A Forum member—I’ll identify him here only as Justine to protect him from possible brickbats—related three weeks ago that owing to his current work, he had obligated himself to attend a recent lecture on legal writing by an English professor from a very prestigious law school.
I was admittedly taken aback when Justine asked me if I agreed with that legal English lecturer’s very contentious rules on the construction and length of sentences and her downright dismissal of the interjection as a legitimate part of speech.
That lecturer’s stern prescriptions are these:
1. “Yes” can’t be considered as a sentence because a sentence should at least contain three words and should follow an S-V-O pattern;
2. A sentence must have as much as possible 20 words to be clear, simple and direct; and
3. The interjection shouldn’t be considered as part of speech because, according to a certain F.J.Rahtz, it is just “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.”
My reply to Justine: 1. My answer to the first question is a categorical “No!” Definitely, “Yes” qualifies as a sentence. The argument that a sentence “should at least contain three words and... should follow an S-V-O pattern” is so old school and so persnickety. I can only presume that that lecturer is way, way over her senior citizen year—not that I’m not anywhere in or beyond that age bracket myself—or that if she’s a fresh AB English graduate, she must have learned English from a professor way past retirement age to even think of that nonsense definition.
That English lecturer’s overly fastidious pronouncement goes against the grain of the very definition of “sentence.” My
Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines it as “a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses.”
That definition’s very first two words—“a word”—already qualifies “Yes” as a sentence because even if it’s just one word, it’s naturally written or uttered by someone in response to an understood subject and verb associated with it. The implied “I agree with that” already satisfies the demand of that legal English lecturer that it “follow an S-V-O pattern.” In fact, it even exceeds that basic pattern by an extra word.
2. Regarding your second question, I totally disagree that “a sentence must contain as much as possible 20 words to be clear, simple and direct.” For saying that, I seriously think she should be reported to her school’s law dean to be chastised for grossly wrongheaded teaching on how long or short sentences should be—whether the English is plain, simple English or abstruse legalese. (You may want to send her this link to my Forum posting on
“How long should a sentence be to effectively deliver an idea?” 3. As to your third question, Justine, I won't be drawn into an argument with anyone who thinks that interjections don’t qualify as a part of speech for being just “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.” I’m content and won’t quibble with my
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate definition that an interjection is “an ejaculatory utterance usually lacking grammatical connection, as a word or phrase used in exclamation (as ‘Heavens!’ ‘Dear me!’).”
That definition has served me well and never failed me in all the years that I’ve been using interjections to express shock or delight over the many unexpected things that most everyone encounters in life.
(Next:
How plain English and legalese differ, or vice versa- 2) September 2, 2021
This essay, 2,060th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the August 26, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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