What does an average high school level sentence look like? Suppose the class was writing about the emergence of the Roman Empire under the reign of Augustus. A representative sentence from such an assignment might look something like this: “After winning the battle of Actium, Augustus became sole ruler of the Romans, who were tired of fighting after decades of civil war.” Lucid, unencumbered, workmanlike – a fine, reputable sentence, which any adolescent might justly be satisfied to have written.
But can it be improved? Of course it can be improved. Nearly every last sentence written by people not bearing names like Virgil or Burke can be improved in some measure. This is lesson number one of writing instruction, preferably conveyed to students from the very first moment they set pencil to large-ruled paper in elementary school. A sentence is a representation of a thought, a feeling, an experience, and as in the case of all representations, there is a gap of meaning between the signifier and what is being signified. As such, no sentence is complete; no sentence can be complete – it can only get better.
So how can our sentence get better? The most time-honored, perhaps even clichéd, of writing advice is to focus on the verbs, and after nearly twenty years as an educator, I have not found better. “After scattering Mark Antony’s ships at Actium” or “After routing Mark Antony at Actium” would certainly provide a more vigorous opening to our sentence than the original phrase. Adjectives too, though often unfairly slighted, supply students with a tool which – if judiciously used – can help them enhance the meaning of their sentences at a stroke. Consider how much more expressive the sentence might be if Augustus became sole ruler of the quarrelsome Romans or the anxious Romans.
Another way to improve the sentence is to ask what already works there? I would point to that last clause, “who were tired of fighting after decades of civil war.” Here is where the sentence moves beyond a bare relation of facts to something like an explanation. The causality behind events is proposed; the motives of the people involved in them examined. The Romans acquiesced to Augustus’ autocracy because of what they had previously experienced - that is real historical reflection at work.
So one certain way to improve the sentence would be to enhance the explanatory force of the clause, by loading it with the details that would support its claim. The sentence might read, “After scattering Mark Antony’s ships at Actium, Augustus became sole ruler of the anxious Romans, who were exasperated after decades of civil war, going all the way back to the conflict between Marius and Sulla, then the rivalry between Pompey and Julius Caesar, and at last the violence that raged after Caesar’s assassination.” Now the student is not only strengthening the proposition of the clause through evidence, but displaying a command of the historical material presented in class. A succinct, even clipped, sentence following this would alter the rhythm quite effectively: “Now, at last, they could hope for peace.”
In fact, the coherence of the sentence can be strengthened further by transforming that initial phrase into a second subordinate clause. “After scattering Mark Antony’s ships at Actium” might become “Once he scattered Mark Antony’s ships at Actium.” It is a slight, almost imperceptible difference, but the clause once more conveys a sense of causality – this second thing happened because this first thing happened – rather than simply describing a succession of events. The mental activity that generates explanation and understanding is at work in this modified grammar.
The first, and most obvious thing, to say about the general writing advice that can be gleaned from this little example is that most sentences written by students can be improved by being expanded. There are, scattered here and there among our high school level students, a handful of writers who tend too much to the florid and the verbose, who would be well advised to cultivate increased concision in their style. But the overwhelming preponderance of student writers need a push in the opposite direction; they need to be trained to articulate their thoughts with greater thoroughness and precision, and this can typically be accomplished by making greater use of the grammatical resources available to them. The most basic form of writing advice you can give to most high school students is, “say more.” The most basic thing they can do to improve their sentences is add something to it that isn’t there already.
All of the grammatical elements provide students the means to say more. One of the most important insights students can gather from their early years of instruction in writing is that grammatical elements are not just the parts of a sentence that make it work, in the way axles and pistons are parts of a car that make it go. Grammatical elements are modes of thought and reflection that aid the mind in thinking about a given subject. They have an affinity to Aristotle’s Topoi – that is, places where the mind can go to in order to discover ideas. A writer who swaps out a dull, hackneyed verb for a more vigorous one is not simply jazzing up his writing; he is thinking through the events he is writing about with greater clarity and concentration.
In this regard, the deliberate inclusion of subordinate clauses in students’ sentences is a particularly effective habit to cultivate. As we have seen, the nature of the subordinate clause is to relate ideas to one another; the conjunctions that introduce them – words like “although,” “if,” “since,” “unless” – introduce a relationship between their content and the content of the clauses they are connected to. When you ask a student to add a subordinate clause to his sentence, you are not only asking him to add a thought to the sentence, but to add it in a manner that demonstrates the coherence between that thought and the thought that is already contained in the sentence as it stands. The regular practice of adding subordinate clauses to sentences therefore trains the young mind to look for connections in the phenomena it contemplates.
So as an exercise, I might give the students the sentence: “After winning the battle of Actium, Augustus became sole ruler of the Romans, who _______________” and ask them to complete the adjective clause. Or I might place five simple sentences on the board, and ask them to start each one with an adverb clause beginning with “since” or “if.” Or I might stipulate one of their requirements on an essay to incorporate and underline five subordinate clauses of any type. By habituating students to self-consciously construct their sentences through subordination, I would be aiming to develop in their minds a bent towards coherence; a tendency to search for new knowledge through a consideration of the knowledge they already have at hand.
One of the insights students can take away from activities such as this is that there is a qualitative difference between the writing process and the final piece of writing. As I already noted, the sentence on the page bears a representative relationship to the thought of which it is the representation. But the act of writing is not simply a process of searching for the words that will adequately represent the thoughts already in the mind of the student. Rather, it is a process of generating those thoughts in the first place. By adding grammatical elements to a sentence, a student is not utilizing the structure of a sentence to display his understanding of the topic; he is utilizing that structure to enhance his understanding of the topic. Writing an essay is not a matter of recording or conveying knowledge about a topic; it is about gaining or building that knowledge. It ought to be a basic expectation of all writing assignments that the student comes away from the task with a more lucid and complete grasp of the material than she began with. But this expectation could not be put in place if we simply taught the writing process as a way of representing the knowledge that students already have.
Most schools like to boast that they are teaching something called “thinking skills” to their students, whether in the form of “critical thinking” or “problem solving” or what have you. But there is no better way to teach thinking than through writing, when writing is taught as it should be. There is simply no activity which students can engage in which exercises the mind in all the generative, correlative, and expansive processes that constitute the primal energies of thought. When students are habituated to regard writing as an enterprise of discovery, they not only may lose much of the anxiety that comes with the task (anxiety stemming from concerns about the “finished product”) but they are taught to value the writing process as the greatest instrument of understanding that their education will impart to them.
After their adoption, Santa's elves became subordinate Clauses.