, essays, journals, legal briefs, and fiction that we read today are so soporific, even though the themes might be interesting. Just imagine your reading a lengthy paragraph full of these S-V-O sentences.
How many times have you, as a reader, found yourself putting a book down, never to pick it up again? Countless times I’d say. And all because many writers tend to write as they speak. People in general are unwilling to give up life-time habits, even knowing that they have to be forsaken. Are you a writer that clings to the S-V-O pattern of writing? If so, you aren’t alone for sure, you are in the company of legions of writers who do just that.
In fact, the great philosopher Socrates –who by the way never wrote a book– decried writing as a deceptive invention, and loved to spend countless hours at the agora (the local market) gabbing, arguing, and speechifying until his wife Xantippe would send someone to fetch him. While Socrates was a gabber, his disciple Plato was a writer. The Platonic Dialogues exemplify writing at its best.
Socrates’ fear was that wisdom would ultimate reside in books (writing) rather than in the mind or in live dialectics. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, the god Thoth, the inventor of writing, is accused of encouraging mental laziness.
Today we know that writing encourages agility of mind. Don’t write as you speak!
As it turned out, writing and books have become the warehouses of wisdom. It is with the written word that wisdom is created, preserved, and expanded in the different levels of human endeavor. Even symbolic logic and mathematics need the written word to lock and secure exact meanings. Scientists use language to put forth their discoveries, their insights, and to falsify or verify them empirically. Philosopher Jacques Derrida sees in writing-in-general an entire system that nourishes the human race: archi-écriture.
Why should we write in the same manner in which we speak?
By writing in the same way that we speak, we take the easiest path to writing-the path of least resistance-and end up overusing the soporific pattern “John hit the ball.” There’s neither elegance nor eloquence in boring and disrespecting your reader with the S-V-O pattern. Follow this excerpt:
She would not tell me what I wanted to know if she had wanted to. She would not take the time to even verify his date of birth. She was wide-eyed, blond haired, in her mid twenties, and obviously bored at the job. Her friends had nicknamed her ‘Bambi.’ I gathered that much, because she greeted my every request with the haunted look of a dear caught in the headlights. She said no to everything. I finally gave up. I kept thinking that people like that exist only to make my life miserable.
How boring! The S-V-O pattern gets old in no time. Based on this, I’ve concluded that a serious writer should think carefully about opening a sentence with a noun or a pronoun of any kind, be they definite, indefinite, or possessive.
That is not to say that the S-V-O pattern isn’t useful, or that it should never be used. What we advocate is that writers limit their use in consecutive sentences.
Although you won’t totally abandon the old pattern, you will see –as you read my articles– that there are more interesting ways to express thoughts. And as you adopt our techniques, you will combine them with the S-V-O pattern to achieve a more rhythmic, graceful style.
Mature writers –in particular those considered literary writers– are aware of the monotony of the S-V-O pattern and watch their sentence openers with uncompromising passion. By mixing their sentence openers with the S-V-O pattern, they add emphasis, variety, and rhythm to their writing.
Let’s recognize that speech and prose are different. Speech is instantaneous, fleeting, and ethereal; prose is lasting, fixed, and earthly. However, our techniques used often enough will positively impact your speech, making it livelier and bringing you more rapt attention.
With a quick rearrangement of the S-V-O pattern, master fiction writers may create an expectation, prodding the reader to move to the next sentence and on to the next paragraph. And you need not become a grammatical genius -just a writer with an open mind who’s undaunted by grammatical labels.
