The problem with most bad writing is that it’s often so general and lacking in texture and depth. The people, places, or things used as subjects seem to exist only in two-dimensional space, as in a crude cartoon movie, and the actions described all seem to crowd themselves in a very brief timeframe. There are hardly any telling details to give meat and substance to the bare-boned prose, so the writing is dry, bland, uninviting—and unreadable.
An efficient way of giving vitality to such writing is to use appositives and appositive phrases. An appositive is simply a noun or pronoun that often comes directly after another word in a sentence, putting that word in better context by explaining it or by giving more information about it. On the other hand, an appositive phrase consists of an appositive and all of its modifiers. Both are powerful tools that allow the writer to identify or explain the nouns or pronouns he uses without having to come up with a new sentence or string of sentences to provide more information. This makes the buildup of ideas smoother as it frees the writing from digressions or asides that may just impede its natural flow.
The appositives used in the sentences that follow are indicated in italics: “My office assistant
Joanna took the day off yesterday.” “Her husband
, the jealous type, took her on an extended out-of-town trip.” “They rode on my friend’s car
, a battered 2015 SUV, to a hillside farm in Batangas.” Note that appositives may also come before the noun or pronoun they refer to; what’s important is not to detach them from the noun or pronoun they modify.
And here are two sentences modified by appositive phrases: “Mayon Volcano
, a major Philippine tourist attraction because of its majestic near-perfect cone, is found in Albay,
a southeastern province in Luzon about 500 kilometers from Manila by bus.” “
Adventurers with only a few hundred pesos between them, the two provincial girls took the bus to Manila.” In the first sentence, two appositive phrases are at work: “a major Philippine tourist attraction because of its majestic near-perfect cone” modifying the “Mayon Volcano," and “a southeastern province in Luzon about 500 kilometers from Manila by bus” modifying “Albay.” In the second sentence, coming ahead of the subject “two provincial girls,” is the modifying appositive phrase “adventurers with only a few hundred pesos between them.”
It should now be clear that an appositive or appositive phrase may either be essential or non-essential to a sentence.
An essential or restrictive appositive narrows the meaning of the word it modifies; it is a must to maintain the meaning of the sentence. Usually a single word or two that’s closely related to the preceding word, it doesn’t require commas to set it off from the rest of the sentence, as in “The extremely popular Philippine president
Ramon Magsaysay died in a tragic plane crash in the early 50s.” (Without “Ramon Magsaysay” as appositive, it will take some research to figure out who that president was.)
On the other hand,
a non-essential or non-restrictive appositive isn’t absolutely necessary to the meaning of a sentence; it may even be omitted without altering its basic meaning. Depending on its position in the sentence, it must be set off from the rest of the sentence by one or two commas), as in “Alicia’s sister, a Philippine-born doctor, worked as a senior anesthesiologist in a large hospital in the U.S. Midwest.” (Even without the appositive
“a Philippine doctor,” the interested reader still could find out who that doctor was.)
Non-essential appositive phrases have the same optional role in sentences like this one: “December
, usually the coldest month in tropical Philippines, is becoming more popular than June as the wedding month of choice.” We can take out the appositive phrase “usually the coldest month in tropical Philippines” and still get a clear idea what month it is that more and more Filipinos are getting married.
Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Appositives as open secret to more engaging writing This essay, 2147th of the series, appears in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the April 20, 2023 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.(Next:
The empathic forms and inverted sentences) April 27, 2023
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