This is bound to happen when any writer, professional or not, unwittingly strings up far too many words to form the subject of a sentence, as this lead sentence of an opinion column sometime ago in a leading Metro Manila daily:
“The initial euphoria generated within the LGBT community by the preliminary document released in connection with the two-week synod of over 200 bishops from around the world to discuss issues facing 21st century Catholic families was short-lived.”
The subject of that sentence—“the initial euphoria generated within the LGBT community by the preliminary document released in connection with the two-week synod of over 200 bishops from around the world to discuss issues facing 21st century Catholic families”—takes all of 35 words to unravel and form a complete, discernible idea.
This is because when the verb and predicate—“was” and “short-lived”—finally show up, the reader must mentally backtrack through a semantic word maze to logically connect the two to their true subject, the noun “euphoria.” By that time, readers will already be too flustered by information overload to fathom what’s being said; they surely will have already lost considerable reading time and momentum and—even worse—possibly also the desire to read on.
Is there a way for writers to spare readers from this very unpleasant and frustrating experience?
SENTENCES SHOULD DELIVER VERBS EARLY TO MAKE THEIR MESSAGE SHORT AND CLEAR
Yes, there’s one very simple writing procedure to forestall it—make the
head noun of a long-winded subject as close as possible to the operative verb. In this case, that head noun is “euphoria”; the operative verb, “was,” and the subject complement, the adjective “short-lived.” The objective is to bring these three grammatical elements beside or close to one another or, if that’s not syntactically possible, at least within handshake distance.
I personally think our best shot is to seize that sentence by its tail and whip both the verb “was” and the subject complement “short-lived” to the very front of the sentence:
“
A short-lived euphoria was generated within the LGBT community by the preliminary document released in connection with the two-week synod of over 200 bishops from around the world to discuss issues facing 21st century Catholic families.”
In this reconstruction, the clause formed by the first eight words of the sentence—“a short-lived euphoria was generated within the LGBT community”—already gives the reader a clear gist of the statement that’s unfolding. Indeed, the statement’s remaining 27 words—“by the preliminary document released in connection with the two-week synod of over 200 bishops from around the world to discuss issues facing 21st century Catholic families”—have become simply supporting or clarifying details of the basic statement made by the basic clause.
Another simple way to clarify and streamline the original sentence is to use the expletive “it” to start it:
“
It was a short-lived euphoria that was generated within the LGBT community by the preliminary document released in connection with the two-week synod of over 200 bishops from around the world to discuss issues facing 21st century Catholic families.”
Still another—a little bit radical though—is to make “the LGBT community” the subject of the sentence and the direct doer of the action:
“The LGBT community experienced a short-lived euphoria over the preliminary document released in connection with the two-week synod of over 200 bishops from around the world to discuss issues facing 21st century Catholic families.”
This version involves changing the passive verb form “was generated” to the active verb “experience,” a very neat but admittedly much more complex grammatical operation.
The goal of all these sentence streamlining strategies is, as we’ve seen, to position the operative verb as close as possible to the head noun of a longwinded subject to make the reading experience much easier and more pleasant.
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*The head noun concept. In English grammar, a noun phrase is categorized as a
nominal group, which by definition consists of a noun and all the other words that modify or characterize that noun. Within a clause, a nominal group functions as though it is that noun itself, which is referred to as the
head or
head noun; the items that precede the head noun are called its
premodifiers, and the items that come after it are its
qualifiers. This being the case, in a noun phrase that functions as the subject of a sentence, the head noun is the subject in its unmodified form; as such, it determines whether the noun phrase is singular or plural. As a rule, any other noun or pronoun found in the premodifier or in the qualifier of the head noun doesn’t determine or affect its being singular or plural.
(Next:
The craft of writing headlines and titles) July 11, 2019
This essay, 1,151st of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the July 4, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
